In case you’ve read a ton of reviews already that have said this movie stinks but needed one more opinion after all, then I’m here to tell you it extremely stinks. The Book of Henry has got to be the most beautifully photographed atrocious movie I’ve ever seen. It takes place in picture-perfect Cavalry, New York, a place of lovely autumn shimmer where you’d never expect anybody to ever hurt anybody else, but that’s where you’re wrong as the movie would have it. From beyond the grave (SPOILERS AHEAD), a mom gets a tape recording on how to set up a righteous kill of her next door neighbor whom is guilty of child abuse on his daughter.

For the first half hour, it’s not exactly good but there’s not enough badness to say “The Book of Henry” is a crime against the arts. At about forty minutes, the jaw-dropping begins. Before that, it starts out as one of those kid genius movies. Henry (Jaeden Lieberher) is supporting the family through his stock market picks, which is a necessity because his mom (Naomi Watts) plays role player shooter games all day when she’s not waitressing. The kid brother Peter (Jacob Tremblay) gets close to getting beat up at school, like a lot, but Henry intervenes all the time successfully. Henry has designed a ton of crackpot simple robotic inventions. Henry is not only smarter than the principal when it comes to student safety policy, he knows as much as the doctors and neurosurgeons at the hospital. He knows what bad news there is for the doctors to say before they say it.

You can’t beat brain cancer! Anyway, how the movie really gets terrible is seeing we have a character who speaks from beyond the dead through a tape recorder and comments on everything wise and punctual, as well as verbally mapping out an execution plan of the bad neighbor. The sicko who likes to slap innocent faces among other things is Glenn Sickleman (Dean Norris), who is untouchable by the law because he has family ties with the police department, and by corruption, they will lie for him. For mom to rub him out is all in the name of justice, of course, and she wouldn’t be able to kill unless she had loving coaching to guide her through it.

Believe me when I say “The Book of Henry” is nothing but phony wisdom.

I wouldn’t blame you if you had to see it though out of perverse curiosity – it has been unanimously agreed upon by all of us critics that this is one of the year’s very worst. Sometimes we gotta see what very worst looks like.

Note: “The Book of Henry” director Colin Trevorrow was removed from helming “Star Wars: Episode IX” after this debacle.

105 Minutes. Rated PG-13.

DRAMA / BRAIN MELTDOWN / BAD MOVIES WE HATE

Film Cousins: “Little Man Tate” (1991); “Radio Flyer” (1992); “Jack the Bear” (1993); “Silent Fall” (1994).