(This article is part of our Best of 2023 series.)
2023 was an odd year for me. Much like the previous year, my love of cinema had diminished to the point where I could no longer muster the energy to watch anything. I would go weeks without wanting to put something on and even then, it wasn’t a guarantee I’d even watch something when the mood struck me. If I couldn’t find a thing to watch within 30 minutes, I’d give up and go back to YouTube or video games. It felt like I watched nothing and yet, this holds the record for the most amount of new releases I’ve watched within a year. I watched every single movie I wanted to see minus Zone of Interest. Watched all the Oscar contenders, the critically acclaimed horror movies and indie darlings. Since I saw so many films, I’m going to be splitting this up into three parts and like always, they’ll be ranked worst to best.
These are my five favorite films of 2023 (plus 67 honorable mentions).
72. The Outwaters
Films like The Outwaters are why the found footage subgenre is easily one of the most divisive within horror. The iconic ones everyone loves do something interesting with the format. They justify the handheld aesthetic by having a story you can conceivably believe someone would constantly be filming to tell. Like a group of YouTubers filming in a haunted abandoned hospital or a news team stuck in a building with infected people for example. The Outwaters follows a group of four friends filming a music video in the Mojave desert. They wander around a bit, one of the main characters sings her awful song and then a supernatural event occurs and they all die. Now, that sounds like a spoiler but that happens within the first 45 minutes. The rest of the film involves one of the characters walking aimlessly through the desert naked shooting rocks and blood trails that lead nowhere and yelling at characters in the distance that he can never catch up to. That’s it. That’s the entire movie. Correction, that’s the movie you can see. A lot of this movie is shot in pitch blackness, which obviously makes it impossible to see anything. Everyone in the horror community that made fun of Skinamarink obviously never saw this film because while yes, that movie is easy to make fun of because of it’s static hallways and ceiling shots, it was at least shooting for a vibe. This movie fails at even being a movie.
71. Dark Harvest
The premise of Dark Harvest is so great, it should’ve been an easy slam dunk. It’s basically Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery mixed with Pumpkinhead. Every year, a small Midwestern town runs a deadly ritual where every teen is forced to participate in a fight against a nightmare creature named Sawtooth Jack. Whoever kills the creature is awarded a brand new car and enough money to live wherever they want. If no one kills the creature and it reaches the church before midnight, the town will have ten years of crop failure. That’s a great set up for a story but that’s all it is. Dark Harvest is either a terrible adaptation of the book it’s based on or both suffer from the same problem, which is it’s a premise in search of a plot. That set up is all there is to the movie. Since 90% of the story takes place on the day of the contest, there’s no room for character. Our protagonist is the brother of last year’s winner, which makes him ineligible for this contest but for unclear plot reasons, he really wants to win. Now, they introduce a romantic subplot for him and you would think that would be his reason for breaking the rules and risking his life but nope. It’s just thrown in there. Like everything in this movie, it’s yet another half baked idea just tossed in there for no reason. And on top of everything, it has a twist so dumb, it invalidates everything you just saw.
70. Malum
Directors remaking their own films is nothing new. Everyone from Hitchcock to Raimi has done it. I mean, it makes sense. If you don’t think you quite nailed it the first time, why not take another crack at the material. Almost a decade after he made Last Shift, Anthony DiBlasi decided to revisit the world he created but with a bigger budget and more resources than he did last time. The end result is an almost shot for shot remake that’s somehow worse in every single way. The original was by no means a masterpiece but it was good for what it was. It delivered exactly the type of experience horror fans have come to expect from this type of movie. It was a low budget single location horror movie that got by on ambience and creepy imagery. Any technical issues could be excused by the director’s lack of funds and relative inexperienced behind the camera. It was one of his first films and he delivered the best product he could with the resources he had to work with. Neither one of those excuses can be applied to Malum. He had a much bigger budget to work with and had been making movies for far longer and yet, it feels, in someway, more amateurish than the previous film. Even the changes made to the original, which have nothing to do with budget, are baffling. If this was a stand alone film, not tied to anything else, I would be far more lenient on it but since it already had a blueprint to work off of and more resources to work with, it’s embarrassing what the final result ended up being.
69. Kids vs Aliens
I’ve been rooting for Jason Eisener for a very long time now; he’s made some of my absolute favorite horror shorts. I think Treevenge (about trees coming to life and killing everyone on Christmas) is hilariously brilliant, Y for Youngbuck (his segment in ABCs of Death) is wonderfully fucked up, Hobo With a Shotgun (both the short and the film it later spawned) is grindhouse perfection and One Last Dive is the scariest thing you’ll see under 90 seconds. The man clearly has talent. So what the fuck happened here? Based on the segment Alien Slumber Party from V/H/S/2, Kids vs Aliens expands on it in the worst possible way – by making the kids insufferable and dumb as fuck. Seriously, the only reason this movie makes it to 90 minutes is by having every character make the worst possible decision just to make the plot happen. Skip it and watch the short instead.
68. Haunting of Queen Mary
Honestly, the only reason this is higher than dead last on my list is the film’s location and the look of the ghost. That’s it. Those two things are the only positives this film has going for it because everything is bad. The director is not wholly incompetent, I mean the film looks great but Jesus, he has no idea how to stage a scene, how to maintain suspense or deliver a scare. Flipping back and forth between the timelines is a monumental miscalculation. It makes the plot unnecessarily hard to follow and makes it impossible to be invested in either the present or the past. It kills what ultimately could’ve been a fun little ghost story. Which again is a shame because the ghost is really cool looking. He’s just wasted in a mess of a movie.
67. Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire
Seven Samurai is the easiest film structure to get right. There are so many excellent examples to look at, borrow from or straight up rip-off, that it’s kind of impressive that Snyder fucked this up as hard as he did. You really have to take incompetence to another level when you fail this colossally hard. Seriously, it’s the absolute easiest film structure to nail. A group of poor villagers enlist the aid of warriors to help defend themselves from evil thieves that plan to milk them of their resources and kill them. Countless movies have mined this concept for gold because it always works. Rebel Moon fails because it’s only half of the structure. The villagers enlist the aid of warriors …. and then that’s it. It’s like that Rick and Morty episode where they’re putting together a team for a heist (“you son of a bitch, I’m in”) but for two and a half hours and there’s no heist. That could be forgiven if the team was fun and memorable but they’re not. I swear to God, there’s a ninja assassin named Nemesis in this. That’s the level of writing we’re working with here. It’s a failure on every level. The fact that there are still Snyderbros is insane to me.
66. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey
For as bad a movie as this is, it did usher in the public domain horror movie trend we’re about to suffer through for the next five years and at least one of those fucking things has to be good, so Blood and Honey at least has that going for it. It’s hard to really talk shit about a meme movie because it delivers exactly what you think it will. It’s bad but what did people expect from it? Maybe my bad movie gage is calibrated differently than others since I’ve consumed so much trash but this was fine. Boring as fuck with awful acting and sub par kills but that’s exactly what I expected going in. There’s monsters that look close enough to Milne’s creations, there’s kills and some nudity. That’s the bar and it delivered. Barely but it still managed to do what it set out to do. I cannot say the same about a multi-million dollar epic by Snyder, so one point to Blood and Honey.
65. Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva
Found footage movies are one of my cinematic weaknesses. Even though 99% of them are unwatchable trash, I’m always hoping I’ll find that one gem that justifies the search. Despite it’s low placement on my end of the year list, Horror in the High Desert 2 isn’t bad, it’s just forgettable. A vast improvement over the first (shit actually happens in this one), Minerva yet again follows a documentary crew investigating a series of disappearances on and around a stretch of remote highway in Nevada. I can’t remember the specifics of who is missing, who is taking and/or killing them or why (I think there’s a cult or a group of murderous nomads living in the desert?) but I do remember a sequence involving a cop and something pursuing him in the pitch darkness that was effectively creepy. Based on the jump in quality from the first to the second, I’m hoping the third jumps even further and we end up with something worth watching.
64. Five Nights at Freddy’s
Confession time. Sailor loves the lore of Five Nights at Freddy’s. Not the games themselves but watching videos explaining the insane mythos behind them. For a series about haunted pizzeria animatronics, you’d be shocked to learn there’s not only a story attached to them but one of the deepest, most convoluted in all of gaming. It puts everything else to shame and that’s saying a helluva lot considering Kingdom Hearts exists. It was inevitable a movie would get made but it is shocking that it took this long and that this was the end result. Since the game creator has creative control over the series, he kept delaying this until they got the story just right and I don’t think the wait was worth it. I don’t know why it took him this long to crack the story since it’s literally the game with a few additional beats but they should’ve spent more time on it because it just doesn’t work as a movie. But as flawed as it is, I’m glad it exists because the kids clearly love it. This isn’t for me. They didn’t make this for me. They made it for a specific audience and they’re eating it up. And I’m here for it. There’s not enough horror movies made for kids, so for that alone (and Matthew Lillard), I think it justifies its existence.
63. V/H/S/85
The selling point of horror anthologies is also its biggest weakness. Getting a handful of new or established directors, cutting them a check and giving them the space to do what they want results in some unexpected magic but it also makes it impossible to predict the quality of each individual short. It’s a gamble that sometimes results in gold but more often than not, ends up being an unfocused mess. This is definitely in the latter category. I don’t think there’s a single stand out segment in the entire film. There’s no Raatma, no creepy monster chick from the first and definitely no cult from the 2nd. The best one is a pseudo sequel to Black Phone due solely to the fact that it’s the one I remember the most. I could look up what the other ones are to refresh my memory but if they’re that forgettable, what’s the point. It’s not like there’s a detail or scene I’m forgetting that will move this up any higher. If the next entry in the series is this bad, I’m ditching it forever.
62. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Full disclosure: I missed the first 30-40 minutes of this film. I walked in when the lead character finds out his car is a wise talking robot. I read the plot synopsis online to find out what I missed and it felt like a bit of robot fighting and character exposition. Nothing important. Which is also how you could describe this movie. The stakes are non-existent since it’s a prequel, the action is lackluster, the main characters are boring and forgettable, the plot is interchangable with every other film in the franchise and the new animal robots add nothing of substance. When Pete Davidson is the best part of your movie, you’ve colossally fucked up.
61. Resident Evil: Death Island
It’s amazing that there have been four separate attempts to bring the Resident Evil universe to the screens and I’d argue each one is a failure. There was a TV show everyone forgot exists, a movie that felt like mid budget fan film, an animated series of DTV movies and of course Paul W.S. Anderson has his over the top action franchise that has its defenders but none truly capture the essence of what makes Resident Evil great. For some reason they all focus on the action and ignore the horror. This movie is no exception. In fact, it doubles down on the action with the selling point that it’s the first movie to bring together every major character minus Barry and Ada. If that means something to you, then this movie is going to be your Avengers Endgame but it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing to me, so there wasn’t really anything here for me. The story is worse than any of the games, the action is run-of-the-mill and the main villains motivation is laughable. Some day someone is going to nail this franchise but today was not that day.
60. Never Hike Alone 2
If Brian Fuller’s show ever gets made, they better throw the director of this a goddamn bone and have him direct at least one episode because he’s been single handedly keeping the franchise alive with exceptional fan films. A huge improvement over the last two, this one sees the return of Tommy Jarvis (played by Thom Matthews) desperately trying to kill the ghost of Jason Voorhees once and for all. Since it’s a fan film, I’m going to overlook its budget restraints, technical flaws and amateurish acting and solely focus on the story and how well it captures the essence of Jason. I would put the story higher than at least 3, maybe 4 entries in the franchise and while it isn’t the best Jason (I really wish they hired a bigger actor for the role), it does at least feel like Jason, so I have to give it points for that. It isn’t perfect but for a fan film, it’s about as close to a masterpiece as you can get.
59. Play Dead
This movie has so many individual elements that I love, that if it was just slightly better, I would consider it a hidden gem. But there’s just too many flaws for me to look past to recommend it. First of all, I love the premise. Even though it stretches believability to the breaking point, I can suspend my disbelief because it’s an idea I like. After a drug deal goes wrong and multiple people end up dead, a woman has to overdose on drugs that’ll make it look like she’s dead, in order to wake up in a morgue to get a cellphone off of one of the corpses that could incriminate her brother. While sneaking around, she stumbles across an organ harvesting operation run by an evil Jerry O’Connell. Solid set up and an actor I like, I’m sold. But the movie really doesn’t know what to do with either of those elements. For about half of its runtime, it is essentially Scooby-Doo and the gang running up and down hallways and in and out of doors while being pursued by the monster. Even when they add new characters, it’s still the same thing over and over again. It’s a shame, I was really rooting for this one to win me over.
58. Renfield
Outside of Cage’s performance, which is legitimately great, there’s really nothing to recommend here. The premise is great but, and I can’t stress enough how much of a negative this is, it feels as though Max Landis wrote it. The humor is cringe, the Mafia subplot is undercooked and ridiculous, the CGI blood is distractingly bad and Hoult and Awkwafina have zero chemistry together. Every time Cage is on screen, it reminded me of the scene in Forrest Gump when he’s in Vietnam and he keeps running back into the warzone to carry his platoon to safety. He is trying so desperately to save this movie but unfortunately he can only do so much.
57. Cocaine Bear
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey wasn’t the only ridiculous meme movie of 2023. Cocaine Bear was all anyone could talk about for a couple of months but man, did it not deserve that much attention. If you’re going to build your movie around an absurd premise, that’s fine but it can’t just be the logline. There needs to be more to the script than just “bear eats a bunch of cocaine, goes crazy and murders everyone.” Actually, I take that back. It can just be that but you really have to deliver on the bear carnage. This movie does not. The perfect template for this is Tremors. A small community, isolated from the outside world, is forced to band together to stop a monster from eating everyone. You could’ve even tied the gangsters into that by making them the reason they’re cut off. They could’ve held the town hostage till someone went into the woods to collect their cocaine. I don’t know, I’m not a screenwriter. I’m just saying, there were avenues they could’ve taken the story instead of doing the absolute bear minimum.
I will not apologize for that pun.
56. Scream VI
There are two types of slashers: the kind with a reoccurring supernatural threat ala Freddy, Jason or Michael Myers and the Agatha Christie murder mystery type where you’re trying to guess who the killer is. Scream is the best example of the latter. Even if the plot is boring or the kills are uninteresting, it’s still a fun game you play with yourself while watching these movies. The identity of the killer(s) in VI is so labored, it immediately killed the enthusiasm I have for any subsequent sequels. I actually like V quite a bit and think the killers in that were memorable and had a motivation that perfectly tied into the first movie. It also knew what to do with its legacy characters and had an edge I feel was missing from the last couple of sequels. This movie has none of that. It somehow has the highest body count of any of the films, yet I can’t think of a single stand out kill. It brings back old characters and gives them nothing to do and the two main characters are far more annoying than they were in the last one. It’s far from the worst in the series but the new one needs to do something drastically different to keep this franchise alive.
55. Unicorn Wars
War-hungry teddy bears journey from bootcamp to the psychedelic terrors of the Magic Forest in their quest to eliminate all the unicorns. Directed by the cat who did Bird Boy: The Forgotten Children, Unicorn Wars is yet another exercise in misery. Alberto Vázquez makes the type of films that if a child accidentally watched it, they’d be scarred for life. They’re dark, depressing, extremely violent and not suitable for anyone under the age of 13. This one kind of plays like Happy Tree Friends if that was taken deadly serious and was set on an Apocalypse Now-esque battlefield. As a metaphor for war, it’s a bit on the nose. You’ve seen this a million times before. The only thing it brings to the table is its adorable character designs doing mature things. Watching cuddly looking teddy bears commit genocide is fun for a bit but the novelty wears off rather quickly.
54. The Price We Pay
The laziest and most reductive way to summarize a movie is by using the old elevator pitch of combing “this meets that” but honestly, the movie is kind of forcing my hand. The Price We Pay is literally From Dusk Till Dawn meets Barbarian with Stephen Dorff and Emile Hirsch in the Gecko Brothers roles. Two bank robbers (one cool and collected and the other a temperamental nutcase) hold up in a house that has a secret. If there was ever a movie that could set a precedent for being sued for plagiarism by two different studios, this would be it. Despite it’s blatant thievery and unimaginative premise, I actually had a good time with it. That’s mostly due to my fondness for Dorff and Hirsch as actors, so your milage may vary.
53. The Flash
In the future, I think the mishandling and catastrophic failure of the DCEU will be taught in film schools. The Dark Universe was objectively worse considering it died before it ever officially began but there’s no lesson to learn from that other than hubris. The DCEU didn’t need to fail this bad. The MCU truly fucked Hollywood. They created a math problem every studio tried to solve and none of them knew algebra. They were all so obsessed with the billion dollar team up movie, they forgot they actually had to make good stand alone films. That was the ultimate failing of the DCEU. The fact that there was a Justice League movie before a Flash movie is goofy. They waited so long to make this, it was almost their way to reboot the entire goddamn franchise. That’s how fast it all imploded. In many ways, The Flash is the poster child for their failures. It’s by no means their worst movie but it does exemplify all of their biggest mistakes. It’s a movie that comes so close to working but misses the mark in every way. The myriad of problems it has is too long to list (the fundamental miscasting of the main character, the inconsistent time travel rules, atrocious CGI, etc.) but it’s biggest sin is that it’s just not fun to watch. Even with the return of Michael Keaton as Batman, you’d think the would be a single scene that would stick in the brain, one example you could point to as entertaining but there isn’t. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of pork rinds. You eat them because they’re not filling and because they have the hint of a much better flavor but once you’re done, the flavor evaporates immediately.
52. The Adults
I will watch any movie with Michael Cera. He has a unique energy and line delivery that plusses everything he’s in. He’s just a presence I enjoy seeing every time he pops up. If that sounds like the beginning of a compliment sandwich, you’d be right. But unlike most sandwiches, one great thing makes up the entirety of the bread. If it wasn’t for him, I would’ve abandoned this within 30 minutes. The rest of the cast is great, with Hannah Gross and Sophia Lillis (who’s really proving herself a capable actress post IT) being the stand outs but it suffers from the same thing all gambling movies suffer from, they’re fucking bummers. There’s not a single gambling movie where the audience ever roots for the degenerate gambler to win, so we spend the entire movie watching them either lose it all or win. With neither option being satisfying. When it’s just a family drama between three fucked up siblings, it’s great but every time it goes back to the gambling, I lose interest.
51. Cobweb
Cobweb is the best gateway horror to come out in quite some time. It’s a slow-burn mood piece that’s not too scary for youngsters but deliverers Raimi level thrills in the third act to reward their patience. The film involves a young boy hearing the voice of a little girl coming from behind his bedroom wall and his increasingly suspicious-acting parents. Since it’s from the point of view of a child (who are the most unreliable narrators in existence), you’re left guessing whether or not the parents are actually becoming more sinister or if their behavior is informed by his point of view. There’s one of of two options (the girl is real and they’re evil captors or he’s imagining the voice) and whether or not you correctly predict which one it is, the end will most definitely deliver regardless.
50. Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael House
Even though the last two were awful, I still decided to roll the dice on this one due to my love of the first and that was a gamble that did not pay off. Being a horror fan is sometimes akin to being in an abusive relationship. The worse the subgenre, the harder we get hurt and the more baffling it is that we keep going back. I don’t know why I love found footage. It burns me every time but here I go, willingly walking back into the fire. Now, The Carmichael House is nowhere near the worst offenders of the subgenre but it offers nothing new. How it ties into the previous films isn’t interesting, no character reacts like a normal human being (they have proof of the existence of ghosts which are immediately hostile towards them and it still takes them two days before everyone is convinced to leave) and the scares are all done better in the first. It’s the type of film only enjoyable while scrolling on your phone when it’s on.
49. Thanksgiving
When Roth announced he was expanding his fake trailer from Grindhouse into a feature length film, I was excited because I’ve been jonesing for an unapologetically over the top slasher for ages now. The kind of film you only found on Blockbuster shelves because theaters were too afraid to play them. But then he said it wasn’t going to be like the fake trailer at all but more like a slick ’90s remake of that trailer and my excited withered and died like a neglected house plant. That was the safest, most boring approach to that idea he could possibly do. But then it came out and I was pleasantly surprised. He actually captured the tone of a late ’90s slasher. It’s very much Scream meets My Bloody Valentine and that’s a good thing. I think both are among the best examples of the genre, so if you’re to rip-off any, it makes sense that it would be these two. The design of the slasher is great and their motivation is solid. Both tie into the holiday, so points to Roth for going the extra mile in that regard. My biggest problem is the writing. Roth can’t help but be Roth. It feels like a slasher from that era but it also feels like an Eli Roth movie, and one of those I like and the other I don’t. Every character is written to be the most annoying character possible. It is impossible to watch this and not hope that all of them don’t end up dead. You can say that about a lot of horror films but most of those films have had characters because no one gave a shit. Roth clearly tried to make the best homage possible, so there really is no excuse as to why all of them are the fucking worst other than the fact that Roth can’t help but be Roth. I’m looking forward to the sequel because I want more slashers but here’s hoping it has better characters and dialogue this time.
48. Brooklyn 45
Brooklyn 45 is one of those films that is really hard to put on a ranking list. I like every element of it but I’ll never watch it again. I remember everything about it but only if I think about it. Other than that, I forget it exists. The film is about a group of five military veterans who’ve been best friends since childhood gather for a seance to help their best friend process the loss of his wife. While there, the ghosts of their past start to catch up to them when confronted with evidence of the paranormal and a surprise from their host. Although it’s a Shudder exclusive, this is not a horror film in any way whatsoever. A claustrophobic one location thriller, yes but this is not a horror film. There’s a ghost in it for one scene, so I guess that counts as a haunted house movie but if you go in looking for spooks, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. It’s a play more than anything. A room full of characters discuss how they’re going to handle a certain issue and while talking, things about their past come to light. That’s the movie. If you like these actors and want to watch them act, this is the movie for you. If you’re looking to get scared, stay the fuck away.
47. No One Will Save You
This movie is so close to being good. I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it a million more, the hardest part of reviewing a movie is reviewing what it is instead of what it isn’t. It is so hard looking at this movie and not seeing wasted potential. The things it does well, it does very well. Making an alien invasion movie that has the non stop action energy of a Mad Max movie is a great idea. Where it stumbles is the lead. Making her mute adds nothing to the movie and feels like a gimmick and everything involving her backstory is painfully trite. If she was a survivalist that has isolated herself from everyone in town and was forced to help them despite the fact that she hates them all, then I’m on board. You could still make her mute simply by having her be alone. But “main character dealing with trauma and finally finding peace” is a trope I’m getting real sick of seeing. Especially when it adds nothing to the movie.
Part II
What do you think of my ranking so far? Which films from 2023 do you think will be in my Top 10?
