The Worst Horror Movies of 2012

It's safe to say that this year has been a rough one for Horror fans. It was almost as if for every good movie that saw release, there were three or four bad ones that came right along with it. Awful Found Footage flicks, ill-advised sequels, poor adaptations, blatant money grabs... we Horror fans have truly been put through the ringer this year.

We here at THC want to save you the pain of enduring the painful, and so we offer you our list of the 10 movies that scarred our movie-loving souls the deepest... and of course we give Honorable Mention to the ones that didn't quite make the Top 10 cut as well. Keep in mind that any of the movies in our top 10 could have easily won the title of  "Worst Horror Movie of the Year" and absolutely deserved it.

*Be sure to click on the movie posters for the full reviews of each movie, if you really need that in-depth analysis.

There was really no Horror movie this year that insulted us, and the Horror Genre as a whole, on a greater scale than did Smiley.

Made with a fairly decent-sized budget by a group of kids who are famous for their wacky YouTube videos, Smiley exists only to pander to the allegiance of those said YouTube video's teenage fans. It tries to be clever and hit its audience with a deluge of Internet-speak jargon and buzz-words that are supposed to make it look groundbreaking and cutting edge, and in that it fails miserably. It's painfully Meta, tries to be Alpha, and ends up being Beta as Fuck. *I just used the movie's own Meta references against it. Point, me.

The painfully conceived plot elements, the bad acting, the atrocious dialogue, the long periods of nothing but talking, the underwhelming action, the annoyingly un-hip Meta in-jokes and references, the LULZ-inducing ending, and just about everything else about Smiley, was bad. Very bad.

With all of the great, well-made Horror flicks out there that never see the light of day, it's sad that this is the crap that gets a Limited Theatrical Release. We've been trolled, fellow Anons. This movie is bad on just about every level, so avoid it unless you like pain. If you like pain, then don't avoid it, and I guess... enjoy your pain?

Had anything about Area 407 been suspenseful, terrifying, atmospheric or even compelling, its shortcomings would have been far less noticeable. Filled with grating characters doing horribly improvised dialogue, a cheesy rubber-suited monster, and and ending that defied any sort of rational comprehension... this movie was a train wreck. Area 407 is an example of Found Footage done very wrong, and it shows perfectly why these movies are so hard to effectively pull off, and it makes the sub-genre look silly.

As bad of a Found Footage flick as Area 407 truly was, Amber Alert was infinitely worse. Amber Alert has a truly great premise for a Found Footage flick, but makes a total and utter mess out of it. This movie is more about two people arguing and bickering incessantly than it is about two people following a guy who may have a kidnapped kid. The characters are horrible annoying, the local Police are horribly inept, and not one thing in the movie makes any sort of rational sense whatsoever. If you're looking to watch a movie that will leave you pissed-off and wanting to punch things, this is your flick.

Alex Cross is a poor, poor excuse for a Thriller, and especially one of the Alex Cross variety. The characters are as cliche' as the dialogue, the plot is a crazy mess of hollow implausibility, and there's nothing here that even remotely engages the audience... in a good way. This movie might have been better had it starred Idris Elba as originally intended, but even he may not have been enough to elevate this awful script. Then again, maybe that's why he took a pass on starring in the movie to begin with. This movie will go down in movie history as not only one of the worst of 2012, but of the decade.

The Apparition was such an embarrassingly bad movie for all involved that it boggles our mind how it was even granted a Theatrical release;  it should have been a direct to DVD movie at best never been released at all. This movie is more painful to sit through than the Twilight films... yeah, I just went there. It really is that bad. The whopping 4% score on Rotten Tomatoes should tell you everything you need to know; The Apparition is 96% suck.

ATM is a movie that has its few good points totally ruined by the lack of any semblance of believability. It's a waste of Alice Eve, who is actually a decent actress on top of being ridiculously hot, and it's nothing more than a string of flimsy plot devices that serve only to allow the premise of this movie to exist. Why they were in that particular ATM to begin with was just silly, and what unfolded during the course of the movie was just as bad. It's a mess, folks. A big ole' silly mess.

The Devil Inside was the first horror flick that we saw in 2012, and it really kicked off the year in shitty fashion for us. We've seen worse Horror movies since then, but damn this one still makes us shudder when it comes to mind. Not only is this movie filled with long, drab scenes of discussion, some horrible shaky cam, truly unlikable characters, truly bad dialogue, and a bunch of "I think that's supposed to be scary" scenes, but it also boasts one of the lamest endings to a movie we've seen all year. Really, the ending was just plain shit.

How The Oregonian made it into Sundance is a mystery of epic proportions. A little Google research on our part and we found that many people left the movie mid-play, to escape the screeching noises and the atrocious everything else. If it's that easy to get a film into Sundance, be on the lookout next year for our entry entitled "The Detroiter"; it's the story of a white guy who wakes up in the middle of Detroit and tries to find his way back home while stopping every so often to masturbate with bacon and scream the lyrics to Bon Jovi songs. Before long, the midget mimes catch him and try to make him drink their "Blue Milk." Somewhere in there we will have a Unicorn dance-off scene too. It's going to be deep. See, we can make a shitty and pretentious student film too.

PA4 exists only to be in theaters to make some quick Halloween cash, and it's written as such. When you put a movie on a fast track like that, and give it less than a year for its conception, writing, pre-production, shooting, and post-production, this is what happens. The gags are old and feel forced by now, and the movie explains nothing, and leaves us with another ending that suggests we should seek answers in the already announced PA5. Like the Saw series, Paranormal Activity looks as if it's going to churn out a new sequel each year in time for Halloween, which absolutely tells you that the quality is going to be shit.

It really feels like the producers of Piranha 3DD started off with the intention of making a legit sequel, but somewhere along the way just said screw it and gave up on the whole thing. The story was awful, the dialogue was laughably bad and confounding, the special effects were nothing special at all, and the actors looked like they had never been in a movie before. For the record, I will not accept that this movie was written and directed the way it was intentionally, and that they wanted it to be a "so-bad-it's-good" type of an experience. They dropped the ball on this one. Period. What a horrible, horrible movie.