The Signal Watch Presents: Worst Movies of 2025

All right.  Let's light this candle.

• We've already broken down some numbers regarding all the movies we watched in 2025.  
• And we'll be looking at the Best of the Year for 2025.

However - this post is the end-of-the-year wrap up in which I indulge in being more than a little unkind.  

There's a school of thought that "hey, you made a movie!  Good for you!  That's hard!" that's very much an appreciation for the work someone put into something, no matter how it turned out.  But we're not here to cheer on sixth graders to whom we share a family bond playing their first band concert.  

ChabertQuest Caveat

So, for reasons I've covered extensively elsewhere, I did a wee experiment this year.  What you need to know is that I watched 75 movies starring actor Lacey Chabert, most famous for starring in Hallmark movies (of which she's done 40+).  

This, I saw a lot of movies I normally wouldn't have picked.  I don't think the quality of these movies is a reflection on Chabert.  So, she may be featured, but she's not the X factor for winding up on this list.

However, for your reading enjoyment, we will note if Chabert was in a movie.

Only First Time Watches

We watched something like 67.5% new-to-me movies this year.  And we usually have a rule about just writing about movies we saw for the first time for movies both good and bad.  It doesn't help anyone if I'm like "Man, Manos: The Hands of Fate sure doesn't improve with a seventh viewing" or "hey, that Godfather movie is a pip!".

So, these were movies that I did watch, that I had never seen before.  Of the 172 new-to-me movies I saw in 2025, these are the ones getting a special mention.

So, here we go...

The Woman in Cabin 10 - a massive disappointment as I was so rooting for Hannah Waddingham to land in a good, fun, locked-room thriller.  And she's fine in it.  But this moody mystery movie lacked thrills, logic, common sense and lighting.  It managed to feel tedious while also just feeling like someone rewrote the very popular book this was based on to goose it up for cinema and wound up just confusing things.  

And it has one of the dumbest endings I can recall in a movie this year.  Just idiotic.

Randy told me not to watch it, and I ignored his advice.  Maybe listen to Randy.

Chabert:  No

The Lost Tree - an independent supernatural thriller, it's nowhere as smart as it thinks it is, while also feeling like two dudes goofing with a handycam with the sincere belief this movie will be *awesome*. 

There is a reason this movie vanished upon arrival, a mess of poorly executed cliches and never giving anyone a reason to keep watching except as a dare.  

Chabert:  Yes - a seductress!

Hometown Legend - a high school sports movie that doesn't know anything about sports.  I mean, at all.  Not how football is played, coached or trained for.  Nor does it understand food safety, human behavior, economics, scholarships, university acceptance practices, or municipal government.  Just insane.  But also a vanity project by the guy who wrote Left Behind, as he decided to try his hand at producing movies.

Chabert:  Yes - a high school girl trad-wife in training

Being Michael Madsen - I assume a lot of drugs were involved.  

This meta-movie posits that actor Michael Madsen is hounded by the paparazzi (did the press EVER do more than take his pic at the airport?).  At its core, the movie is about an actor's delusions of grandeur married with a revenge fantasy, so I'm thinking cocaine wrote this movie.  I did learn that Michael Madsen is Virginia Madsen's brother, so there you go.

Chabert:  Yes - it's complicated

Off-Season: The Lex Morrison Story - this movie assumes what people want is for former LA Laker and former Vanessa Williams husband Rick Fox to appear in a wacky movie spoofing egotistical basketball players.  It's kind of hard to see a lot of the movie behind Fox's hubris blocking the lens.  

Just horrendous, unfunny, sometimes racist and chauvinistic, but mostly raises more questions than anything.

Chabert:  Yes - a sports reporter

A New Wave - I wound up watching a few post-Pulp Fiction movies with Chabert in them this year, and this misogynistic steaming pile was the worst of them (but The Pleasure Drivers really gave it a run for its money).  Pretentious while making fun of pretentious people - and nowhere near as hilarious as it imagined, it did have an early career John Krasinski trying his best in a terribly written part.  

Avoid at all costs.

Chabert:  Yes - she's a girl

Werewolves - I almost didn't include this, because as bad as it is, I didn't have a terrible time watching it. I don't *think* it knows how bad it is, but it's possible it knows that exactly.  I enjoy Frank Grillo in everything.  And while the costumes are practical and that's neat, the concept is DOA, and nothing really works from the first minute.

Chabert:  No

Morbius - It's almost comforting to see "superhero" movies that aren't review bombed because they feature women or POC as the lead, but, instead, are just absolute misfires - so bad they become legendary.  

It really took me back to the 1990's when any adaptation of superhero stuff was going to be mediocre at best.  But quite often, those movies were made by people with no fealty to the source material, just hired guns looking for a gig where they could goof around and maybe get to do something good if they played ball.  And that's Morbius, but not in the 1990's.  

Still better than Madame Web.

Chabert:  No

Slightly Single in LA - maybe this is recency bias, but this movie is an absolute mess of shallow writing, poor characterization, uninspired choices and the direction of auteur Christie Will.  While squarely "not for me", it's also squarely maybe just for terrible people with no ability to self-reflect.  

It's not campy - it's just... for like a few thousand people living in Los Angeles circa 2010.

Chabert:  Yes - our lead/ Christie Will avatar

A Holiday Heist - Another Christie Will movie, this one just an incoherent mess.  Ostensibly a comedy, it's a desert wherein one will die from a lack of jokes or humor and none will be provided.  Endless, aimless, mirthless and joy-free, it seems angry at the concept of Christmas.  And heists.  And comedy.

Chabert:  Yes - she plays Girl

Runner-Up for Worst of the Year:  A Little Piece of Heaven

While a Chabert-watch, she's like 8 years old in this movie.  This Kirk Cameron TV movie, in which he cannot close his jaw, suggests kidnapping kids from an orphanage - and, later, their own family - is a-ok if you have good intentions in your heart.  The dialog is oddly racist even for the time, and all this is just the just the tip of the iceberg. But it still has the gloss of a 1990's TV movie.  

I've written it up twice, so taken was I with how far off the rails this movie goes.

Chabert:  Yes - abuse victim child

WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR:  CHRISTIAN MINGLE - THE MOVIE

It's not even close.  I would have words with everyone involved for making this horror show.  I don't often expect for a Hallmark movie to share much with an Ari Aster horror film, but here we are.

What I was not expecting, when putting on a cute dating movie that aired on Hallmark - was that this movie is a recruitment tool for a cult (or, viewed in ways they never intended, a warning to not get tricked into joining the site/ cult, depending on your point of view). 

Christian Mingle was and is a dating site where you could be guaranteed some level of safety, I guess, if you absolutely wanted a church-going partner with some shared values.  But anyone who has been through high school knows that there are *many* flavors of religion, Christianity and protestantism.  This one is just shy of snake-handlers.

The movie features all the worst and weirdest features of paranoid religious sects - like assuming people would lie about being a Christian to get into the good graces and seduce a "good man" (I guess keeping his seed from a true woman of the faith, a traditional wife, if you will).  In fact, the seductress is the very role Chabert is cast in - but it's unintentional on her part.  She just wants to get laid by a good gu/  When she finds one, will she be ready for what it means to date a *real* Christian - ie: this home-schooled mama's boy who thinks any food that hasn't had the crusts cut-off by mommy is suspicious/ against God's will?

It's a movie about how the un-deserving who don't truly understand God's word as interpreted by... someone very particular, because many forms of Jesus-loving are FALSE...  need to suffer until they DO understand God's word CORRECTLY.  And when the suffering is complete, you will have the ecstacy of being ONE OF US.

This is in a light, frothy romcom about an internet dating site, btw.  

It's basically a pro-tribalism, fear-the-outsiders, horror movie that should have ended with Chabert in a crown of flowers watching Stephen Tobolowsky burn inside his nautical themed advertising agency.

Anyway, fuck this movie.  I've rarely wished an ill-fate on any Hallmark male lead, but I wanted this guy to be eaten by a feral hog. 

Chabert:  Yes - a person who has no idea how religion works at all, who decides she should meet a deeply religious guy.  As one does.

So, that's it

It was actually a year of a lot of movies that were perfectly fine for what they were.  I'm not dragging a Hallmark Christmas movie for being a Hallmark Christmas movie.  Anymore than I'd point at a superhero movie and say "hey, that's not realistic".  

So, instead, we dug deep into the recesses of our dark old heart and said "yes, but what actually felt either like stepping on a rake and getting smacked in the face this year?"  And here it is.  

On to the next!