Part 9 – The Failures
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
These are the failures, and most of them fail the same way. A genuine idea sits inside the picture and nothing engages with it. Morbius treats a blood appetite as an inconvenient side effect, Leviathan builds a creature out of the faces of the dead and never asks what that means, and Satan’s Cheerleaders has a better premise in its second act than the one it started with.
The other pattern is a film serving something outside itself. The Mummy stops for twenty minutes to establish an organization for sequels nobody made, and World War Z discards the structure that was the whole of its source for one man flying between set pieces.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the last of nine parts.
Prometheus has scientists removing helmets on an unsurveyed world, and Agatha gives four witches a job each and no appetite. Two failures worth studying in the Deep Character Handbook.
1. Renfield (2023) [full review]
► Read the full review of Renfield (2023)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"A support group where everybody hears metaphor and one man means it."
Chris McKay made a comedy about codependency with Nicolas Cage as Dracula and Nicholas Hoult as the familiar who has finally started attending a support group. Robert Kirkman wrote the original story, Ryan Ridley the screenplay, and Universal released it as part of a loose attempt to revive its monster properties after several earlier failures.
Cage is the reason to watch it and he has wanted to play Dracula for decades. The makeup progression across the film is excellent, moving from a burned ruin in a hospital bed to something close to full recovery, and the performance treats the character as genuinely ancient instead of as camp.
The support group framing is the strongest material in the picture. Renfield describes an abusive relationship using therapeutic vocabulary, everybody in the room hears metaphor, and the comedy comes from a man being congratulated for insights about a situation considerably more literal than anybody present understands it to be.
The New Orleans crime subplot is where it comes apart. A cartel family, a corrupt police department and a shootout structure arrive to give the film an action shape it never needed, and the codependency material stops developing the moment they turn up and never recovers any momentum afterward.
Awkwafina plays the traffic officer and Ben Schwartz the cartel son, and both are stranded by a screenplay that has two films in it. The picture cost around sixty-five million dollars, lost money, and the good version of it is visible in about forty minutes of scattered material.
2. Vamp (1986) [full review]
► Read the full review of Vamp (1986)
RLR: 5.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.6/10
"Grace Jones says nothing at all and is the only thing anybody remembers."
Richard Wenk made a vampire comedy set almost entirely in a strip club across a single night, and Grace Jones plays the owner without a word of dialogue in the entire film. She was a recording artist instead of an actor at that point and the casting is the only reason anybody remembers the picture at all.
The Katrina performance is the sequence that survives. Jones dances in body paint designed by Keith Haring, the scene runs several minutes, and the film treats it as a genuine set piece instead of as an interlude before the plot resumes. Nothing else in the picture operates at that level.
The lighting is the other distinctive element and it was a deliberate choice. Wenk shot the club interiors in saturated green and red gels with almost no white light anywhere, and the effect is closer to a music video of the period than to horror as it was being made in 1986.
The comedy is where it fails and the two leads cannot carry it. Chris Makepeace and Robert Rusler play fraternity pledges looking for a stripper, the material they are given is thin, and the film keeps returning to them when the audience has no reason to want that.
Sandy Baron plays the club manager and is genuinely funny in a picture that needed more of him. The last act moves into the sewers, the budget becomes visible, and a film that was distinctive for an hour resolves into something entirely ordinary in its final twenty minutes.
3. Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977) [full review]
► Read the full review of Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 4.0/10
"The better premise arrives in act two and nobody follows it."
Greydon Clark made a film about four cheerleaders and a coach who break down near a property belonging to a satanic cult, and the tone is the problem from the opening scene. It is not frightening, not funny and not committed to either, and the picture never settles on what it is attempting across ninety-two minutes.
The cast is considerably better than the material. John Ireland had been nominated for an Academy Award, Yvonne De Carlo had a long career behind her, and both are doing professional work inside a production that has neither the budget nor the direction to make any use of what they brought to it.
The premise has a genuine idea buried in it that the film never develops. One of the girls turns out to already have power of her own, the cult’s ceremony keeps failing because of it, and a picture willing to follow that would have been considerably more interesting than the one that exists.
The occult material is entirely generic and the film seems unaware that this is a weakness. Robes, an altar, chanting and a pentagram, assembled from other films, with no internal logic and nothing the audience can use to work out what any of the participants want or expect to happen.
The Invitation withholds a name the trailer gave away, and Ghost Ship explains its haunting into an accounting problem. Structure it properly in the Plot Handbook.
4. Cheerleader Camp (1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of Cheerleader Camp (1988)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.1/10
"Three scenes of something real, undercut by a mascot."
John Quinn made a slasher at a cheerleading competition with Betsy Russell, Leif Garrett and a cast assembled largely from television, and the film is considerably more competent than its reputation allows without ever being good. It went to video quickly and has survived on the title alone.
The structure is conventional and the film obeys it without variation. A remote location, a competition, a group who dislike each other, and killings that arrive on a schedule an audience can predict inside twenty minutes of the opening. Nothing in it attempts anything the form had not already done.
Betsy Russell is doing real work in it and the film gives her a genuine problem. Alison is having nightmares, losing time and suspecting herself, and a picture willing to build on that would have had something. The material is there in three scenes and abandoned in every other.
The comedy is the weakest element and it undercuts everything around it. A mascot, a lecherous camp director and a running joke about a rival squad, none of which sits comfortably next to a film that also wants an audience to be frightened by what is happening to the people involved.
The reveal is the one thing it does properly. The identity is properly placed, the motive follows from what the audience has watched, and the last ten minutes are the only part of the film that looks like it was constructed instead of assembled from parts of other pictures.
5. Leviathan (1989) [full review]
► Read the full review of Leviathan (1989)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.8/10
"The creature wears the faces of the crew and nobody asks why."
George Cosmatos made one of three underwater creature films released within months of each other in 1989, alongside The Abyss and DeepStar Six, and it is the most nakedly derivative of the group. Stan Winston built the creature and the effects are the best thing in the picture by a considerable distance.
The Alien structure is followed beat for beat and the film makes no attempt to conceal it. A commercial crew, a corporate employer who knew, a discovery on a wreck, an infection, a mounting body count and a survivor sequence that lands almost exactly where the 1979 film placed its own.
Peter Weller leads a cast that is genuinely overqualified. Ernie Hudson, Richard Crenna, Daniel Stern and Amanda Pays are all doing professional work, and the film gives each of them a single characteristic to play and no room at all to develop any of it further than that.
The creature design is where Winston made something original. The thing assimilates its victims and keeps them recognizable, so the final form carries the faces of crew members the audience has spent an hour with, an idea the rest of the film has no interest in pursuing.
The corporate material is stated and then dropped, the film’s clearest failure. The company knew what was on the wreck, a manager says as much on a video call, and the picture treats the betrayal as a plot beat instead of as the subject it plainly wanted to be at that moment.
6. World War Z (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of World War Z (2013)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The novel had no protagonist. That was the point of it."
Paramount abandoned an entire third act set around a battle in Moscow and reshot roughly forty minutes at a cost in the tens of millions, with Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard brought in to write the replacement. The production became a bigger story than the film and stayed that way through release.
Max Brooks published the novel as an oral history assembled from interviews across dozens of countries, with no protagonist anywhere in it and a structure built entirely on testimony given after the fact. The film discards every part of that for a single United Nations investigator flying between set pieces.
The Jerusalem sequence is the one piece that works and it works because of scale. A wall, a singing crowd, and a pile-up of bodies climbing itself over the top, and it is the only passage in the film that retains any sense of a global event happening to a great many people at once.
The replacement third act is a quiet laboratory sequence in Cardiff and it is considerably better than the abandoned Moscow battle sounded on paper. The film ends small, on a man walking slowly past infected who cannot detect him, , the single decision the reshoots got right.
Brad Pitt produced it through Plan B and the film took over five hundred and forty million dollars despite everything. A sequel was announced repeatedly across the following decade, David Fincher was attached at one point, and nothing was ever made. Matthew Fox was cut almost entirely.
7. The Invitation (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Invitation (2022)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.2/10
"Ninety minutes withholding a name you read in the trailer."
Jessica M. Thompson made a Dracula film that conceals being a Dracula film for most of its running time, and the marketing gave it away regardless. A woman discovers English relatives through a DNA test, is invited to a wedding at a country estate, and finds the arrangement considerably older than anybody has told her.
The premise is genuinely good and the execution is entirely conventional. A bride is being selected instead of married, the household staff know, and the film has a real idea about marriage as a transaction that it states once and then abandons for corridor sequences and jump scares.
Nathalie Emmanuel carries it and the performance is better than the material. Evie is an artist working in catering, she is alone in the world, and the film is at its strongest in the early scenes where she is being courted by people who are clearly assessing her for something.
The rating is the structural problem and it was a commercial decision. The film was cut for a wide audience, the violence is almost entirely bloodless, and a picture about consumption and ownership cannot say anything with the content it needs removed before release. Sony released it in August 2022.
Thomas Doherty plays Walter and the reveal arrives without any weight behind it. The film has spent ninety minutes withholding a name the audience worked out from the trailer, and nothing in the third act justifies the concealment or does anything with the name once it has been spoken.
The Swarm spends two hours on people restating the situation to each other. Put the information inside an argument instead, using the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
8. Ghost Ship (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ghost Ship (2002)
RLR: 4 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.5/10
"A haunting explained is a scheme, and schemes get solved."
Steve Beck made a haunted ship film for Dark Castle and the opening sequence is the only reason anybody has seen it. A wire snaps across a crowded dance floor on an ocean liner in 1962 and cuts every passenger in half at the waist, and the film never comes close to that again.
The salvage premise is workable and the film handles it competently for about forty minutes. A tug crew find a liner adrift in the Bering Sea, the vessel is worth an enormous amount as salvage, and the money gives everybody aboard a reason to stay considerably longer than sense would allow.
Gabriel Byrne and Julianna Margulies are both better than the picture and the cast generally is. Isaiah Washington, Ron Eldard and Karl Urban fill out the crew, and each is given a profession and almost nothing else to work with once the ghosts start appearing.
The mythology is where it collapses entirely. A demonic figure has been harvesting souls aboard the ship for forty years, the arrangement is explained at length in a flashback, and the explanation converts a genuinely unsettling situation into an accounting problem with a supernatural middle manager.
The last act abandons the ship as a location, the one asset the film had. Corridors, a flooded hold and an engine room are all established early and then largely unused, and the finale takes place in a set that could belong to any picture with a similar budget.
9. The New York Ripper (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of The New York Ripper (1982)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"The treatment is the argument, whatever the defense claims."
Lucio Fulci made the film that got him banned from Britain outright, and the print was escorted out of the country by customs instead of simply refused a certificate. It is the nastiest thing he made and the one his defenders have the most difficulty accounting for.
The killer speaks in a duck voice, and it sounds like a detail from a comedy and is used for the opposite effect. The quacking arrives during the killings and over telephone calls, it is never explained beyond a single line late in the film, and it is genuinely unbearable to listen to.
The violence is sustained past any point of purpose and aimed almost entirely at women. Fulci’s defenders argue the film is about misogyny instead of an expression of it, and nothing in the direction supports that reading. The camera lingers, the sequences run long, and the picture has no interest in anybody’s interiority.
The New York location work is the only element with any real quality. Times Square before the cleanup, the Staten Island ferry, a genuine sense of a city that was at that point close to broke, and Luigi Kuveiller shoots all of it with considerably more care than the material deserves.
The giallo structure is present and the film obeys it mechanically. A detective, a set of suspects, a psychiatrist and a reveal that follows from evidence the audience has been shown, all delivered without any of the invention Fulci brought to the supernatural films he made either side of it.
10. Prometheus (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Prometheus (2012)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"They take their helmets off on an unsurveyed world."
Ridley Scott returned to the franchise thirty-three years later with a hundred and thirty million dollars and a screenplay by Jon Spaihts that Damon Lindelof substantially rewrote. The production design, the photography by Dariusz Wolski and the Michael Fassbender performance are all genuinely first rate.
Fassbender’s David is the best thing in it by a wide margin. An android modelling himself on Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, watching the film on the voyage, practising the diction, and quietly poisoning a crew member out of curiosity instead of malice or any instruction from anybody.
The crew behaviour is the failure everybody names and it is worse than the reputation suggests. Scientists remove helmets on an unsurveyed world, a biologist who fled a corpse approaches an unknown organism like a household pet, and a geologist with mapping drones gets lost in the structure he mapped.
The film asks a genuinely large question and declines to engage with it. Why did the makers want humanity dead, Shaw asks, and the picture treats the question as a reason for a sequel instead of as something worth examining within the two hours the audience is already sitting through.
The self-surgery sequence is the one piece that works completely. Noomi Rapace in an automated medical pod configured for male patients, operating on herself, staples and all, and the scene is shot in real time with a physical prop and almost no cutting away from what is happening.
Morbius smooths the discomfort out of its own premise and Renfield abandons its central comparison for a crime plot. Protect the idea, in the Theme and Meaning Handbook.
11. The Mummy (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Mummy (2017)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.4/10
"You paid for a mummy film and received a prospectus."
Universal built a shared universe announcement into a single film and the picture spends its running time establishing an organization instead of telling a story. The Dark Universe was cancelled immediately afterward, six writers share the story or screenplay credit, and Alex Kurtzman has discussed the production openly since.
Tom Cruise is miscast in a way that is structurally instructive. The part requires somebody who can be overwhelmed by a situation, and Cruise’s entire screen presence is competence under pressure, so the horror has nothing to push against and the film keeps converting menace into action sequences.
Sofia Boutella’s Ahmanet is genuinely good and the film keeps interrupting her. The character has a coherent motive, the makeup and movement work are excellent, and she spends the middle hour of the picture inside a containment cell while other people discuss what to do about her.
The Russell Crowe sequence is the clearest symptom of what went wrong. A twenty-minute detour explaining an organization the film has no use for, delivered as exposition for sequels that were never made, with a Jekyll and Hyde transformation nobody in the audience had asked to see.
The zero-gravity plane crash is the one genuinely good sequence and it was shot practically. The cast filmed it in a parabolic aircraft across dozens of flights, the weightlessness is real, and it sits in a film that has no idea what to do with anything else it has.
12. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"The arc reversed between properties, offstage."
Sam Raimi took over after Scott Derrickson left and the film contains recognizable Raimi construction inside a franchise assignment. Dutch angles, a possessed corpse used as a vehicle, and a genuine horror sequence built around a chase through a mirror dimension that nothing else in the franchise had attempted.
The Wanda decision is the central problem and it happened offscreen. WandaVision spent nine episodes on grief and accountability, ending with her choosing to release a town she had enslaved, and this film opens with her murdering people to acquire children she has never met in another universe.
The Illuminati sequence is well staged and structurally hollow. Five characters are introduced and killed inside about eight minutes, the deaths are the entire point of their presence, and none of them exists for any reason beyond demonstrating a threat level to an audience that already understood it.
Xochitl Gomez’s America Chavez is given a power, a trauma and almost no characterization. She can punch holes between realities, she cannot control it, and the film resolves that problem by having an authority figure tell her she can, the whole of her arc across two hours.
The Raimi horror material is the best thing in it and there is not enough of it. The Wanda pursuit, the musical duel with notes used as projectiles, and the Defender Strange corpse sequence are all more inventive than the franchise usually permits anybody to be.
Multiverse of Madness reverses a nine-episode arc between properties and never dramatizes the turn. Write the change where readers can watch it, using Character Writer’s Handbook.
13. The Swarm (1978) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Swarm (1978)
RLR: 2 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.0/10
"Two hours of people restating the situation in rooms with maps."
Irwin Allen assembled the largest cast available to him and made the film that ended the disaster cycle he had built. Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Olivia de Havilland, Henry Fonda, Fred MacMurray and Jose Ferrer are all in it, and none of them can do anything with what they were given.
The premise is African bees reaching Texas and the film treats it as a military campaign. A general commands the response, a scientist argues with him for two hours, and the dialogue consists almost entirely of people restating the situation to each other in rooms with maps on the walls.
The bee effects are the technical problem and there was no solution available in 1978. Real bees with the stingers removed were used for close work, they refuse to behave as swarms on command, and the wide shots are visibly animated dots that never integrate with the footage underneath them.
The hallucination sequences are the film’s most remembered failure. Victims see a giant bee hovering in the room, rendered as a superimposition, and the effect is so far from frightening that the sequences play as comedy in exactly the way nobody involved could have wanted them to.
Caine has discussed it for decades with considerable good humour and no defense of it. The film cost around twenty-one million dollars, took well under that, and Allen never recovered the position he had held across the previous six years of the genre he effectively invented.
14. Morbius (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of Morbius (2022)
RLR: 2 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.1/10
"The discomfort at its middle was the whole reason to make it."
Daniel Espinosa made a film Sony produced to retain character rights, and the release was delayed six separate times across two years. It was returned to cinemas after internet jokes suggested an audience existed, and took under three hundred thousand dollars the second time it opened.
Jared Leto plays a biochemist who cures his own blood disorder using bat DNA and acquires an appetite, a premise with a genuine horror film inside it. The picture treats the condition as a superpower carrying an inconvenient side effect and never once engages with what the character is actually doing to people.
The visual signature is a smoke trail following every fast movement, and it is the only distinctive choice anywhere in the film. Every action sequence is shot in darkness against grey backgrounds with the trails filling the frame, so the choreography is impossible to follow from one beat to the next.
Matt Smith is the only performer who identified which film he was making. Milo is delighted by his own transformation, he dances alone in an apartment, and the performance belongs in a film willing to be what this one keeps declining to be about itself.
Adria Arjona and Jared Harris are both wasted and the ending is incoherent. Two post-credit sequences attempt to connect the film to a franchise it has no relationship with, the mechanics of how that character arrives are never established, and Sony abandoned the arrangement shortly afterward.
15. Agatha All Along (2024) [full review]
► Read the full review of Agatha All Along (2024)
RLR: 1 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"A party roster where a cast should have been."
Jac Schaeffer created a nine-episode series continuing a character from WandaVision, and the premise is a witches’ road that grants a wish at the end of it. Kathryn Hahn returns and is the only element the series has any confidence in from the opening episode onward.
The structure is a series of trials and it is the weakest thing about the show. Each episode presents an obstacle, the coven passes it, and the format announces itself so clearly in the second episode that an audience can predict the shape of every hour remaining before the first one has finished.
The coven are given professions and almost no interiority. A potions witch, a divination witch, a green witch and a protection witch, each introduced with a single trait, and the series keeps promising to develop them across episodes that arrive and then spend their time somewhere else entirely.
The seventh episode is genuinely good and demonstrates what the rest could have been. Patti LuPone’s Lilia moves through her own timeline out of order, experiencing her life as a tarot reading, and the episode is constructed with more care than the eight around it combined.
The Billy reveal is handled badly and the series had nowhere to go with it once delivered. The identity is obvious from the second episode, the show behaves as though it is withholding something, and the resolution arrives with the emotional weight of an administrative correction.
Honorable Mentions: Horror Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
The Void (2016)
Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski built a cosmic horror film around a rural hospital and a cult in white robes, with practical creature work that has no business looking as good as it does on the money they had.
We Are Still Here (2015)
Ted Geoghegan set a haunting in a New England farmhouse that needs a family every thirty years, and the last fifteen minutes abandon restraint entirely. Barbara Crampton and Larry Fessenden lead it.
The Sacrament (2013)
Ti West made a found-footage film about a journalist visiting a commune, closely modelled on Jonestown. Gene Jones plays the leader and the interview sequence is the best thing in it.
Baskin (2015)
Can Evrenol sent five Turkish police into a derelict building and then into somewhere considerably worse. It is the most genuinely upsetting thing to come out of that decade of international horror.
The Innkeepers (2011)
Ti West again, with two hotel employees and a closing weekend, and almost nothing happens for an hour. Sara Paxton carries it and the patience is the whole technique.
The Sentinel (1977)
Michael Winner put a model in a Brooklyn brownstone that turns out to be a gate, with a cast including Ava Gardner, Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum. The casting of the last act caused genuine controversy.
Rabid (1977)
Cronenberg built an outbreak around a woman who develops a new organ after experimental surgery. Marilyn Chambers plays her and the Montreal material has the texture of a real city in a real emergency.
Scanners (1981)
Cronenberg again, with telepaths, a corporate conspiracy and a head that does not survive the first ten minutes. Michael Ironside is the reason the second half works as well as it does.
The Legend of Hell House (1973)
Richard Matheson adapted his own novel about four people in a house with a documented history. Roddy McDowall gives the best performance and the electronic score is genuinely unsettling.
Lady in White (1988)
Frank LaLoggia made a ghost story about a boy locked in a school cloakroom on Halloween, and the film is closer to a memoir than to horror for most of its length.
Sleep Tight (2011)
Jaume Balaguero built a film around a concierge who lets himself into an apartment every night. Luis Tosar plays him and the film gives the audience his point of view throughout, an unbearable place to sit.
Julia’s Eyes (2010)
Guillem Morales made a thriller about a woman losing her sight while investigating her sister’s death, produced by del Toro. The last act is shot so the audience shares her condition.
Dishonorable Mentions: Horror Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the premise, the cast or the source material and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
The Devil Inside (2012)
A found-footage exorcism film that ends mid-scene and directs the audience to a website for the resolution. Audiences booed in cinemas and the website was taken down within a year.
Dark Shadows (2012)
Burton turned a gothic soap opera with a genuine following into a fish-out-of-water comedy about the 1970s. Depp plays Barnabas for jokes and the original series had played him for tragedy.
The Wicker Tree (2011)
Robin Hardy returned to his own 1973 film with a follow-up nobody wanted, repeating the structure with American evangelists and none of the dread the first picture had built.
Fantasy Island (2020)
A horror reworking of a television series, where each guest receives a wish that goes wrong, connected at the end by a revelation that ties every strand into one explanation nobody needed.
Countdown (2019)
An app tells you when you will die and kills you if you try to avoid it, a rule with no room in it. The film supplies a demon, a loophole and a priest who explains the terms of service.
Wish Upon (2017)
A music box grants seven wishes and takes a life for each, and the film gives its protagonist no reason to keep using it beyond the plot requiring seven wishes to be made.
What Do You Think?
Every film here had something. Leviathan had a creature made of the dead, Morbius had a man who has to feed, and Renfield had codependency. Tell me which one you would have rescued and how.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures