10 Movies That Will Definitely Win Razzie Awards In 2017

What is this? An award for ANTS?

Ben Stiller Razzie Zoolander 2
Paramount Pictures

Dedicated to recognising the worst in film, The Golden Raspberry Awards began on Tuesday, March 31, 1981 – the same night as the 53rd Annual Academy Awards.

While Ordinary People was being honoured with Best Picture, Razzies founder John Wilson was dis-honouring the Village People’s Can’t Stop The Music with Worst Screenplay and Worst Picture. He’s been dis-honouring the films that are “so bad they’re wildly entertaining” ever since.

“The acting in these movies isn’t merely wretched,” Wilson notes, “it’s laughable. The writing is deliriously dunderheaded. And the direction sails beyond the mediocre into the stratosphere of meteoric misfires.”

Wilson and co don’t make movies, they just make fun of those who do, and you have to question their logic on occasion. It’s hard to believe now, but Danny De Vito was up for Worst Supporting Actor for Batman Returns while The Blair Witch Project was a Worst Picture nominee in a year that included Wild Wild West and The Phantom Menace.

In other years, however, the Razzies proved themselves a vital part of popular culture, singling out the tat they knew would spell trouble for future generations. Long before they handed out gongs to Fifty Shades Of Grey and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, the Razzies recognized the potential of Donald Trump, who won Worst Supporting Actor in 1990 for Ghosts Can’t Do It.

If you want to know who’ll dominate the 2017 awards, step right this way.

10. The Darkness

Ben Stiller Razzie Zoolander 2
Blumhouse Productions

Not to be confused with the band of the same name, The Darkness (originally 6 Miranda Drive) stars Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell as a couple who return home from a Grand Canyon vacation to find their lives invaded by a supernatural presence.

You wouldn’t expect Greg McLean, who also made Wolf Creek, to take the reins on a PG-13 horror movie and sure enough, the critics wondered if he was phoning this one in. One critic called the movie “pretty much a total bust – it isn’t scary, it isn’t exciting and it plods along at such a snail’s pace that even though it clocks in at just over 90 minutes, it plays like it runs at least twice that.”

The cast are good, McLean does what he can with the material (it’s his first film that he didn’t write) but the results are thin and predictable at best. When will Blumhouse abandon the supernatural in favour of a story with bite?

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Contributor

Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'