A complex riddle that you can obsess over until you fit all the pieces together and finally see the big picture. Films that fall into that category can be some of the most frustrating yet rewarding filmic experiences you’ll ever have and on this list we will be taking a look at 10 films that will blow your mind.

10. Coherence

Coherence begins like a pretty normal yet slightly mumblecore-y drama that you have seen a million times before, but then the film takes a turn into quantum physics that will leave you scratching your head and trying desperately to keep up as characters and events move between different timelines and/or realities and/or dimensions.

It’s an absolutely wild ride that will make varying degrees of sense based on your knowledge and understanding of Quantum Psychics, but even then you’ll be having a hard time keeping track of every little detail that the film throws at you.

The fact that the film was filmed in three days with next to no script is an astounding achievement, it must have been hell to get all of this to make as much sense as it does while having to literally improvise pretty much all of it and get the coverage needed to get a fully functioning film during the editing process.

9. The Element of Crime

The Element of Crime is the feature debut of the legendary yet highly controversial Danish director Lars Von Trier.

It’s an interesting case study because it’s so completely different from pretty much everything he would go on to do, both narratively and stylistically, yet pretty much lays the thematic groundwork for his entire filmography perfectly in a 100 minute surreal murder mystery that was highly inspired by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.

Lars is no Tarkovsky but in this film he has come the closest anyone has to recapturing the atmosphere that made Tarkovsky’s work so special.

The film is a dreamlike odyssey of obsession, murder and madness that becomes increasingly harder to follow yet also becomes increasingly more addictive the longer it goes and by the end you will feel like you’ve just awoken from a dream that you didn’t understand but want to revisit as soon as possible.

8. In the Mouth of Madness

In the Mouth of Madness is John Carpenter’s masterpiece, it has the tension of Halloween, the cosmic horror of The Thing, the playfulness of Big Trouble in Little China, the awesomeness of Escape from New York and the creepiness of Prince of Darkness all rolled up into one absolutely insane package that goes batshit bananas in the third act as it spirals completely out of control in the best ways possible.

It tells the tale of Trent (the great Sam Neill), a cynical insurance investigator that is hired to track down a missing author and hopefully retrieve his newest manuscript, but the further Trent gets into this case the more things start to take a Lovecraftian turn and by the end it has turned into Carpenter’s most insane and complex film yet.

The film’s ending is something that you’ll just have to see to believe, it’s absolutely insane and might be the most playfully terrifying sequence Carpenter has ever directed.

7. Triangle

You might figure out Triangle’s game out early but that doesn’t really matter because the lengths that the film takes its concept to is so god damn insane and complex that it will blow your mind either way.

It’s truly a great experience to witness this film play out and not collapse under its own ridiculously convoluted weight.

The fact that it’s also a highly entertaining and engaging thriller that will keep you at the edge of your seat is just the icing on a cake.

6. Enemy

Enemy is a film that doesn’t make logical sense but at the same time it makes perfect emotional sense, in the end you may not understand anything that happened and you may not be able to explain all the symbolism but you will still understand the emotional underpinnings of the piece.

Enemy is also director Denis Villeneuve’s crowning achievement, every frame of this movie is directed to perfection and holds important details to help you through the maze that is the film’s story.

It tells the tale of a teacher that discovers his double when watching a low-budget film and tries to seek him out, but things go awry when they finally meet.

It’s the type of film where nothing is as it seems because everything is pretty much a metaphor for something else or only makes sense if you are familiar with certain psychological theories about the subconscious of the Freudian variety.

But even if you get the gist of it, then there is still more than enough left for you to unpack.

Film history is full of films that were hated when they were released but through time grew in status and became beloved classics, but once they’ve reached their high stature we often forget how they were received at the time of their release.

But with the birth of the Internet that change has become a lot slower and harder because now every film gets an instantaneous majority opinion slapped on it and then it’s stuck with that opinion forever even if that opinion was misguided, biased or based on wrong expectations or unreachable hype.

It’s getting harder and harder for films to shed those opinions and get re-evaluated, as opinions are always changing and that’s just the natural order of things, but with the Internet those opinion tend to stay static and some even tend to become hostile when change is even suggested.

But that change is how Cult films are born, as they are literally films that were either misunderstood or ignored when initially released and have then gone through that re-evaluation and become beloved by a somewhat large group of people.

In this list we’ll be taking a look at 10 recent movies that seem destined to go through that process and come out the other end as Cult classics.

10. A Cure for Wellness (2016)

A Cure for Wellness is a batshit crazy gothic horror epic with Lovecraftian elements that’s directed to perfection by GoreVerbinski in his first great horror film.

It’s a film that feels almost designed to divide the audience as many will be turned off by how crazy and fucked-up this film is, but many will fall under its unique spell and get lost in the strong atmosphere that permeates the whole film.

Watching the film feels like walking through a hazy dream where everything just feels weirdly off in the beginning and then just keeps getting weirder and crazier the longer it goes until it reaches a perfect crescendo of insanity and then you wake up confused and creeped out.

The film is a sure-fire cult classic that will live on for a long time and will in time be recognized as the underrated horror masterpiece that it is.

9. Chappie (2015)

Chappie was the victim of wrong expectations causing people to miss the woods for the trees, as people were expecting a mix between Robocop and Short Circuit.

They expected it to be a blood-soaked but charming robot comedy action film, but instead they got a highly idiosyncratic character study about growing up in a poor crime-infested neighbourhood and how that can shape the behaviour and actions of an individual.

It’s a grim story about Nature vs. Nurture that uses the sci-fi genre to make the subject matter more accessible to people who wouldn’t usually be into these kinds of films.

The film is pretty low on action but the action that’s there is masterfully directed, the film is full of charm and cute moments in the first half, but those moments are almost overshadowed by the dark existential turn the film takes at the mid-point.

If you go into it with an open mind and judge the film based on what it is instead of what you wanted it to be then you’ll be in for a great ride, if not then you’ll just be angry and confused but at least you’ll have Hugh Jackman’s glorious mullet to hang onto.

8. Lucy (2014)

Lucy is both a really smart film and a gloriously dumb one.

On a scientific level it’s beyond ridiculous and is full of inaccuracies that will slowly drive you mad if you’re obsessive about those kinds of things.

But on a philosophical level it’s actually quite brilliant and poses one of the most interesting What ifs? Scenario’s ever conceived.

What if we would unlock our full potential and slowly become god?

It’s a great concept and Luc Besson goes all out on it and creates one of the craziest action films ever, he throws so many different abstract ideas at the concept that the audience is pretty much seconds from downing in information throughout most of the runtime.

It’s a complete mess but it also strangely works thanks to Besson’s insane willingness to take everything up to 11 and it’s actually awe-inspiring to see him run around like a madman firing on all cylinders and somehow pulling it off.

It’s a batshit insane ride that’s relentlessly awesome and it’s actually insane that it hasn’t already gained the Cult status that it obviously deserves.

7. Lost River (2014)

Lost River is actor Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut and he has obviously taken a lot of inspiration from Director Nicolas Winding Refn who he had worked twice with prior to making this film.

But Lost River is also a completely different beast from anything that Refn has made so far, the things that this film shares with Only God Forgives are mostly superficial, as in some similar stylistic choices and similar colour pallet.

Lost River is a hyper-realist modern fairy tale that’s a bit messy in the narrative department but is so visually stunning and full of spellbinding atmosphere that the narrative short comings are easily forgivable.

Gosling shows real talent in the director’s chair and he could become a great director if he follows through on the vison presented here, and even though Lost River is flawed it’s still a hell of a debut film and is pretty damn impressive.

Even if it ends up being viewed as a strange novelty in Goslings career, the film still has enough style, mood and weirdness to warrant a large cult following.

6. Noah (2014)

A Biblical epic for Atheists and Anti-theists.

It’s no wonder why people hated this one as Darren Aronofsky took one of the most beloved stories in the bible and turned it into a horrific meditation on the worth of human life.

It also shows the true horror of the story in a way that will shock people who have never really stopped to think about how terrifying it really is, and by throwing in some more fantastical elements and magic taken from pretty much every religion that isn’t Christianity it seems like he was willingly trying to annoy the hell out of Christians everywhere.

But the film isn’t only just a slice of Christian trolling because it’s also a brilliantly directed and brutally effective film that might be the weirdest fantasy epic of the 21st century.

There are directors who at first look seemingly have a perfect career, but if you take a closer look at their filmography you will find a few stinkers.

Because if you make films for long enough then it doesn’t really matter how great you are, eventually everyone makes a bad film.

10. Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock)

Alfred Hitchcock is easily the most productive director on this list as he directed 55 films, and the fact that about 80 percent of those films have gone on to become highly respected classics that are still repeatedly rewatched just proves how perfect his career really was.

Out of 55 films there are obviously going to be a few films that are lesser than others. But even his lesser works are still absolutely worth watching, except for “Family Plot.”

“Family Plot” was sadly his last film and was an absolutely atrocious note to go out on. This disaster of a film became his swan song, even though it’s more accurate to describe it as a pig squeal.

Hitchcock had been working steadily as a director since 1927; his penultimate film “Frenzy” was released in 1972 and “Family Plot” was released in 1976, which is the longest gap between movies in his entire career.

“Frenzy” was a perfect showcase for everything that made Hitchcock a great director, but instead of ending things there, he decided to make this unbelievably messy and unfocused comedy thriller that lacked both laughs and tension and ended up being the most lifeless and meandering slog that Hitchcock ever directed.

The sad part is that this wasn’t even planned as his last film as he had already started production on a spy thriller named “The Short Night,” but that film fell apart after his health started to decline.

Which is tragic, because Hitchcock deserved a better swan song than “Family Plot.”

9. Alien 3: Theatrical Cut (David Fincher)

David Fincher was the victim of bad luck when he was handed the job of directing “Alien 3,” because it was ruined by studio interference, and because of that, the Theatrical Cut is complete garbage. The Assembly Cut, on the other hand (which is as close to David Fincher’s original vision for the film as we’ll most likely get), is a masterpiece.

The Assembly Cut adds in all of the missing atmosphere, tension, character development, and thematic complexity that was missing from the Theatrical Cut.

It’s almost as if the producers saw his original cut and then decided that the best course of action was to cut out all of the best parts and then release a much shorter, shittier, emptier version into theatres that everyone would obviously hate.

The production was a complete mess and almost drove Fincher away from filmmaking altogether, which would have been a shame because every film he has made since has been either great or a masterpiece, and frankly he has yet to make a terrible film on his own.

The fact that he was somehow able to get anything close to a functioning movie out of the hellish production is a miracle, and the fact that we even have the Assembly Cut is a blessing.

Fincher has gone on to disown the film all together and it’s easy to understand why; he went through hell and had to sit back and watch the producers tear apart his movie, and then he ended up with all the blame for its awfulness.

Who wouldn’t disown a film after that?

8. Blade II (Guillermo del Toro)

Guillermo del Toro is a great director with a unique style that seeps through in (almost) every single film he has made.

His style came out seemingly fully formed in his great directorial debut “Cronos,” which he followed up with the highly underrated “Mimic” and his first masterpiece “The Devil’s Backbone.” But then in 2002, he took the first misstep of his career when he agreed to direct the sequel to the hit superhero flick “Blade.”

The trouble with “Blade II” is that instead of doing his own thing and making a del Toro film, he instead decided to bend and distort his vision to fit with the style of the first film. The style established by Stephen Norrington just didn’t fit comfortably with del Toro’s sensibilities, and the end result is a awkwardly assembled mess.

It’s also the first and only time that del Toro was working with a script that he didn’t either write or co-write; the screenplay is absolutely awful and is easily one of David S. Goyer’s worst scripts to date.

But thankfully this film was a hit, because otherwise it could have killed del Toro’s career, and then we wouldn’t have gotten “Pan’s Labyrinth” the Hellboy duology, “The Shape of Water,” “Crimson Peak” or “Pacific Rim.”

Which is literally the only good thing to come out of this terrible movie.

7. The Brothers Grimm (Terry Gilliam)

Terry Gilliam is a great director who, like Fincher, has never made a terrible film on his own, and the only film in his filmography that’s actually bad is bad because the clash between Gilliam and the Weinsteins ended up destroying the film.

While filming, Gilliam had countless arguments with the Weinsteins over pretty much every aspect of the film; they even fired his cinematographer six weeks into shooting and hired one that they preferred.

At one point it got so bad that filming was shut down for two weeks. Of the situation main actor Matt Damon said, “I’ve never been in a situation like that. Terry was spitting rage at the system, at the Weinsteins. You can’t try and impose big compromises on a visionary director like him. If you try to force him to do what you want creatively, he’ll go nuclear.”

The trouble continued into post-production and led to the film’s release being delayed by 10 months as they fought over the final cut.

The end result is an ugly film that’s utterly devoid of all the charm and manic energy that makes all of Gilliam’s other films so great. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster that has been assembled in heated arguments and distorted into some monstrous shape that no one would ever want to watch more than once.

6. Fear and Desire (Stanley Kubrick)

Stanley Kubrick is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. He directed 13 films in his lifetime, and out of those 13 films, nine of them are considered amongst the greatest films ever made. Out of the remaining four films, three are considered flawed but important classics.

Out of his 13 films, there is only a single film that isn’t considered either a masterpiece or a classic, and that is his directorial debut: “Fear and Desire.”

A film so bad that Kubrick spent most of his later years trying to bury and hinder people from seeing it, because he himself considered the film “a bumbling amateur film exercise” and pretty much wanted people to forget its existence.

Frankly, we should honour his wishes and forget this amateur turd and consider “Killer’s Kiss” as his true directorial debut.

It’s what he would have wanted.

Awful films have been around since the birth of cinema and they won’t be going away anytime soon, and frankly it’s kind of a miracle that we have so many great films based on how messy film productions can be.

Getting everything in the right place so that filming can commence is such a humongous task that getting a film finished is an achievement in itself, and you’ll be lucky if it’s anywhere near decent and not an absolute clusterfuck.

But sometimes you end up with a film that’s so amazingly horrendously awful that it’s awe-inspiring, and those are films we’ll be focusing on – films where everything went wrong in the absolute best ways possible.

10. Jupiter Ascending (2015)

The Wachowskis have always been highly interesting and unique filmmakers. They make huge messy films that are filled with big ideas and enough vision to fill five different films, and “Jupiter Ascending” is no different.

It’s full of interesting ideas like DNA-splicing, reincarnation, and a pretty fucked up way of reaching immortality. The story is also pretty interesting: what if you found out that you were the reincarnated version of the queen of the universe and were faced with fixing all the massive problems that her death left behind?

The problem lies in the execution, because they decided to tell this story in the messiest and dullest way possible. The characters are so flat and the story is so all over the place that it’s pretty much impossible to get engaged in any of it.

If handled correctly, this film could have become something spectacular, something on the same level of quality as “The Matrix” and “Cloud Atlas” (their magnum opus), but instead we get a gloriously stupid dumpster fire that became infamous for how awful it is before it had even left the cinemas.

It’s a film that’s so full of idiotic scenes (“I love dogs, I’ve always loved dogs”) and just complete bullshit (Sean Bean playing a half-bee hybrid, the villain’s henchmen are the last surviving dinosaurs, etc.) that it’s absolutely fantastic to see the expression of utter disbelief on the face of everyone as you try your best to explain the plot of this shitsterpiece.

But its fatal flaw is that it’s a film that’s amazing to talk and joke about, but when it comes to actually watching it, you realize that it’s just so mind-numbingly dull that it becomes one hell of a chore to sit through.

Meaning that, even though its reputation will rightfully live on for years, it will never become one of those great cult classics that stays in circulation through midnight screenings like “The Room,” “Donnie Darko” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

9. The Last Airbender (2010)

M. Night Shyamalan is a great director, and “The Last Airbender” is the type of terrible film that only a great director could have made, because it’s so idiosyncratic in its terribleness that it’s undeniably a completely unique work of utter genius gone completely mad.

At this point in his career, Shyamalan hadn’t really made a bad film; he had obviously taken a huge step in the wrong direction with the wrongly-marketed absurdist dark comedy “The Happening,” but other than that small misstep, he had been making films ranging from great to pretty good since 1992. However, “The Last Airbender” was his first (and hopefully last) truly awful film (“After Earth” is bad but it’s nowhere near the level of utter awfulness that “The Last Airbender” reaches).

Every single decision that Shyamalan made while making this abomination went wrong in weirdest ways possible: the story is a complete mess that spends more time desperately trying to explain itself, and its backstory actually forgets to properly develop anything and ends up becoming more episodic than the season it’s based on.

Every single one of the films flaws can be traced back to Shyamalan’s inexperience with adaptations. All of his films up to this point had been original and the only adaptation he had been in any way connected to was “Stuart Little,” whose screenplay he co-wrote with Greg Brooker.

It shows that he obviously didn’t quite know how to handle the adaptation process because not only was it a terrible idea to condense an entire season into a 90-minute film, but what he decided to keep and how he blended it together is so messy that it becomes crystal clear that he had no idea what he was doing.

The show is also driven by a really light tone with a lot of action and humour, which is the complete opposite of Shyamalan’s slow-burn character pieces dressed up as genre films.

His films do have action and humour, but the action is small and more focused on the emotion behind the action than about the spectacle, and his humour is more focused on weird idiosyncratic character behaviour and is constantly shifting between being really dry and really absurd, which is the complete opposite of the show’s style.

When making “The Last Airbender,” Shyamalan tried to change his style to fit more in line with the tone and style of the animation and failed miserably, but if he had instead kept to his guns and changed the style of the animation to fit more in line with his own style, then he could have made something special. However, instead he made one of the absolute worst adaptations in the history of cinema.

8. The Pink Panther (2006)

The original Pink Panther franchise with Peter Sellers is one of the best comedy franchises in the history of cinema; his performance as Inspector Jacques Clouseau has become legendary for how hilarious it is, and frankly the Pink Panther franchise should have died with Sellers.

Because since his death, we have had five Pink Panther films and they have for the most part been getting worse with each entry. Out of the five entries, the only one that’s worth watching is “Trail of the Pink Panther” and only because it has a few hilarious deleted scenes of Sellers from the other films.

“Curse” and “Son” are both terrible in their own way, but are still not offensively bad and don’t really impact the franchise’s legacy as they have pretty much been forgotten. The two Steve Martin remakes, on the other hand, take a massive turd on the Pink Panther legacy and sadly there are people today that have only seen the remakes and haven’t even bothered to discover the genius of the originals because of that.

Both of Martin’s entries are absolutely god-awful, but the first entry is by far the worse, because no matter how horrendously horrible “Pink Panther 2” is, at least it has John Cleese, who is always amusing, even when he’s stuck in a massive pile of shit.

Two other things that “Pink Panther 2” has over the first Pink Panther remake is that it stars (and completely wastes) the (almost) always wonderful Andy Garcia and is (terribly) directed by Harald Zwart, the guy behind the Karate Kid remake, “Hamilton” (1998), and “One Night at McCool’s,” while the first remake is stuck with the hack Shawn Levy behind the camera.

If there is one thing that Levy sucks at, it’s comedy (and just directing in general). He has made eight comedies (the Night at the Museum trilogy, “Cheaper by the Dozen,” “Big Fat Liar,” “The Internship,” “The Pink Panther” and “Date Night”), and the only one of those that’s even slightly funny is “Date Night” and that’s only because Steve Carell and Tina Fey are funny in everything and work wonderfully together.

Out of those (mostly terrible) eight comedies that he has directed, “The Pink Panther” might be the worst and least funny thing he has ever come close to in his entire life.

Even if you ignore the film’s connection to the legendary originals, it still utterly fails as a stand-alone comedy because every single joke misses the mark and the film becomes an offensively unfunny and borderline unwatchable slog.

Steve Martin owes the whole of France an apology for that horrendous accent.

7. Fant4stic (2015)

“Fant4stic” is everything that’s wrong with modern superhero films all wrapped up in a single package, and it proves that the dark gritty reboot method only works in certain cases, like the the Dark Knight trilogy.

“The Fantastic Four” has always been monumentally silly and full of bright colourful designs that gave the original comic run its charm, and is part of the reason why the characters have been as popular for as long as they have.

They are always so full of life and fun that it becomes quite addictive and contagious, something that the three previous Fantastic Four films got somewhat right as they were all light-hearted fun family adventures. What they were missing, on the other hand, was good writing, good acting, good special effects/CGI, and just about good anything else, but at least they got the tone and the look right.

By trying to make the Fantastic Four gritty and dark, Josh Trank and company pretty much robbed the characters of their identities and took away the charm, and what they were left with was an incompetent mess that’s way too dull and depressing to be even remotely enjoyable.

Not since “The Last Airbender” has an adaptation missed the point of the original so terribly, and frankly, “Fant4stic” is such a clusterfuck of a movie that it makes “The Last Airbender” look like “Citizen Kane” in comparison.

Large portions of the film were re-shot and the entire thing was re-edited by the studio after Trank turned in his version, and even though they were obviously trying to save what was probably a pretty bad film, they only ended up making it worse.

6. The Love Guru (2008)

Mike Myers is (or was) a pretty hilarious comedian, but he wasn’t without his flaws. His jokes could sometimes be pretty hit-and-miss even in his great comedies (“Austin Powers”/”Wayne’s World”), and over the years he became a bit too reliant on a few very specific kinds of jokes:

1.The “this is so silly and absurd that you must laugh” joke
2.The “this is so terribly unfunny and awkward that you must laugh” joke
3.The “silly word play that’s so unexpected that you must laugh” joke
4.The “look everyone, this thing looks like genitalia, isn’t that hilarious” joke

“The Love Guru” is where he took those four jokes and pushed them as far as he possibly could, and frankly he pushed them so far that they were way past the breaking point within the first 15 minutes, meaning that we are stuck with the same four terrible jokes on repeat for the next 70 minutes, and it gets old really quickly.

It was Myers’ biggest box office bomb and pretty much killed his career; “The Love Guru” was so bloody terrible that all the goodwill that Myers had built up to that point vanished like a fart in the wind, and so did he.

This film is so terrible that the only film work that Myers has gotten since 2008 as a leading man is in “Shrek Forever After,” and other than that he has been relegated to small cameos in films like “Inglourious Basterds” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” He also directed a documentary about Shep Gordon that everyone has pretty much forgotten, and he’s currently hosting a game show.

“The Love Guru” is a film that is still so furiously hated that the chances of Myers’ career having a Brendan Fraser-esque resurrection are pretty much out of the question.

It’s a film that is so atrocious that we’re lucky it didn’t tank Ben Kingsley’s career as well.

A twist ending can make or break a film; get it wrong and you will leave the audience feeling cheated and angered at the twist. But if you get it right, then you could easily save an otherwise below average film and turn it into something worth remembering and rewatching.

Creating a good twist is hard, because it has to make perfect sense in retrospect and enhance the rest of the film in some way. It also has to catch the audience by surprise, but it can’t be so out of left field that it feels more like a cheap shock tactic.

It has to be set up throughout the entire film, but not in a way that it becomes so obvious that the audience can predict it an hour before it happens.

It can sometimes be fun for the audience to guess the twist because it makes them feel smart, and might lead to them enjoying the film even more because they begin to see the story in the way that was intended for their second viewing.

But more often than not, an obvious twist is the result of lazy writing and only ends up making the film boring, as you’re only sitting there waiting for it to confirm something that you already know.

It’s a delicate balance between being predictable enough that it makes too much sense in retrospect, while going completely under the radar upon a first viewing, and when a film gets this balance perfectly right, it can be an insanely awesome experience.

The following 10 films range from pretty good to meh, but the one thing they all have in common is that they pull off that delicate balance and end up saving themselves from being forgotten.

Warning, SPOILERS (obviously).

10. Planet of the Apes (1968)

The original “Planet of the Apes” is alright; it’s an interesting sci-fi satire that’s competently made and enjoyable, but is nowhere near the masterpiece it’s been hyped up as for five decades.

But its oversized legacy is perfectly understandable, because the twist ending is easily one of the greatest endings ever seen on film. It’s an ending that has become legendary for a reason, and for 50 years has lifted up the rest of the film with it, even though the preceding 108 minutes are nowhere near as good as its final scene.

It’s also an ending that everyone knows about; there are probably very few people on this planet who don’t know of the twist or who haven’t seen the iconic image of Charlton Heston in front of the Statue of Liberty, and about 40 to 50 percent of these people probably haven’t even seen the film and only know about it through pop culture references.

Which means that it has undeniably lost some of its shock value, as most people watch the film already knowing the twist (kind of like what’s happened with “The Sixth Sense”) and are pretty much just watching it to see how it goes from point A to point B.

But even though the twist has pretty much been spoiled for everyone, it’s still a great ending and is pretty much the sole reason the film is considered a must-see classic masterpiece by everyone and their grandmother.

9. The Ring (2002)

The remake of Japan’s “The Ring” sparked a flood of terrible remakes of Japanese horror films; the original films were of varying quality, but aside for three films, the remakes were all complete shit.

“The Ring” is one of the good ones (the other two being “The Grudge” and “Dark Water”) and is still probably the best film to come out of the mid-2000’s J-horror remake craze, which doesn’t say much for the rest of them as “The Ring” is only okay.

It tells the story of a mother who goes on a journey to find the story behind a haunted VHS tape, whose spirit kills you seven days after you watch it. It’s an interesting and engaging story that never becomes as thrilling, chilling, or creepy as it could have been, until the twist arrives.

After discovering the complex traumatic backstory of the spirit inside the tape, that she was a girl named Samara who was abused by her adoptive family and ultimately murdered, the mother decides to help her by finding her earthly remains and giving her a proper burial, hoping that this will stop her from killing more people.

But when she tells her son about what she has done, he answers her, saying that she wasn’t supposed to help Samara, because now that she has been set free, she can finally reach her full strength and go even further with her killings than ever before.

It’s a chillingly disturbing scene that completely recontextualizes the rest of the story as Samara has been manipulating the mother from the beginning, and everything that has happened has been part of her escape plan.

It’s the first and the only genuinely creepy scene in the film, and it makes everything that came before it more interesting and gives the final moments the energy they needed.

The twist gives the film a deeper retroactive creepiness that makes everything appear even better when you look back at it.

8. Friday the 13th (1980)

The original “Friday the 13th” has become a bit of a classic, and started one of the longest and most popular horror franchises in the history of cinema. However, as a film it’s quite flawed, and it’s actually quite surprising that it spawned so many sequels.

There is a good slasher film hiding somewhere inside “Friday the 13th,” but it’s just way too long and meandering to actually work. Most of the film is just the audience watching a bunch of forgettable characters walk around an old summer camp doing stuff, and then an unseen serial killer slowly starts to kill them off one by one in a line of overlong, dull, and repetitive sequences.

The kills themselves are actually pretty impressive and still hold up, but the sequences surrounding them are just so boring that it becomes almost impossible to rewatch it and still get anything out of it.

Until the twist ending comes around, where it’s revealed that the serial killer has been an old lady all along (Jason’s mother, to be precise). We learn about her tragic backstory and the reason she murdered the main characters, and it’s actually really interesting, kind of compelling, and it catches you completely off guard.

Then we get a pretty awesome but overlong chase scene full of Betsy Palmer’s gloriously hammy overacting, and a decapitation scene that’s all kinds of amazing.

Had the film been about 15 to 20 minutes shorter, it might have actually been a highly entertaining slasher film with one of the most surprising slasher villains ever, but as it stands, it’s an overlong and boring film that’s worth watching once or twice for the twist and the kills.

7. Cry Wolf (2005)

“Cry Wolf” is an entertaining slasher film from the mid-2000s. It’s nothing great, but it’s competently made and will bring some enjoyment to slasher fans looking for something to kill time on a Sunday afternoon.

Our main character Owen has recently gotten into an academy and gets involved with a gang that plays a game called Cry Wolf. They then spread a rumor about a serial killer being on the loose after a girl is found murdered in the woods near the school, but everything goes to hell when an actual serial killer that perfectly matches the rumored killer shows up and starts to kill everyone in the gang.

In the end, it is revealed that it was all a prank that the gang had pulled on Owen and that he was the only one who wasn’t in on it. But at this point, Owen had killed a teacher who he believed to be the serial killer and is subsequently arrested, which is a pretty good twist on the horror formula.

The teacher Owen killed was having an affair with a girl named Dodger, who Owen had a crush on for the entire film. But in the film’s final moments, it’s revealed that Dodger killed the girl who was found in the woods because she was also having an affair with the teacher, and that Dodger had manipulated the entire prank to lead Owen into murdering the teacher because she was angry that the teacher cheated on her.

Owen then tells her that he’ll tell the police about this, but Dodger then tells him that the police would never believe him because he has no proof and because the entire situation is so far-fetched that the truth will look like a bunch of lies. Which is a great fucking twist.

6. Upgrade (2018)

Upgrade is a sci-fi action film that doesn’t do a single original thing until the final scene; you have seen 99 percent of this film a hundred times before, and you have seen every single thing done a hundred times better.

It’s by no means an awful film – it’s well made and actually quite fun and has some pretty awesome action sequences – but it’s just one of the most formulaic and predictable films made in recent memory.

So when it takes a complete U-turn in its final minutes and decides to go for a dark, nihilistic ending, it catches you completely off guard, and it’s actually pretty awesome.

2019 looks like it’s going to be full of great films, but just like with every year, there are undeniably going to be a lot of box office bombs and massive disappointments, and in this list we will be looking at 10 films that seem most likely to fall into that second category of awfulness.

10. Zombieland: Double Tap

The first “Zombieland” was a pretty fun, original and entertaining comedy, but this year it’s going to suffer the same fate that most fun, original and entertaining comedies fall for: it’s getting a sequel.

If you look at the long history of comedy sequels, you will have a hard time finding a single one that was as good or as entertaining as the original. Most of them are just tired cash grabs that rehash the same jokes and formula that made the first one work without much effort or creativity.

And if you look at the history of comedy sequels that came out 10 (or more) years after the original, you will pretty much only find films that range from awful to abomination.

It’s said that the best way to predict future behaviour is to look at past behaviour, which means that “Zombieland: Double Tap” is most likely going to suck, but there is the possibility that it might break the curse of shitty 10-years-later sequels and actually be good. But that chance is so slim that it’s best to prepare for the worst and hope that it won’t be as bad as “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues,” “Blues Brothers 2000,” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2,” “Zoolander No. 2,” “Super Troopers 2” and “Dumb and Dumber To.”

9. Terminator: Dark Fate

The Terminator franchise has had its ups and downs: the first one is pretty good, the second one is great (especially the Special Edition), the third one is meh, the fourth one is watchable, and the fifth one is so bad it singlehandedly killed off all interest in a sixth one.

Unlike the last three films, “Dark Fate” is the first one since “T2” to have any input from James Cameron, which might make it into the sequel we have been waiting for. But getting the director of “Deadpool” to make it was a seriously odd choice, because even though “Deadpool” was really entertaining, it was directed in such a basic way that it bordered on feeling lazy.

Out of all the films on this list, this is the only one that could actually take everyone by storm and re-establish the Terminator franchise as something more than two great movies that were then followed by 27 years of shit. But frankly, this is probably just going to fully cement the fact that the Terminator franchise should have died in 1991 and that producers should probably stop beating its corpse.

8. Rocketman

From the guy who finished “Bohemian Rhapsody” after known paedophile Bryan Singer gave up comes a film that looks almost identical to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but this time with Elton John songs instead of Queen songs.

When looking at all the trailers and promotional material for “Rocketman,” it becomes almost absurdly obvious that Dexter Fletcher directed both pictures, as they have the same colour pallete and look like they are going to have an almost identical story and narrative structure. Or like Patrick H. Willems put it, “A remake of ‘Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story’ without the jokes.”

“Bohemian Rhapsody” wasn’t anything special, it was a lifeless mess that lived mostly on the infamous music it used and ended with a vastly inferior version of a legendary performance that can be found on YouTube for free.

Looking at the final cut of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and seeing how “Rocketman” looks almost like a “Bohemian Rhapsody” remake with a different soundtrack, it’s not hard to predict that we are in for another lifeless messy remake of “Walk Hard” without the jokes.

7. Shaft

The Shaft franchise may not be that great, but it’s undeniably an important part of film history. The first film is one of the greatest blaxploitation films ever made, and was and still is an important stepping stone in Black representation in film, both behind and in front of the camera, even though the sequels (all three of them) got progressively worse.

The idea of making a sequel to a franchise that has been going downhill with each installment since 1972 isn’t really that great, and it could work on the screen presence of Richard Roundtree and Samuel L. Jackson alone. But what completely sinks all hope that this new film will be anything more than the final nail in the coffin of Shaft is that it’s being directed by Tim Story, the guy behind those two god-awful “Fantastic Four” films, the terrible Ride Along duology (soon to be Trilogy) and that horrendous “Taxi” remake.

The only film that Story has directed that’s worth watching is “Barbershop,” which was 16 years ago and was most likely only good by accident, and based on the long line of shit that followed, it’s extremely hard to be hopeful for the new Shaft film.

It was doomed from the moment he signed on to direct.

6. Rambo V: Last Blood

Rambo is a franchise that has become legendary based more on the idea of Rambo more than because of the films themselves, because as a whole, the Rambo franchise has never been that good.

“First Blood” was a pretty decent film but nothing special; “First Blood: Part II” was downright awful and has only lived on nostalgia and people’s never-ending hunger for ‘80s cheese; “Rambo III” was just terrible; and “Rambo” was a gratuitously ugly and misguided bore.

The original idea for “Rambo 5” was to create a soulful swan song for Rambo in the vein of “Logan,” but based on interviews with Stallone, that idea was thrown out the window to create an action-packed story where Rambo fights a Mexican drug cartel, which might work but based on the Rambo’s track record it probably won’t.

We all know that moment when you sit down to watch a movie that has everyone losing their minds over and hyping up beyond belief, and then when it’s over, you’re left incredibly disappointed and thinking: wait, that’s it? That’s what everyone’s been going crazy over? Why?

It’s a pretty awful moment that everyone has experienced and everyone will experience multiple times again, and these are exactly the movies we’ll be taking a look at in today’s list.

Those movies that everyone loved for some reason but are nowhere near as good as people have hyped them up to be.

The term ‘overrated’ has become rather overused in recent years, to the point that it has practically lost all meaning, as no one can seemingly fully agree on what is and isn’t overrated. But as of yet, this is the best term we have to describe the films that fall into the scenario above.

Also, as a measure of how overrated they are, we will be using IMDb as a way to rank them, the order of the films on this list aren’t from least to most overrated, that’s a discussion you can have in the comments, but the ranking will go from the lowest to highest IMDb score.

10. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs – 7.3

The Coen brothers are undeniably great filmmakers, but they’re great filmmakers who every now and then make films that just don’t work, like “The Ladykillers,” “Raising Arizona” (a film that has aged like cheap cheese), “Intolerable Cruelty,” “Crimewave” and “Gambit” (those last two have them only in the writing department but they are still pretty responsible for their badness). “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is their newest film to fall into this category.

“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is an anthology of six stories that are connected through a thematic thread in that all of them deal with death in the Old West, but other than that, there is no real reason why these specific six stories were thrown together in this specific order. That’s a problem that all anthologies inherently have, so why these stories?

But even with a similar theme and setting, these six stories just feel so completely different that they just work as a whole and make the film feel more like it was thrown together. Almost like the Coens had six short films that they wanted to make, and then after filming all of them, they had the great idea of throwing all of them into a single film just for the heck of it.

Another inherent problem with anthology films is that some stories are always going to be more or less interesting than others, and that’s a big problem with this film because only two of the six stories are actually good.

The first segment, the one from which the film takes its title, is easily the best and is so energetic and fun that the rest of the film feels like it’s slowly turning into a lifeless unengaging slog. Starting the film off with the best story is a great way to hook the audience, but when the rest of the stories aren’t particularly good, it ends up creating huge pacing issues.

The second segment, “Near Algodones” is alright, but it’s neither sharp, witty, or exciting enough to be anything more than an okay time-waster with a meme-worthy ending.

The third segment, “Meal Ticket,” is an interesting idea executed in the dullest way possible: we watch two people we don’t care about doing something we don’t enjoy for what feels like forever, and when it finally wraps up, you realize that the most interesting parts of the story happened off-screen.

The fourth segment, “All Gold Canyon” is watchable and it’s always fun to see Tom Waits, but it’s not anything worth watching more than once, and barely that.

The fifth segment, “The Girl That Got Rattled” is probably the most boring thing the Coens have ever directed. It’s about 25 minutes too long, and is so unengaging that it becomes borderline unwatchable thanks to its excessive dullness.

The sixth and final segment, “The Mortal Remains,” is a huge improvement over the fifth one but is still too unfocused and underdeveloped to be worth it, and ends the film on an empty whimper.

How the film got a score anywhere above 6.0 is just incredible, and just goes to show that at this point people will pretty much eat up whatever the Coens throw out, even if it’s this half-baked and mind-numbingly dull.

9. Black Panther – 7.4

Black Panther is a good film, but it’s also a flawed one.

The story that it’s trying to tell is pretty great in theory, but in practise, it’s both highly underdeveloped and over-stuffed at the same time. There are too many characters that add next to nothing to the story on a whole, and all of them barely one-dimensional.

The story also suffers because it’s been forced to fit into the typical Marvel formula: it’s basically a mix between the “Thor” and “Iron Man,” but had they taken the story into bold new directions and been given the screen time necessary to fully develop all of their ideas, then this could have been a great film.

But as it stands, it isn’t.

Killmonger is a great idea for a villain, but he gets barely enough screen time to reach the surface of his vast potential, and it doesn’t help that he is sidelined for the first hour by a much more entertaining villain. Killmonger may be more complex and thematically rich, but Klaue is just plain fun, and if used correctly could have been used to develop the themes of colonialism, institutionalized racism, and white oppression over Black people, much more so than with Killmonger.

The film also suffers because the main character is probably the least interesting character in the whole movie. His journey loses all impact and steam by the halfway point because the film is asking us to root for what is pretty much a humourless plank of wood in tights.

But even when the film tries to spice up its dreary thematic groundwork with humour and action, it just ends up undermining itself, because the humour is just so painfully unfunny and forced that even David Brent would cringe himself to death (“What are those?” – studios, please stop trying to appeal to the masses with dead memes that weren’t funny in the first place).

On the action front, the film has pretty much nothing to boast about. The hand to hand combat is poorly filmed; the climax is an atrocious CGI mess; the car chase is probably the only action scene that’s not highly underwhelming or poorly handled, and even then, it’s too underlit to be fully enjoyable. It’s not the worst action ever, it’s watchable and never boring, but it could have been so much better.

That pretty much goes for the whole film. It’s a bunch of interesting ideas forced into a formula that doesn’t suit it and ends up being a flawed but enjoyable mess.

It’s a solid 6.5, anything over a 7 is being unnecessarily gracious.

8. A Quiet Place – 7.6

“A Quiet Place” is a pretty solid thriller, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen many times before. It’s just your typical monster movie mixed with your typical post-apocalypse tale, just on a smaller budget.

Narratively, it doesn’t do anything new and it’s not really trying to. It’s not trying to be some deep contemplative deconstruction on its genre, or some kind of a metaphor for the good and bad traits of masculinity, or a transcendent reworking of old ideas.

It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel; it’s just trying to show how effective that already existing wheel can be if handled correctly, and that’s perfectly fine.

Not everything has to be some deep art piece, and a solidly crafted thriller can be one hell of a ride, but the reception that “A Quiet Place” got in its release is frankly kind of absurd. This is a film that would typically not even make a splash on the cultural landscape, but for some reason everyone lost their damn mind over this film and made it out to be the saviour that modern cinema desperately needed.

And it just isn’t.

Yes, it’s pretty awesome and intense but it’s nothing more than a solid 7.0, and even with its competent old school filmmaking, strong atmosphere and overall awesomeness, 7.6 is pushing it a bit too far.

7. Upgrade – 7.6

“Upgrade” is a film we have seen many times before. The story is so worn out and typical that you’ll be able to predict every major story beat after watching only the first 10 minutes, and frankly, the only surprise this film has in store is how unexpectedly awesome the action scenes are, and that the final twist seems somewhat surprising just as long as you’ve been watching it with your brain turned completely off.

But those action scenes sure are awesome and make the film worth watching on its own. The rest of the film around them isn’t technically bad, but it’s just kind of bland and so predictable that it borders on being lazy.

Some people have called it the good version of “Venom” and they aren’t wrong, but you could also call it the good version of the new “Robocop,” the inferior version of “Death Wish” (but now with AI and hacking), the vastly inferior version of “Elysium,” and a thousand other things, both good and bad.

But no matter what, despite the countless other films it reminds you of while watching, it isn’t even close to being awesome enough to warrant a 7.6 score.

6. Incredibles 2 – 7.8

“The Incredibles” is a great film, but “Incredibles 2” isn’t.

“Incredibles 2” is okay, but it’s in no way worth the 14-year wait it took to get it, and it pretty much feels like a messier version that was rushed into production to make money, which it probably was after the financial failure of “Tomorrowland” (which is three times better than “Incredibles 2” but somehow only has a 6.4 score).

The tight plot of the original is replaced with messy wandering meandering that only ends up repeating plot and character beats already done in the first one.

But it’s not a complete failure, Jack-Jack is still hilarious and the action is pretty good (what else do you expect from Brad Bird and Pixar), but the undercooked mess that is the story and the lack of any real purpose to justify its existence (outside that fight with the racoon) does make it awfully disappointing.

That 7.8 score is more likely than not the result of nostalgia, Jack-Jack, and people obsessed with Elastigirl’s ‘thiccness.’

But in reality, it’s more like a generous 6.8.

There have been many great movies released in the 21st century, many of them have been charming fluff that’s endlessly rewatchable, but many of them have also been really disturbing and dealt with heavy subject matter, and in this list we will be taking a look at those movies that you won’t feel the need to rewatch after your first viewing.

10. Rob Zombie’s Halloween II (2009)

Rob Zombie’s Halloween II is an interesting film, not only is it the weirdest and most surreal film in the Halloween franchise but it might also be the most gruesome.

Halloween as a franchise began by giving people slow-burn thrills, but with each sequel the dreadful atmosphere of the original was replaced with gore, something that this entry comments on in a really unique fashion.

The kills in Halloween II are done in such a brutal and nihilistic manner that it’s really hard to enjoy them, it almost feels like Rob Zombie is trolling the audience, as most gore-hounds love to watch masked killers slaughter innocent victims in horrific ways, and by making them this horrific he is basically putting a mirror to his audience and asking them: Are you enjoying this? This is what you wanted, right? Do you really enjoy how fucked up and morally reprehensible this is?

It’s almost like Rob Zombie decided to take a few notes from Funny Games (1997) but add in as much brutal and unenjoyable gore as he could to emphasize the point even harder, while also turning the film into a surreal nightmare about PTSD and making Michael into the human manifestation of Trauma, which is basically the furthest you could possibly get from the barebones simplicity of the original.

It’s no wonder that people didn’t embrace it when it came out, most people don’t like being criticized and called out about things they enjoy, and fans of the original were obviously massively turned off by the massive shift in tone from the somewhat realistic to the full-blown surreal hellscape of trauma presented in Halloween II.

It’s the type of film that deserves multiple viewings but most people will have no interest in watching more than once.

9. The Passion of the Christ (2004)

The Passion of the Christ is by no means the most disturbing or fucked up film on this list, it does have a lot of gore and blood but the reason most people will probably never watch it more than once is down to the fact that this might be the most mean-spirited and anti-Semitic film released in the 21st century.

The film tells the story of the final 12 hours in the life of Jesus Christ but instead of spreading any of his messages about being good to thy neighbour and all that, it instead goes with the approach of repeatedly screaming its message in your face over the course of two hours, that message being: Look what Jesus did! He did all of this for you! To save you from the pits of hell! Even though you don’t deserve it, you sinful bastard! But he did it anyway! Now accept Jesus or burn in hell!!!

This attitude not only makes the film feel extremely preachy in all the worst ways but also robs the story of any depth or complexity as Mel Gibson is only showing us Jesus suffering to either force us to convert or to shame you into complete submission if you were already a die-hard Christian.

But the message that the film is screaming at you is just so out-dated and misguided that it becomes pretty infuriating and highly annoying after a while, and that’s not even mentioning Gibson’s portrayal of the Jews, which is down-right offensive and makes too much sense when put together with his infamous phone rant.

But what cements the film as being something that you’ll never watch again is that on top of being mean-spirited, excessively preachy, misguided, gory and anti-Semitic, it’s also incredibly boring.

The story of the Passion is an interesting one but it’s not interesting enough to justify the 127-minute runtime, and it’s painfully obvious that Mel Gibson had to drag the story to its breaking point with many over-long and unnecessary scenes that repeat the same point over and over again, many unimportant flashbacks that don’t connect too or add anything to the current narrative and a few short sub-plots that go absolutely nowhere.

The Passion of the Christ is a complete failure as a movie thanks to Gibson’s poor directing and terrible sense of pacing but it becomes an offensive dumpster fire of misguided ideas under closer inspection.

8. mother! (2017)

mother! might be the most ambitious and divisive film of 2017 (other than maybe The Last Jedi, in the Divisive department at least), it’s a two-hour long arthouse fever dream mash-up of all the themes and ideas Darren Aronofsky has been playing with in his career up to this point.

It’s both a character study on an artist whose obsession leads to the destruction of everything around him, a furious rant on how we’re treating the planet, a retelling of a biblical story, a study of damaged relationships, a study of the fragmented psyche of a female character and just over-all an absolutely batshit insane ride that is both utterly fucked up and nerve-wracking in its portrayal of anxiety inducingly awkward social gatherings.

It’s a film that is either a pretentious preachy mess and a work of genius from a brilliant auteur, both opinions are perfectly valid as the film is designed to provoke an extreme emotional reaction, it doesn’t matter if that reaction is positive or negative as long as it leaves a lasting impression on you.

The film begins as a slow but engaging character piece about the awkwardness of human interaction and tries to drive the audience crazy by dialling that awkwardness up with each passing scene until it reaches a breaking point where it turns into a 36-minute long sequence of complete mayhem that’s so overstuffed with ideas, themes and metaphors that you will feel exhausted afterwards.

Which makes the film kind of hard to rewatch and most people will probably just leave it at a single viewing.

7. Inland Empire (2006)

Inland Empire is a three hour long surreal nightmare directed by David Lynch and it’s probably the most disturbing film that David Lynch has ever made.

All of the films on this list are disturbing in one way or another, but Inland Empire is special in that it’s really hard to explain why it’s so god damn disturbing, it just is.

The film is working on such a subconscious level that it feels like a dream, not only because it follows dreamlike logic like the rest of David Lynch’s work but because it’s a film so complex and beyond explanation that the only other sensation that feels like it is dreaming.

The story pretty much fizzles out into nothing around the 45-minute mark and the rest of the film is this strange montage of unrelated and unexplainable scenes that leave you dumbfounded as to what the hell happened but also leave you feeling like you understood everything on a subconscious level and that there is something truly terrifying hiding deep under the images that you just saw.

If that make no sense, then it still makes a lot more sense than Inland Empire.

It’s a must-see for all David Lynch fans, but it’s also a film that many won’t revisit.

6. The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2011)

The Human Centipede 2 delivers on all the fucked-up imagery that the first one only hinted at, and so much more.

It’s undeniable that this film is filled with some of the most disgusting things that a human being could possibly do, and if the film really was nothing more than 90-minutes of fucked up shit then it still would have made its way onto this list, but the reason that makes it all even more disturbing than it already is, is the mind of the main character Martin Lomax.

Martin is simply put one of the most disgusting characters that have ever graced the silver screen, he is both this depraved monster devoid of morals but also a monster that we can understand and somewhat sympathize with, Martin is the victim of years of incest and rape that have left him broken and out of touch with reality, it has shattered his mind to the point that he doesn’t view his actions as evil or anything other than normal, he is a victim of horrific circumstances and all of his actions can be tracked back to his childhood and his disturbed relationship to his parents.

But even though we can understand him and explain his actions we can never forgive them or fully sympathize with him, if we only saw his home life then we might feel sorry for him, but the moment we see him kidnap people and torture them for his own horrifically twisted sexual pleasure then all of that pity goes out the window and we are left to sit there and watch as his broken mind goes out of control and does some of the worst things a person could possibly do to another human being.

It’s terrifying to watch but also so interesting that it’s hard to look away, Martin is just too twisted of a case study that you can’t help yourself but to continue watching and analyse his mental state and try to understand what would lead someone to do this and how a mind like his would even function.

Laurence R. Harvey’s performance is also so dementedly brilliant and compelling that he owns the screen any time he’s on it, which is pretty much every shot of the movie.

He’s so compelling that even when he’s just walking down some stairs, you feel absolutely captivated and on edge as something truly terrifying might be about to happen.

This is also the only film that Tom Six has made where he has shown himself to be a truly talented filmmaker, the first Human Centipede was a competently made anti-thriller but nothing truly special, and the third one was just down-right incompetent on all fronts, but here he is in his element and delivers a brilliantly directed piece of work.

His Mise-en-Scène is devilishly simple yet highly effective, his hand-held camerawork is visually stunning in a weirdly beautiful way while also putting you smack in the middle of this horrifying situation, and his use of black-and-white is actually kind of genius, and it’s kind of sad that he will most likely never reach this high point ever again.

It’s easy to understand why people would never watch this more than once, some people wouldn’t even give it that chance because of its well-earned reputation, but the people that have watched it, either out of curiosity (what was it about cats?) or genuine interest, will never forget this film.

For better or worse.

5. The House That Jack Built (2018)

The House That Jack Built is the newest film from the infamous but highly controversial Danish auteur Lars von Trier, his films have always been divisive and as controversial as the figure behind them, and The House That Jack Built is no different.

It tells the story of a serial killer over a 12 year period, it shows us five randomly chosen episodes that defined him, the film also functions as a deconstruction of art and the career of Lars von Trier himself as he confronts his own darkest sides and addresses every single criticism that’s been thrown his way throughout his career.

His supposed misogyny, his provocative nature, his troubling politics and everything in-between, and he pretty much comes to the conclusion that he is the most evil and reprehensible person alive and that he should never have been allowed to work for as long as he did without punishment and that the proper thing to do with him is to throw him into the deepest, darkest pits of hell where he can happily burn for the rest of eternity.

There have been rumours that this might be his last film, and if this really is his swan song then he couldn’t have gone out in a better way as The House That Jack Built is the perfect conclusion to his career, it takes all the themes he’s been working with, turns them on their head and finished them in the most personal yet ironic yet compelling ways possible.

The film is a brilliant critique of a troubled artists that both explains and apologizes for everything he did over his 40-year career, and if this isn’t his final film then this is hopefully the beginning of a new thematic trilogy.

For those that don’ know, you can divide his entire career into sets of trilogies dealing with a single theme, The Europe Trilogy, The Golden Hearts Trilogy, The still unfinished U.S.A Trilogy, The Depression Trilogy, and if he is about to start a new trilogy that deals with him making up for or criticising his own flaws as a director and a human being then we should be in for a treat.

But even if you take all of that meta-narrative thematic stuff out, we still have a brilliantly made and darkly comedic satire on humanity and how we deal with our worst sides, like Sexism, Murder, White Privilege, The Male Gaze, Patriarchy, Feminism, Nazis, Pretentious Art and more.

It’s a film jam-packed with thematic depth on multitude of complex issues and most people either don’t like that or can’t properly see that because of the many brutal murder scenes, which is understandable as the murders have been used as a big selling point for the movie and are done in such a way that it will either offend you, disturb you or make you burst out laughing, there really isn’t a middle ground on that and it’s pretty sad that more people can’t look past that as that is just the surface of a multi-layered work of art.

The House That Jack Built is a film that deserves to be viewed multiple times and fans of Lars von Trier will be doing so for years to come, but for everyone outside of that circle, The House That Jack Built will more likely than not remain a film that will never be watched again.

4. Pusher 3: I’m the Angel of Death (2005)

Nicolas Winding Refn is another great but controversial Danish director, Refn is at once more popular than Lars but still not as well-known as Lars, more people have seen Drive, Bronson, Pusher, Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon than Dogville, The Idiots, Epidemic, Melancholia or The Element of Crime, but ask someone what they think of Nicolas Winding Refn and you’ll most likely get the answer: Who’s Nicolas Winding Refn?

But ask someone what they think of Lars von Trier and you’ll probably get a whole speech about either how much they love him or absolutely hate him and think he’s the antichrist.

Which is a shame.

But out of Nicolas Winding Refn’s amazing filmography there is one film that’s a lot more underrated than it should be, and that’s Pusher 3: I’m the Angel of Death.

(Other contenders for Nicolas Winding Refn’s most underrated film are: Bleeder, Fear X, Valhalla Rising and Agatha Christie’s Marple: Nemesis)

Being the final film in the highly acclaimed Pusher Trilogy there were high expectations for this film and most people were left disappointed, which is kind of weird as Pusher 3 might be the best film of the Trilogy. The first one is great but doesn’t hold a candle to the greatness of the third one, the second one is a masterpiece and there is a case to be made that it’s the best one but Pusher 3 is still a more focused and effective film than Pusher 2.

It tells the story of the aging crime lord Milo who has pretty much been the villain of the trilogy up to this point, but here we finally begin to see his more human side and get a peek into a day in the life of an old man trying to keep his empire intact as everything is pretty much crumbling around him.

In every film of the trilogy a character is put through hell as he needs to get money to pay some dept, in the first one it was Frank that owed Milo money, in the second one it was Tonny that got caught up in the troubles of one Kurt the Cunt as Kurt owed Tonny’s father money after a failed meeting with Milo, and now in the third one it’s finally Milo’s turn to be put through the ringer as he owes money to the new king in town and is forced to betray his own morals to get it.

It’s a compelling story that perfectly brings this trilogy to a close in the best way possible, both narratively and thematically, but it’s also a film that’s really hard to watch thanks to the last 10 minutes, which are just plain horrific.

The film is pretty tame but intense all the way up to those final 10 minutes and then it takes a dark turn into a situation that will leave viewers disturbed, the situation will not be Spoiled here as it’s something that everyone should go in without knowing, but be warned, it’s so gruesome and fucked up that you’ll most likely never watch the film again.

3. Antichrist (2009)

Another masterpiece from the Danish madman Lars von Trier, Antichrist is an avant-garde horror film that’s one of the most fucked up things you’ll ever see, if you ever fancied watching genital mutilation then this is the film for you.

The film is a study in misogyny in society throughout history but it’s also about grief and how destructive that can be both to a person and to a relationship, and how hard it can be to cope with it.

It’s a film of intense emotions, complex themes and majorly fucked up imagery, it’s a film that’s a must-see for everyone that considers themselves a cinephile but one that you won’t find yourself revisiting often, or at all.

2. The Act of Killing (2012)

The Act of Killing is the only documentary on this list and it’s one that everyone should watch at least once, because it’s disturbing in an important way.

In present day documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer invites former Death Squad member Anwar Congo to take part in their newest documentary and help them recreate scenes from the Indonesian Killings of 1965-66, guided by Anwar’s imagination the reality of the genocide begins to come to live as glorified genre pieces, like Western’s, Gangster films and Musicals. But the more Anwar revisits the past the more it begins to haunt him as the fakery of the recreations begin to reveal the true horror of the act’s he has committed.

It’s a documentary that’s both, beautiful, strange and haunting, it shows us a piece of history that many outside Indonesia might not be familiar with and examines the effect that it had on everyone involved.

It’s a really heavy film that will leave most viewers emotionally drained and that is why most people won’t be revisiting this film, it’s a viewing experience that will stay with you for such a long time that a second viewing might be unnecessary, but it’s also such an important work that it needs to be seen.

1. The Bunny Game (2011)

The Bunny Game is about a prostitute that’s kidnapped, tortured and raped for days in the desert by a demented serial killer, it’s also based on a real story.

This is a passion project for main actress Rodleen Getsic, it’s based on her own kidnapping and the film was made as a therapeutic experience for her to get it out of her system so she could get on with her life.

Everything in the film was done for real, she does real drugs, has real sex, is really beaten and chained to a wall for hours, there was real knife play performed on her and there is a scene where she is branded for real with hot iron (in close up, you can see her skin crackle), and it’s all absolutely horrific.

Getsic is gives an astounding performance, she is obviously 120% committed to this film and the fact that the film even exists is extremely brave on her part.

This film is not an easy experience and most people will probably pass on it from reading the synopsis alone, but it’s such a brave and important work that not watching it is a disservice to Getsic’s brave contribution to cinema.

But even if you end up watching it, it’s such an overwhelming experience that you will most likely never watch it again.

Don’t you hate it when you’re watching a movie and you’re really enjoying it, you might even consider it to be great or even possibly a masterpiece, but then the ending happens and it sucks.

The ending is the most important part of a film, get it right and you might turn an otherwise pretty underwhelming film into a potential cult classic (Krampus (2015)), get it wrong and you will end up with many highly disappointed audience members, and those are precisely the films we will be focusing on in this list.

Warning: There will be SPOILERS.

10. The Amityville Horror (1979)

The Amityville Horror is a supernatural horror film supposedly based on true events (which basically means that maybe 15-to-20% of what happens actually happened in real life), it tells the story of the Lutz family as they move into a house that may or may not be haunted after the previous owners were murdered in their sleep with a shotgun (why none of them woke up after the first shotgun blast still being the case’s biggest mystery).

The film is actually pretty decent, it has two pretty great performances from James Brolin (Father of Thanos) and Margot Kidder (who will appear again later on this list), it’s well shot, the story is pretty interesting and there are three or four scenes that come close to actually being kind of creepy.

But the film also has its share of flaws, the story is poorly paced, the rest of the actors are pretty shit, that Priest sub-plot added absolutely nothing but unintentional comedy, most of the supposedly scary scenes are unbelievably silly and some of them are easily explainable with simple logic, and the ending is so underwhelming that it undermines the entire experience and makes the film feel more or less like a waste of time.

The Amityville Horror is the type of film that is always promising that something creepy is going to happen, but when it comes time to actually do something it’s so rushed, lifeless and abrupt that the only possible response is: really, that’s it, that’s what you’ve been teasing this whole time???

After about 100 minutes of constant build up the climax is literally just them leaving the house because the father had a mild mental breakdown and some mud came flowing through the walls, then after they’ve left the house the father goes back inside to get the dog he falls through some old crappy stairs and takes a short unexpected mud bath, and then they just leave and the film ends.

If the film had focused more on being a subtle character study about a family suffering from mental illness do too stress then this ending might have worked, as it would have asked the audience to decide for itself if they were just crazy all along or if something was actually going on in that house.

But as it stands, the film wants to split it 50/50 (insert the usual having and eating cake metaphor), it wants to have all the subtle character study and slow-burn pacing while also having terribly over-the-top scenes that pretty much confirm that there really are ghosts, which might have worked with a better screenplay but those two half’s only end up undermining each other, especially when it comes to the climax.

9. Men in Black (1997)

Men in Black is a pretty decent but kind of overrated action-comedy, it’s held up as this hilarious and highly original classic and it just isn’t. It’s a pretty decent and entertaining comedy that undeniably has a pretty original central idea (what if FBI but for aliens?) but tackles it in the most formulaic way possible.

Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are fun together but are stuck in a film that is rarely funny, for a comedy it’s weirdly low on jokes and as an action film it fails pretty hard because the action scenes are the weakest parts of the film, which is too bad because the ending is pretty much a five-minute action scene.

But even though the film itself may not be that great, the ending still feels really disappointing, the fight with the bug is just such a lifeless and underwhelming sequence that it makes the film as a whole feel really unsatisfying.

8. Spione (1928)

Spione is a spy thriller by the legendary Fritz Lang, the film is amongst his more underrated works but watching it proves just how influential it has become, as the story and themes have been repeated so many times since that it’s impossible not to think of multiple different movies every other scene.

The film isn’t just one of those old silent movies that’s a must-see only because of how influential and important it was in shaping the course of film history, because it’s also a highly entertaining thriller that everyone should be able to enjoy. It may not quite rival some of Fritz Lang’s masterpieces, like Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler or M, but it’s still an absolute masterwork.

Basically, the only part of this film that doesn’t really work is the ending, and that’s not because it’s a terrible ending, on paper this is the perfect ending for this film, but it’s executed in such an abrupt way that it robs the ending of all the impact that it could have had.

It’s easy to understand what Lang was going for by tackling the ending in this way but it’s one of the few directorial miscalculations of his career and it’s really disappointing because this easily could have been a great ending had he handled it differently.

7. Suspiria (1977)

Suspiria is a Giallo supernatural horror film from the legendary Dario Argento and it has pretty much become a classic horror film, and it’s easy to see why, the film is visually stunning with great set design and an amazing score by the rock band Goblin.

The story is also pretty engaging and the atmosphere is so strong that it’s easy to get completely lost in it and forgive some of the film’s bigger flaws, those being the awful acting and horrendous ADR, that completely destroy every single dialogue scene.

Another big flaw is the last act and how poorly it fits together with the rest of the film, the structure up to this point in the story has been kind of episodic and feels dictated more by what Argento wanted to film rather than to tell a compelling story, but it more or less holds together in a somewhat cohesive way. But then when the last act comes around the films literally stops the narrative for about five minutes so that Udo Kier can explain the films backstory and mythos to our main character Suzy so that the last act will hopefully make some sense.

It almost feels like Argento finished filming and then realized that he forgot to properly set-up the events of the last act and instead of adding in a few scenes here and there throughout the narrative, he instead decided to film a single massive exposition dump and throw it in right before the climax in a desperate plea to make it make sense, but it’s just so lazy and out of nowhere that it doesn’t work.

Then Argento goes into a climax that’s visually awesome and for a moment looks like it’s going in a direction that would force you to forgive that Udo Kier exposition dump, but instead it cop’s out with a really stupid and non-sensical resolution before ending in a really abrupt way that lacks all of the great atmosphere and visual splendour the rest of the film had.

6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is an interesting film, it’s got a really stunning yet cold and alienating visual style that obviously took a lot of inspiration from The Shining, the story is interesting and it explores some rather interesting themes, the characters are memorable and the film moves along at a nice pace, that is until the last act.

All of the positive thing that were listed above are also some of the film’s biggest flaws and the main reason that the film loses all steam in the third act. The style is stunning but it’s just so cold that it never lets you form any emotional connection to what is happening on screen, the story is interesting but never really engaging, the themes are interesting but are so scattershot and not explored enough to give the film enough dept to make up for Its other short comings, the characters are interesting, but not because they’re well written or because you like or empathize with them, but because they’re so cold yet act in such an absurd way that it’s hard not to remember how odd they were, but you never really feel connected to any of them.

Which is precisely why the last act failed, because in the last act the pacing goes from a steady pace to crawling slowly across the finish line, which kills the momentum that had been built up to this point, and the climax that follows only really works if you care for the characters, and as the characters are so cold that it’s really hard to care about anything that’s happening to them, and when the inevitable ending finally comes, it’s nothing more than a whimper that should have been a gut-punch.

Movies are for the most part made to be entertainment, nothing more than big harmless fluff that’s primarily there to make money and even though these films can be really enjoyable and fun they can get a bit stale if you don’t consume a few thought-provoking and complex films in-between, films that are made to be something more than mere entertainment and actually have something to say.

These kinds of films will most likely leave more behind than the average blockbuster and might stay with us for years to come, some of them can even be so emotionally effective that they’ll leave us devastated, those are the kind of films we’ll be looking at in this list.

Warning, there will be SPOILERS for some of the movies.

10. Heavenly Creatures (1994)

Heavenly Creatures is a film that hides its true nature as cutesy fluff for about an hour before slowly descending further and further into the delusional minds of the main character’s before landing on an emotional gut-punch of an ending.

It’s the type of film that rewards multiple viewings as the knowledge of the ending changes your perception of every single thing that happens in the film, everything that at first looked campy or fluffy takes on a creepier dimension as you see that the delusional nature of the character’s that made itself apparent in the film’s finale was there the whole time but that you just didn’t notice it because you were too stuck viewing them as innocent but eccentric little girls that were just having fun, a mindset that all the adult’s in this film share and that blinds them to the reality of the situation, which is precisely what leads to the film’s tragic ending.

The film is based on true events, which gives the film an even stronger edge as you see that the tragedy at the end of the story could have been adverted had someone sensed that something was seriously off with these two girls, but nobody did and when they finally did, tragedy had already struck.

This film might be Peter Jackson’s crowning achievement when it comes to his mastery of cinematic language, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy will always be his magnum opus but Heavenly Creatures is just so perfectly and carefully crafted that it might be one of the best directed films of all time, and the ending might be the best thing Jackson has ever directed, or at least the most devastating.

9. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the only film on this list that could be categorised as a comedy, because the film is absolutely hilarious and spends about 80% of the runtime being a really fun and charming ride through some serious subject matter, mental health issues have never been this charming.

But that is all part of the trick, because by being this fun and enjoyable and care-free the film slowly draws you in and makes you fall head over heels in love with all the character’s, except Nurse Ratched, so when tragedy finally strikes in the third act it hits a lot harder because of how much we’ve come to love the characters and seeing them fall victim to Nurse Ratched’s psychotically obsessive hunger for control is devastating.

8. The Deer Hunter (1978)

The Deer Hunter is a film that poses the question: would you rather live your whole life in an uneventful small town or shoot yourself in the head in the deepest, darkest pits of Vietnam?

It’s a film that takes its time to get us fully invested in the lives of the main character and then spends the rest of the film putting them through hell and back.

It’s one of the most powerful war films ever made and has lost none of its impact 40 years later.

7. The Green Mile (1999)

The Green Mile is a classic, it might even be the best of Frank Darabont’s three Stephen King adaptations, and considering that the other two are the masterpiece The Shawshank Redemption and the great but slightly underrated The Mist then it’s no small claim, but The Green Mile is just such an emotional powerhouse of a film that there really is no way to watch it and not cry (or at least tear up) over the films ending.

Nothing more needs to be said about this film, it’s the kind of film that will have every single audience member in tears by the end but is also entertaining enough that you’ll want to revisit it time and time again.

6. Irréversible (2002)

Irréversible is devastating in a different way from all the other films on this list, it’s not devastating because it’ll have such a profound emotional effect you but because it’s such an inhumanely brutal and disturbing film that there is no way anyone can watch it and not be disturbed afterwards, and that’s mostly because of the now infamous 20-minute long unbearably realistic rape scene, it’s one of the hardest scenes you’ll ever watch and it will stay with you and haunt you for a long time afterwards.

Most of the films on this list show humanity at its worst, but also show that life will find a way back to beauty and that hope will return with time, but not this film, this film gives us a happy ending but that happy ending only happens because the film tells it’s story in reverse, so the happy ending we get is nothing more than a beautiful lie, a single moment of happiness that will eventually be snuffed out by darkness and leave everyone involved face down in the dirt.

Irréversible is a film that shows us the worst sides of humanity and tells us that the darkness will always outweigh the light and that all the happiness we feel might just be one decision away from turning into something utterly horrifying and ugly.

It’s in no way an easy film to watch as it’s quite a horrific experience, but you can’t really talk about devastating films without mentioning Irréversible.