January is a notorious dumping ground for movie studios' most embarrassing atrocities.
January is upon us, and film fans know what that means: nothing good. The first month of the year is traditionally the dumping ground for Hollywood studios, the month in which they unload the films that aren't quality enough for the Oscar-courting fall, but not commercial enough for the lucrative holiday, spring, and summer seasons. January is where bad movies go to die, and where studios hope we won't notice them. They're usually right; viewers either tend to catch up on the prestige pictures that are going into wider release, or just stay at home and watch football.
But our nation's film critics, fat and happy after the holiday feast of smart, highbrow entertainment, are often subjected to the sugar crash of January gruel, and as a result, their reviews often pack a little bit of extra vitriol. After the jump, we've assembled the 10 worst movies released in the month of January—according to the reliable aggregators at Rotten Tomatoes—along with a few choice words from the scribes who sat through them.
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