Readers’ Poll: The 10 Worst Movies of 2014 So Far

Why can't Johnny Depp make a little indie movie every once in a while? He was so brilliant in Ed Wood. Why must everything be some mega-budget beast? This year's turd was Transcendence, the story of a scientist whose mind gets uploaded into a computer. Mayhem ensues. These machines we all love may kill us one day. Yawn. 

Whatever you do, please don't confuse this with upcoming flick Hercules. That one is directed by Brett Ratner and stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Odds are extremely high it will be unwatchable, but we could be wrong. The movie we're talking about here is The Legend of Hercules, starring Kellan Lutz. We don't need to speculate about this one sucking. It earned an astonishing 3 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Within a few months, if we're lucky, most people will forget it ever existed. 

Really, Neighbors? Didn't most people find this surprisingly enjoyable?  Sure, the premise was a little cliché and it made little sense that the other neighbors weren't also driven batty by a wild fraternity, but Seth Rogen and Zac Efron really sold it. Good comedies are rare these days and this was no Airplane!, but calling it one of the worst movies of the year seems unfair. Our readers, however, have spoken. 

Can't Hollywood just leave anything alone? Did we really need another RoboCop? We already had the original and two horrid sequels. We know what happens. The human cop becomes a RoboCop. It poses all sorts of moral quandaries, building to a big action sequence where bad guys are chased and stuff blows up. We only have so many hours on this earth, and spending two of them watching a RoboCop reboot doesn't seem like a good idea. That said, if they make a documentary about the quest to get an actual RoboCop statue built in downtown Detroit, we'll be first in line. They have a website and everything. 

How many of you saw Sleeping Beauty as a kid and thought to yourself, "Gee, I'd sure like to see this movie from the perspective of the evil queen?" We doubt very many of you, though Disney seemed to think this was a grand idea. They certainly weren't wrong from a business perspective. Maleficent has made over $500 million, making it Angelina Jolie's most successful movie ever. The critics weren't quite as enthralled, but we doubt that's giving anybody at Disney sleepless nights. They're probably too busy plotting a movie about The Little Mermaid from Ursula's view. 

Over the past few years we've seen sexy werewolves and sexy vampires, so it was only a matter of time before we got a sexy Frankenstein monster. Aaron Eckhart plays the title character in the film, which is based on a graphic novel by Kevin Grevioux. The film is barely longer than 90 minutes, yet it seems to drag on forever and ever. Nearly every critic absolutely despised it, though it managed to eke out a tiny profit. 

It was clear from the very beginning that Darren Aronofsky's Noah was going to be a divisive movie. Not only did he flesh out the (rather thin) Biblical story with all sorts of new elements, but he also included some aspects from the original text they don't teach you in school. (Let's just say that Noah wasn't always the best father.) The result was a movie that didn't completely please evangelicals or non-believers. It still made a decent amount of money, but not everyone walked out of the theater thrilled with what they'd just seen. 

You gotta admire Seth MacFarlane's moxie. Not only did he write, direct, produce and star in this western spoof, but he wrote a freakin' companion book to the thing. He really, really believed there was a huge appetite for a movie about a loser that battles an outlaw in the old west. The movie did have some funny moments, especially the Emmett "Doc" Brown cameo, but the whole thing just came off as a vanity project. We think MacFarlane can withstand this quasi-failure, especially since he has Ted 2 in the works and 6,000 more episodes of The Family Guy. 

Enough with the Spider-Man already. Five movies in 12 years is just too much. This new one suffered from villain bloat and simple audience exhaustion with the character. Reviews were less than kind for this one, though it did make a huge pile of money and two more sequels are slated. What happens when this runs dry, through? Do they reboot for a second time? Are we as a people doomed to face an endless series of Spider-Man movies until the end of time? Can anything stop it?

We were a little surprised to see Godzilla win this poll. Nobody expected yet another Godzilla reboot to be Citizen Kane, but director Gareth Edwards and screenwriter Max Borenstein were smart to turn this into a disaster movie as opposed to a mere monster flick. It's light years above the abysmal 1998 Godzilla, though some people did complain about the pacing. It did take a little while to get to the monsters. Those of you that didn't like this one will probably hate the inevitable sequels. These things tend to get worse as they go on.