15 Awful Films The Avengers Actors Want You To Forget

8. Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) - Stellan Skarsgård

RottenTomatoes Score: 11% The Plot: The prequel that nobody wanted to the 1973 classic horror film, following a younger Father Lancaster Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård) as he faces off against the iconic demon Pazuzu for the first time in East Africa. Why It Sucks: William Peter Blatty, who wrote the original Exorcist novel (and also wrote the movie's screenplay as well as writing and directing The Exorcist III), said that watching this movie was his "most humiliating professional experience", and it's unsurprising considering that it shouldn't even exist. Paul Schrader was originally contracted to make the Exorcist prequel movie, but when his footage displeased producers (who wanted more gore), he was fired, with his movie eventually becoming 2005's slightly-better-reviewed Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, The Long Kiss Goodnight) was then hired to re-shoot the movie with an altered script, the results of which are nothing short of terrible. It's tough to even try to live up to the original movie, all the more so when poor Stellan Skarsgård has to fill Max von Sydow's shoes. The CGI is laughably bad, there's plenty of gory violence but little in the manner of actual substance, and though Skarsgård tries and tries to make it work, he's absolutely hopeless thanks to the mind-bogglingly dumb script, which was clearly cobbled together in haste.