Streaming has come to change our lives and make us forget those Christmases when the easy gift for your cinephile cousin was a few discounted DVDs. But, what happens now that they have more movies to watch than could possibly fit in a lifetime? Well, of course, it’s overwhelming. Every week there’s a “best movie of the year,” every month there are seven more must-sees in theaters that you can’t miss, three Netflix series, a documentary on HBO Max, and the most incredible animated series of the century on Prime Video. It’s just not possible.
But, of course, most of the movies that premiere on streaming platforms are not exactly good. Rather the opposite: flat films, impossible sequels, and poor plots that you end up watching because, well, they are there, just a click away. What if one day you wanted to do a marathon of the worst of the worst in streaming, watching those unwatchable and impossible movies that, for some reason, have become audience hits? Let’s take a look at 4 streaming apps with their respective flops. Because anti-influencing is also necessary.
Netflix: 365 Days: That Day
The second part of 365 Days was, if possible, even more terrible than the previous one: one of the few movies in history that holds a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and tells the story of a woman in love with a mafia leader, who, filled with jealousy, ends up running away with the gardener… who, oh coincidence, was the son of the rival mafia leader. Pure eroticism in a movie that doesn’t even earn the label, with absolute indifference to pleasing the audience, dedicated only to satisfying those who want, almost literally, television trash filled with scenes of domination and mediocre sex. Ah! It even has one more sequel, which, fortunately, seems to be where it will end.
Prime Video: War of the Worlds
The War of the Worlds, the classic by H.G. Wells, has been adapted into numerous media: Orson Welles made history on the radio, Steven Spielberg in cinema… and Ice Cube, somehow, in the streaming era. This new adaptation was filmed during the pandemic and was stuck in a drawer for five years, but seeing the result, it could have stayed there for a couple more decades: set only on a computer screen, it is actually a grand advertisement for Amazon Prime where everything is solved thanks to the protagonist placing an order on time with the new drone service. Cheap special effects, actors who don’t know who they are responding to, a spectacular visual dizziness… To see and not believe, really.
HBO Max: Fahrenheit 451
Here, I was really hoping to put Space Jam: A New Legacy, but it’s not available on all HBO Max, even though the whole movie is an advertisement for Warner’s intellectual properties, from Rick and Morty to A Clockwork Orange. Instead, another gigantic misstep, despite featuring Michael B. Jordan (who also stars in the sequel to Space Jam, by the way) and Michael Shannon, very loosely based on Ray Bradbury’s masterpiece. Enough to put the title, but making an incredible blunder about the Internet and book burning so failed that it was a subject of mockery by all film critics in 2018.
Disney+: The Hunchback of Notre Dame 2
Someone, in the midst of the craze for direct-to-DVD sequels (here we could perfectly include Mulan 2 or Oliver & Company 2), decided that if something deserved a second part, it was the character created by Victor Hugo in 1831 and adapted by Disney a century and a half later. In The Hunchback of Notre Dame 2, Quasimodo, who is part of Parisian society at the time, falls in love with a thief, and the son of Esmeralda and Phoebus becomes his best friend. It has well-executed songs and a fortune was spent on the animation, but it shows: it looks ugly and cheap. What is even worse: the plot doesn’t stretch beyond a short film, but they extended it to an hour, suffering a lot, to be able to sell the VHS to gullible parents. And now, it’s streaming for a boring afternoon. For what we’ve come to, Disney.
