And now we come to the contrarian's category of the year: Worst Picture. This is the place where we at BOP get to tee off on the truly awful films of the year - those that were disappointing, nonsensical and just plain dumb. Moreover, these films all wasted our time, and that's a filmic sin that can never be forgiven. Exacting a bit of revenge here doesn't, hurt though. Note: While there may be some obvious targets you feel are missing from this list, bear in mind that we still had to pay for all these movies ourselves, so mostly we're talking about films that at least appeared like they might have had some redeeming value. We just weren't strong enough for The Love Guru.

The overwhelming champion for 2008 was M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, finishing with twice the points of any other film in our survey. Watching the career arc of M. Night makes a person look around for a helmet to put on to protect from the incoming missle. After a meteoric rise with The Sixth Sense, his films since then have steadily increased in our unease with them, with a steep decline either with The Village or Lady in the Water, depending on your personal perspective. With The Happening, he turned into the equivalent of Wile E. Coyote dashing off a cliff and not realizing that he's standing on air, then careening into the bottom of a canyon.

But where to begin? Billed as his first R-rated movie (as if that alone made it an event), The Happening promised apocalyptic terror. Cryptic clips hinted at something so terrible that it cause mass suicides. It's the kind of setup that makes you wonder what someone with such a fertile imagination could do with it. In Shyamalan's case, the answer turned out to be...plants.

Okay, that wouldn't be such a bad idea, except that he expected us to be terrified by the idea of plants somehow sensing the presence of humans and fighting back against overpopulation by driving us to commit suicide. His main characters end up spending most of the film running away from the wind, as if it were a) possible and b) interesting to watch. Not only ludicrous in plot, it featured unbelievably stilted dialogue, incompetent acting and scare scenes that belonged in Monty Python. Later, he tried to play it off like it was supposed to be corny, but you could see his ego dying a little each time he said it. For all these reasons and more, it's one of the most worthy winners of our Worst Picture in some time.

Second place went to 10,000 B.C., Roland Emmerich's attempt to simultaneously piss off both scientists and creationists. Playing something like CW Presents: Quest For Fire, this was a laughably bad excuse to dress up actors in caveman costumes and throw them into ridiculous battle scenes. Although we weren't expecting an anthropological study, the portrayal of this so-called ancient world was just insulting. Snow-capped mountains gave way to rainforests, which turned into deserts all in the span of just a few miles of walking. Beasts from vastly different eras were placed together in ways that weren't possible, and the film wasted what was arguably its ace-in-the-hole, the resurrection of a sabre-toothed tiger. All in all, it made The Flintstones look like a documentary.

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