The Middlin's of 2013

The middle of the road. The average. The could have been greats. The nearly tragic. These fair to middlin’ movies entertained us in some ways, while letting us down in others.

They simply were neither The Best nor The Worst of the year.

I'm sure that some of the movies on this list will cause people to throw cyber rocks at us, because many people praised them to no end, and included them amongst their best of the year. All we can say to that is, get over it.

You either can click on the pictures of the movies that we reviewed for a more in-depth look at our thoughts on them, or head below for our brief comments.

Either way, here are The Middlin's of 2013.

Let's start with the big 2. You're Next and V/H/S/2 seem like they're on just about Everybody's "Best Of" lists this year, but not ours though, because we're rebels! You can click on the reviews to see our in-depth thoughts, but basically both films just underwhelmed us. You're Next was solid, but but too sloppy for us to truly love. V/H/S/2 had one great segment (Safe Haven, which was truly brilliant), but the rest of them did little for us. They're solid enough, just not Best Of material for us.

Curse of Chucky and Warm Bodies were pretty popular with most Horror Critics and Fans this year too, and we found them to be fun flicks, though we didn't really love them as much as most seemed to. Again, both are solid, enjoyable efforts.

Haunter could easily be an Honorable Mention on our Best Of list, as it was a pretty solid little flick. The same goes for Crawlspace and John Dies at the End. Magic, Magic and Wither had their moments too.

Many, many people in the Horror Community cried foul on Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Texas Chainsaw 3D, to which we say poppycock! Fine, they may have been cheesy, not so great movies, but we had a ton of fun with them anyhow. Maybe they aren't so great, but they're enjoyable enough to not be amongst The Worst of the Year for us either.

As for the Middlin's that we didn't review, most of them were simply average fare. Carrie was good, but we were interrupted a few times at the Theater, so it probably didn't have our full attention. We'll be giving that one another look once it hits Blu-ray.

Finally, we have +1; the movie that we wanted to love, but just couldn't because it felt so jumbled and confused.

As for the rest of The Middlin's, you'll just have to click through to our Reviews to see what we thought about them. Ha!

We see a lot of non-Horror flicks around here, mainly because Action, Sci-fi, Fantasy, Thrillers and the like are all pretty much in our wheelhouse anyhow, you know? We love straight-up Dramas and Comedies too, but if we stretched our coverage to those Genres, we'd have to be The Movie Club.

Elysium was pretty fun, as was Jack the Giant Killer Slayer. Neither burned up the Box Office, but we had fun with both.

Iron Man 3 disappointed the hell out of us, but there was enough good stuff packed into its framework that we mostly enjoyed most of it. Kinda. The Mandarin thing really killed the whole movie for us though. We haven't picked it up on Blu-ray yet, and that about says it all.

Machete Kills is a pretty bad movie, but we ate it up despite its many flaws. Riddick was good, but it should have been far better than it was. We really enjoyed them both for what they were, though they were far more disappointing than we thought they'd end up being. Double bummer.

Oblivion was decent, though rather bland at times. Ditto Star Trek: Into Darkness; it just didn't wow us like the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie did. Then again, I have never been much of a Trekkie. Both were worth a watch though.

We liked Trance, as we're definitely big Danny Boyle fans. As much as we love Edgar Wright and his films, The World's End just didn't do it for us. It had its moments, but we found it ultimately forgettable. Both movies were passable, yet unremarkable for us.

If nothing else, these movies were all pretty fantastic, on a technical level.

So those were the movies of 2013 that neither fully inspired nor completely revolted us. They're all worth a look, and in fact, some of them are pretty good. Just know that there were far better (and far worse) movies to be had in 2013.

We'll be getting to those post-haste. (That means very quick, in fancy speak!)

Before we get to our Best & Worst of 2013, a little bit of Full Disclosure…

Before we get into the movies of 2013 that we loved, the one's we hated, and the ones that really didn't move us either way, we have to give mention to the ones that we didn't even see.

I know, how dare we not see every Horror & Genre-related flick that came out over the past 12 months, because who do we think we are?

Busy, overwhelmed, forgetful, lazy, disinterested, far too dissmissive... oh, we are all of those things and more!

Bottom line is, life just gets in the way, and we can't sit and watch everything.

The flicks below are what we consider to be the higher tier movies of 2013 that we did not get a chance to see. We're pretty sure that some of them would have gravitated towards the "Best" list if we had, but who can say. Maybe some of them really suck. Gallowwalkers, we're looking at you!

Either way, we just wanted to let you know what we haven't seen, in case you were all like "...but what about this one, or that one!" See how considerate we are?

*We’re also not going to be including any movies that we’ve seen this year that will not have a proper Theatrical/Home Video/VOD release until 2014; we really hate when movie sites do that, mainly because it’s a big tease and feels really disingenuous.

Now, let's get busy on the Year End festivities!