10 Movies That Instantly Told You They Were Garbage
3. Cats
Because we can't have just one cat-themed entry on this list, here's to Tom Hooper's ill-fated 2019 adaptation of the hit musical Cats, which remains one of the most bewilderingly awful "prestige" films of recent years.
Widely touted as a likely Oscar contender prior to release, public opinion pulled a sharp 180 once the first trailer dropped, with many feeling that the decision to have the entire cast perform their roles through VFX-assisted motion capture was a major mistake.
And while Hooper and others from the production assured fans that the trailer featured work-in-progress effects, the end result was no less a nightmarish fever dream from its very first scene.
It takes mere seconds to appreciate that Hooper has thrown us headlong into a digital hellscape beyond compare: distractingly artificial, CGI-soaked sets filled with actors whose faces have been awkwardly blended with feline fur in a deeply unsettling and offputting way.
Every single character fell straight into the uncanny valley and could never escape: the VFX and art direction simply weren't good enough to convince us that we were looking at persuasively anthropomorphic cats.
Instead, it felt akin to watching a surreal tech demo reel that never should've seen the light of day: an unforgettable and terrifying vision which thoroughly undermined the undeniably game efforts of the cast.
And that's Cats in a nutshell - a spectacularly misguided project which did a visually hideous disservice to its talented ensemble from the jump. And it really only gets worse from that opening scene.
Who among us will ever forget the sequence where Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson) rips off her own skin and eats cockroaches with human features? Truly, truly haunting.