Xillix Ranks the 2018 Films He Saw in Theatres, or, Xillix Jumps on the Bandwagon

[Xillix]

Simple enough, innit? I'll just do a brief write-up with scores and what not for each film. I'm not counting anything I didn't catch theatrically because I don't really keep track of stuff I watch at home in the same way. I'll be going worst to best. Just so we know what's gonna be on the countdown, without spoiling placement, here's the full list of 37 movies that qualify in the order I saw them:

 

Spoiler

Insidious: The Last Key

Winchester

Black Panther

Game Night

Annihilation

The Strangers: Prey at Night

The Hurricane Heist

Tomb Raider

Pacific Rim: Uprising

A Quiet Place

Rampage

Truth or Dare

Traffik

Avengers: Infinity War

Deadpool 2

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Adrift

Hereditary

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Skyscraper

Unfriended: Dark Web

Mission: Impossible - Fallout

Slender Man

The Meg

Searching

The Nun

The Predator

Hell Fest

Venom

Halloween

The Possession of Hannah Grace

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Bohemian Rhapsody

Bumblebee

Aquaman

 

Edited February 10, 2019 by Xillix

[Xillix]

#37 - Winchester

Directed by Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig / Released by Lionsgate

 

Ooooof. Cool true-life story AND Helen Mirren, and they still really managed to fuck this one up. It was just dreadfully dull. Not a genuine scare to be had, and the dramatic subplots were about as interesting as watching paint dry. There's not even much worth laughing at here, intentionally or otherwise - just some really poor CGI used to render the mansion in a few shots and the climactic implication that the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was somehow caused by a ghost(!?). The least entertaining time I spent in the theatre last year bar none.

[Xillix]

#36 - Truth or Dare

Directed by Jeff Wadlow / Released by Universal

 

The concept is clever enough but it's no surprise the guy behind Cry_Wolf couldn't pull it off. Aside from pulling pretty much all of its punches to keep a PG-13 rating, and featuring a painfully generic backstory for the curse, this flick's got bad acting and writing out the wazoo. The characters are as dumb as the plot and whoever thought the huge CGI grins on the possessed folk was scary has got to be on drugs or something, because they're friggin' hilarious. Thankfully a good bit of this movie was at least bad enough to be worth a few chuckles, so seeing it didn't feel like a total waste.

[Xillix]

#35 - The Hurricane Heist

Directed by Rob Cohen / Released by Entertainment Studios

 

I'm not gonna lie, I had an absolute blast with this piece of shit. If this were a totally subjective ranking based purely on my personal enjoyment, ironic or otherwise, then it'd be a lot higher. I'm a sucker for disaster movies, even the impossibly stupid ones, and this definitely qualifies. It felt like watching one of those straight-to-Netflix disaster movies from The Asylum that someone inexplicably financed to the tune of $35 million and released theatrically. The plot is dumb as rocks, the way the storm is depicted doesn't make a lick of sense, the laws of physics change from shot to shot, and it's all absolutely glorious. I was the only person who attended my screening of this movie, which is good, because I was laughing so hard I sounded like a hyena.

[Xillix]

#34 - Slender Man

Directed by Sylvain White / Released by Screen Gems

 

Let's ignore, for a moment, that this movie came out several years too late for anyone to care. Let's also ignore the question of good taste in the movie's existence what with the real-life events related to the titular character. On its own merits, Slender Man is a mess. Its biggest problem is that it's incomplete. This flick was clearly cut all to hell and it really feels like it. A large number of scenes shown in the trailers are not actually in the finished film - including a couple of death scenes. And yet the setup and foreshadowing for these deaths is left in the movie, and then the characters just... stop showing up, never to be seen or mentioned again. The ending is abrupt and excruciatingly anticlimactic.

 

Of course, even if it were uncut this would still be a bad movie. It uses the character as nothing more than an excuse to regurgitate pretty much every supernatural horror cliché ever conceived. It shows Slender Man too clearly and too often, and the effects are less than impressive. It's devoid of scares, besides a middling jump or two, and features a few unintentional laughs. The only things I can give it points for are some nicely moody cinematography and a decent woodsy New England atmosphere in places.

[Xillix]

#33 - The Nun

Directed by Corin Hardy / Released by New Line

 

This is the first movie in the "Conjuring Universe" that actually kind of feels like an MCU movie, and that's not a compliment. It's got so much continuity porn, poorly-placed comedic relief, and so many VFX setpieces that it barely feels like a horror movie at points. The horror elements that are left aren't anything special, and certainly not up to the standard set by the rest of the franchise - there wasn't a moment of effective suspense in this thing, and the jump scares were telegraphed enough to be rendered inert. It's a handsome-looking production, but that's about it.

[Xillix]

#32 - The Possession of Hannah Grace

Directed by Diederik van Rooijen / Released by Screen Gems

 

True story - the day I went to see this, I walked up to the box office and asked for a ticket to The Possession of WhatsHerFace. I couldn't remember the name of the interchangeably pretty young white chick who was getting possessed this time. I wanted to like this movie primarily because I dig horror and it's set in Boston, where I went to college. I got a kick out of seeing them use Boston City Hall as the stand-in for the fictional hospital, but otherwise this left me pretty cold. Despite the idea of the possessed girl being a corpse in a morgue seeming kind of neat at first, it really doesn't do a whole lot to change the way things play out. It's just a generic possession movie that happens to have the exorcism scene at the beginning instead of the end, and it feels rushed and perfunctory to boot.

[Xillix]

#31 - Rampage

Directed by Brad Peyton / Released by New Line

 

I love corny monster movies and I really enjoyed the prior Peyton/Rock collaboration San Andreas, so I was really looking forward to this. What a letdown. It's tonally inconsistent and generally takes itself too seriously. It never really just lets loose with the cornball kaiju action the way it should, and the attempts it does make at comedy are mostly badly-written jokes and one-liners from The Rock. The one thing this movie had to be was a fun, dumb time, and it couldn't even get that right.

[Xillix]

#30 - Traffik

Directed by Deon Taylor / Released by Summit Entertainment

 

This wasn't nearly as bad - and not even QUITE as exploitative - as I expected. The characters make a handful of really dumbass decisions, but that's not exactly a rarity in these kinds of thriller B-movies. The biggest issues for me personally were the predictability of a major twist and the way the ending felt a bit like a cop-out. There were enough suspenseful moments overall to make for a decent time-waster.

[Xillix]

#29 - Hell Fest

Directed by Gregory Plotkin / Released by Lionsgate

 

A super mediocre slasher flick. I dig the Halloweeny atmosphere and the killer's at least got a neat mask. But the characters are forgettable, as are most of the kills, and it loses steam pretty badly as it gets into the third act. Its conclusion is especially anticlimactic and never pays off a lot of what seemed like pretty clear foreshadowing. I was expecting it to go out with a twist and a scream, but it was more of a shrug and a sigh.

[Xillix]

#28 - The Predator

Directed by Shane Black / Released by 20th Century Fox

 

I was really loving this until the third act. Then it just got so hectic and badly-edited that I found it all really hard to follow. Spatial logic and pacing went out the window and I was honestly pretty frustrated. I still had a fun time overall, and I think that when it works it's got a pretty solid blend of humor and gory action. I just felt like I needed a pause and rewind button to figure out what was supposed to be going on at the end there.

[Xillix]

#27 - Skyscraper

Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber / Released by Universal

 

This was one of my most-anticipated summer 2018 flicks because I'm a big fan of disaster movies and The Towering Inferno specifically. It was passably entertaining but a disappointment overall. There wasn't enough disaster for my liking, and the generic heist/action elements weren't especially involving. The weird holo-projector room in the climax was just too out there for me as well. And if there was ever a movie that cried out for great 3D it was this one, but the conversion was below average with only a handful of shots looking straight up or down that really took advantage of it.

[Xillix]

#26 - Unfriended: Dark Web

Directed by Stephen Susco / Released by OTL Releasing

 

This not-really-a-sequel requires some SERIOUS suspension of disbelief as, like so many movies, it treats hacking as essentially magic. Despite that, it's actually rather clever in places - and I personally thought it was more consistently thrilling and frightening than the original. Definitely a movie than turned out better than I figured it would.

[Xillix]

And might as well wrap up the night with what will probably be the first really controversial one...

 

#25 - Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman / Released by Columbia Pictures

 

I guess it was pretty good for a kids' movie. The art style was neat (except for Kingpin being depicted as a giant black square with a tiny pimple head) and it was often fairly funny. I'm just not a fan of most "family films" and this one was really no exception. The blend of watered-down melodramatics and slapstick cartoon antics just doesn't sit well with me. I will give it credit for not overstaying its welcome despite all the major characters it's got crammed in there. I guess there's a ton of fanservice in this for diehard Spidey/comics fans too, but I don't really fit that mold.

[Xillix]

#24 - Tomb Raider

Directed by Roar Uthaug / Released by Warner Bros.

 

Full disclosure: I've never played any of the games, and I haven't seen the Angelina Jolie movies since I was a kid. This wasn't great - it took to long to get to the island and the actual tomb raiding, for one thing - but it was a pretty fun action-adventure flick in any case. Vikander did a pretty solid job as a more "grounded" Croft than Jolie.

[Xillix]

#23 - Solo: A Star Wars Story

Directed by Ron Howard (plus the uncredited Phil Lord & Chris Miller) / Released by Disney

 

This movie's production woes definitely show through as it does feel somewhat jumbled and aimless without a clear creative direction. Of all the Star Wars movies to date this feels, to me, the most like any old generic blockbuster. It's still a pretty entertaining generic blockbuster though, staged with perfectly adequate technical competence and featuring a few solid performances. It's just pretty pointless and not especially memorable.

[Xillix]

#22 - Avengers: Infinity War

Directed by Anthony Russo & Joe Russo / Released by Disney

 

My main problem with this movie is definitely the ending. I felt insulted - not by what happened, but by who it happened to. The choice of characters made it immediately obvious to me that it wasn't going to stick. So why did I just sit through such an absurdly long superhero movie to get to this time-wasting cliffhanger? One of the criticisms often levied at the MCU is that every movie is essentially just an advertisement for the NEXT bunch of movies, and this is the first time that really bothered me. It wasn't a terribly effective sequel hook because it didn't leave me wondering what was going to happen at all.

 

That said everything up until the ending was pretty solid. Definitely a lot of fun character moments and over-the-top blockbuster action. The interactions between Thanos and Gamora were especially interesting. But considering the point of the movie was basically to get me pumped for Endgame it failed pretty badly.

[Xillix]

#21 - Ant-Man and the Wasp

Directed by Peyton Reed / Released by Disney

 

This movie really isn't any better than Infinity War - it's a pretty middling Marvel film, all things considered. The only reason it's ranked slightly higher is because it didn't upset me. Also Paul Rudd is just too damn likable. I don't really have too much to say about it because frankly, despite the different settings and subgenres, most MCU movies do feel more or less interchangeable to me at this point.

[Xillix]

#20 - The Meg

Directed by Jon Turteltaub / Released by Warner Bros.

 

Jason Statham fighting a giant prehistoric shark? Sign me up. The premise alone made me know early on that I'd probably enjoy it whether or not it was actually any good. Thankfully, it's pretty solid - there's a good balance of action and camp without it turning into a full-on parody. The 3D was well-used and there were plenty of memorable setpieces. The one major downside is that I really wish there was more of the shark attacking the public beach. The trailers were misleading in suggesting it was a major element of the film when in fact it was an all-too-abrupt sequence before the climax. Some gore would've been nice too, but given the budget of this thing I'm not surprised they went PG-13.