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Vulture’s Critics’ Poll: What Was the Worst Movie of 2007?

Courtesy of Paramount, Samuel Goldwyn Films, New Line, Universal, MGM, and Warner Brothers

All this month and next, debate will rage across the Internet about what the best movie of 2007 was. Cinephiles will push for There Will Be Blood. Comedy lovers will praise Juno. Foreign-film addicts push for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. People who never read the book Atonement love Atonement.

But what about the awful films of 2007? Who will remember them? The poorly written sequels, the torture porn, the unfunny comedies, the oeuvre of Lindsay Lohan? Who will tell us what, of the 300-plus films shat out by Hollywood this year, was truly the most awful?

Vulture, that’s who! We’ve searched high and low for every critic in America who’s declared a Worst Film of the Year, or who’s made a list of their Top Ten or Top Five or Top Three least favorite pictures. We borrowed the Washington Post’s Rotten Tomatoes research. We also used the Village Voice’s film poll, pulling Worst Film votes and meticulously cross-referencing them with our other selections for about three minutes before we were like, “Screw that.”

So what’s the turkey of 2007?

The worst movie of the year: Norbit. Eddie Murphy played multiple roles in this misbegotten spring comedy, the awfulness of which is widely thought to have scuttled Murphy’s Oscar campaign for Dreamgirls.

2. Because I Said So
Diane Keaton, Lauren Graham, and Mandy Moore are all cute as bugs, but they couldn’t save this romantic comedy from being one of the worst of the year.

3. License to Wed
Robin Williams plays a creepy priest intruding on the lives of John Krasinski and poor, poor Mandy Moore, who clearly needs to fire her agent. Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Hunter liked it, though, which we counted as another vote against it.

4. The Number 23
Remember this one, with Jim Carrey as an obsessive Goth saxophonist who becomes obsessed with Michael Jordan’s number? No? Lucky you.

5. Hostel: Part II
Eli Roth’s movie was dead on arrival, like so many of his victims, when it became the poster child for critics’ revulsion at “torture porn.”

6. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
It’s hard to believe that Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor are credited screenwriters on this gay-panic masterpiece. Hard to believe … but true.

7. Evan Almighty
Steve Carell is normally sure-footed in his choice of material — even his crappy romantic comedies, like Dan in Real Life, turn out surprisingly good — but this overbudget sequel was adrift from the start.

8. 300
This abs-and-ass-kicking epic was hurt by a lot of worst-film votes in the Village Voice poll. In honestly, the film might not have been so horrible, but its enormous success was.

9. The Bucket List
Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play aging cancer patients out for one final fling. No, no, that’s not our sarcastic description — that’s the sales pitch.

10. Southland Tales
Richard Kelly’s crapterpiece, so memorably described as “like watching Howard the Duck with a high fever,” is this year’s love-it-or-hate-it movie for critics. (Eleven voters placed it among the best of the year in the Voice poll, and that doesn’t even include Manohla Dargis!) But the ones who hated it really hated it.

Also in the running: Epic Movie, Good Luck Chuck, Hannibal Rising, I Know Who Killed Me, Juno, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Perfect Stranger, Premonition.

Vulture’s Critics’ Poll: What Was the Worst Movie of 2007?