Vulture Critics’ Poll: What’s the Worst Movie of 2011?

Moral: do not spend the weekend partying with Jeremy Piven, because it’ll only end with a body count. Thirteen years after the dead-stripper “comedy” Very Bad Things, Piven returned to (a limited number of) screens in this coke-booze-pills-tearful-threesome-filled cri du coeur about a reunited quartet of college buds. Michelle Orange of Movieline called it “Four unsatisfying answers to the question: When will death come?”

The trailer used a clip of Katherine Heigl’s character chirping, “There’s gonna be more celebrities here than rehab,” before flashing a list of participants including Halle Berry, Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Ashton Kutcher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Hillary Swank. The celebrities who chose rehab made the better decision. “Garry Marshall ushers in the eternal hellfire predicted by the Mayans,” lamented the Village Voice’s Melissa Anderson.

The second nightmare from Dutch gastroenterology enthusiast Tom Six again managed to dodge the Oscar race. “Reprehensible, dismaying, ugly, artless, and an affront to any notion, however remote, of human decency,” wept Roger Ebert.

More falling-skyscraper porn starring the kid from Project Greenlight. “2011’s second biggest box-office hit is a sad reminder of audiences participating in their own brain deaths,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, adding that “Michael Bay is the Antichrist of cinema.”

Although Michael Fassbender is on the short list of likely Best Actor nominees, this wallowing, judgmental drama about Too Much Sex was a cold shower for many critics. “Watching Carey Mulligan slowly torture 'New York, New York' to death,” wrote David Edelstein, ”I passed the time writing my Opposite World review: 'Mulligan strips away the song’s facile optimism and lays bare her heartbreaking need for affirmation. Devastating!'”

“This is a vomitous movie using a largely irrelevant story of a boy’s search for his father’s last message for specious uplift,” scorched David Edelstein of the slick, button-pushing postraumatic scavenger hunt. “I think I'll be screaming 'too soon!' from here to eternity,” ached the AV Club’s Scott Tobias.

Frequent Michael Bay accomplice DJ Caruso directed this loud sci-fi mash-up of The Fugitive and Smallville, which Movieline's Michelle Orange called, “Harder to follow than a 4-year-old on a Skittles high, and less fun."

For his own worst-of-the-year list, Quentin Tarantino only chose one teenage-girl revenge fantasy with a gray palette and a trailer scored by Led Zeppelin, and it wasn’t The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. "One of an improbable two sleep-rape fantasias starring Emily Browning in 2011," said the Daily's Zach Baron. "But at least Sleeping Beauty didn’t require Browning to warble an awful cover of 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).'”

In February, Adam Sandler and director Dennis Dugan burdened the world with this coarse update of the 1969 Walter Matthau/Ingrid Bergman/Goldie Hawn vehicle Cactus Flower (itself based on a French play). “The film is appallingly clueless about its own offensiveness,” castigated Movie Mom's Nell Minow, "with even the unpleasant good guy characters portrayed as heartless mercenaries." And then, six months later …

… Sandler and Dugan returned with another stinkbomb that was, in the words of Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald, “so desperate, so starved for humor or jokes of any kind, I kept waiting for Al Pacino to Method-fart.” Several harrowed reviewers speculated that it was an act of pure malice. Alynda Wheat of People called it “So offensively lazy and stereotypical that I'm convinced that Adam Sandler hates us — not just critics, ALL of us.”