5 Sequels Made By People Who Must Not Have Seen the Original
The things Hollywood has done to keep franchises going make Dr. Frankenstein look like a reflexologist. After six sequels the Saw plot only makes sense if you assume everyone in the world is a psychotic invalid. And since a lot of them went to see Saw seven times, the assumption is pretty accurate.
"Yes, this looks like something a sane person would buy."
But we're not talking about sequels that shouldn't have existed. We're talking about sequels that couldn't have, because the plot of the previous movies made them a logical impossibility, and yet they did. Apparently there's no reasoning with movies like ...
#5
Jaws: The Revenge
The conceit of the second film is the same as the first: A giant shark is eating people off of Amity Island, and nobody will believe Sheriff Brody when he says that's what's happening. In the third movie, nobody will believe Chief Brody's son that a shark has broken into Sea World and is eating people, presumably because that could never happen anywhere but inside the mind of a crazy person.
"Please note that we haven't even arrived at the most implausible sequel yet."
In the fourth film, Jaws: The Revenge, a fourth shark eats Sheriff Brody's other son in the waters off of Amity Island, because sharks are apparently both capable of swearing blood oaths, and remarkably persistent about carrying them out. And here's where things get really far-fetched.
The ImpossibilityThe Revenge was impossible in more directions than Escher. Lead actor Roy Scheider refused to return, because the previous disasters had done more aquatic damage than the Exxon Valdez. He went on to make SeaQuest DSV, safe with the knowledge that it now couldn't be the worst thing ever filmed on the ocean.
And Poseidon knows it tried.
After her son is killed by yet another giant great white shark, Ellen Brody leaves Amity Island for the Bahamas, and I'd like to congratulate one of Amity's suicidal bait-monkeys for finally having that idea. Almost as if they're unprepared for the inclusion of logic in a Jaws sequel, the shark follows her. Did the shark hire a PI? Was there a great white sitting in the back of the plane with an extremely dark hat and glasses? The only question the writers appear to be interested in having answered is, "Holy shit, you're still watching these movies after that Sea World one?"
To be fair, they have a point. The shark is the least threatening fish this side of sushi. It moves like a sock puppet and attacks like a grandmother plugging in a USB key. Meanwhile, the heroes are worse at aquatic combat than flamethrowers. The climax is an estranged mother and son crying at each other on a tiny boat. That's not after the final showdown, that's during it. A franchise couldn't ruin its final showdown worse if the T1000 had suddenly become vulnerable to the power of friendship.
After decades of having everyone close to her eaten by sharks, Ellen has developed the ability to be traumatized by sharks, freezing up and flashing back every time she sees it. This is especially when she's doing something vital like steering the boat. And just like every '80s movie, the stupidest ability possible saves the day! Just before gently prodding the shark with the boat's bowsprit, she flashes back to a sepia-toned clip of the original movie's "Smile you son of a bitch!" So even the flashbacks are impossible because the only living thing to see that immediately became a hundred buckets of oxygenated chum.
And reminding audiences of the original at this point was just cruel.
The impact somehow causes the shark to explode like a blood-filled balloon, thus bringing the franchise to a merciful ending.
Jaws 4 sucks more impossibly than a black hole.
#4
Highlander: The Quickening
The Impossibility
Every single thing about the first movie said it was over. The Immortals were all dead. Connor MacLeod was mortal, psychically omniscient, had the girl, wanted to settle down and even his new powers made him wimpier because he used them to know what his girlfriend was thinking. His ass-kicking days couldn't be more over if he'd lost the final fight and been decapitated, because even then his body would still have balls. They even encoded the warning in the plot, "There can be only one!" As with all ancient warnings, breaking it released horrors.
In The Quickening, all the ass-kicking mythology that wasn't explained in the first movie because who cares was given an explanation that managed to get all the facts from the first movie wrong despite there only being two of them.
One film caption hasn't told so many fans to fuck themselves since DIY Masturbation was closed captioned for the hearing impaired.
Despite the first movie featuring more than two Immortals from over 500 years ago, The Quickening explains that immortals originated when the planet Zeist! exiled two treasonous criminals 500 years ago. The planet Zeist! has an immortality-creating teleporter, but they only use it on criminals who want to kill the government. The planet Zeist!'s government is Michael Ironside, who clearly believes this is a Disney movie. There's less ass-kicking than a minesweeper's reunion. Highlander opens with a wrestling match and moves on to a sword fight which explodes a carpark. The Quickening opened with an important message about the environment and moved on to an old man falling asleep at the opera. Connor only uses his psychic powers on Al Gore, then spends 30 minutes of the movie as an old man waiting to die before being attacked by the retarded cousin of the Matrix Twins.
The face of action!
The face of inbreeding!
How many of the following things aren't murdering people with swords: making jokes at a tailor's shop, ruining a Shakespearean play and sacrificing your life to defeat a ceiling fan. If you could even read that sentence you did better than Sean Connery, though at least that last one included blades. The Quickening is the worst thing to happen to blades since Wesley Snipes' last tax return.
#3
Alien Resurrection
Alien 4 said, "No."
The ImpossibilityAlien 3 started by killing half of the remaining characters, and destroyed the franchise so hard the other half committed suicide during the movie. Ripley back-flipped into boiling lead as her chest exploded -- that's the deadest you can get in a movie without threatening Schwarzenegger's daughter.
The makers of the fourth film thought this was too subtle.
You would swear the people who made Resurrection had watched the previous films kill their parents, and were out to destroy the movies and everyone who loved them. They resurrect Ripley as Ripley-8, who we'll call Yelpir because she's such a complete opposite of everything the character stood for that she ends up snuggling with aliens.
"I feel so safe in your claws."
Of course, to get to that point, she must undergo a resurrection more genetically impossible than Tila Tequila's child filing a paternity test -- too many horrible things have gone wrong in there for the result to make any sense. They show you the clone growing from childhood, but it still has memories (impossible), the alien parasite (impossible) and superhuman Alien abilities (ultra-impossible, since the only power acid blood gives to humans is "being a puddle.") Yelpir spends the rest of her screen time believing that "strong female character" means "bitch." It's like two idiots hated Ripley in different ways and took turns writing her lines, and the production was so pointlessly ruined that might actually be what happened.
The movie's big reveal is that aliens can now get pregnant, a plot point so stupid they literally embedded a narrator in the monster to explain it. The new half-human Alien was born fully-formed. That means no egg stage, facehugger, parasitism, chest-burster, double-mouth or horrible penile-facelessness. E.T. was truer to the Alien movies -- at least its xenomorph looked horrifying and the military still wanted to kill it.
Why am I?
The plot ends with Yilrep and Winona Goddamn Ryder (who fits the franchise about as well as a Care Bear) looking sad to be killing an alien. The first three Aliens take more joy in alien murder than video games. Even Jaws 4 seemed to take pleasure in actually killing the damn thing.
The Alien Resurrection section suffers from a serious lack of research.
ReplyA: The reason she's called Ripley-8 is because Ripley Clones 1-7 were horribly mutated. The problems with clones liquifying was probly taken care of by the time Ripley-1 clone was created.
B: The reason the cloning was possible was because the Alines change the DNA of the host to grow the chestbuster from the host's own tissues. They're like a virulent cancer strain.
C: Ripley-8 is part Alien. Thus, she is NOT the Ripley who died. This is a different character who shares the same name. It's actually more realistic than the idea that a clone would think and act like their donor without something like the mind recording device from The 6th Day. The movie also states that she has a form of autism.
D: The inherited memories and acidic blood are results of the hybridization of human and alien DNA. Ripley Clones 1-8 have the Aliens immunity to their own acid. This is also why the Queen gives birth instead of continuing to lay eggs. She was also affected by more human DNA than Aliens normally get from the normal Alien gestation process. The whole point of the Newborn was to show that Alien and Human DNA should not be mixed this way.
E: Call is an android. She's programmed to have compassion for everyone. Her programming may not be able to properly differentiate the Aliens from humans in some respects. Or there may be some directive that tries to prevent the androids from engaging in anti-Alien activities.
F: Alien 3 contained only the deaths of the dog-Alien, and the chestbuster. Alien Resurrection rivals Aliens in the levels of killing, and shows some more interesting deaths on both sides.
Crank 2 was almost like a spoof of the original movie with (some of) the same actors. I personally thought it was hilarious. My favorite part is when he finally caught up to the guy who was carrying the cooler the whole movie and he looks inside but they never show what is inside. Stratham is just like "what kind of a sick f**k carries something like that around with him everywhere?"
ReplyAt this point we can add Punisher: Warzone. Nothing quite like turning a Marvel comic into cheesy, grindhouse garbage.
ReplyCrank 2 was horrible, don't know how anybody could be defending it. The article was dead on, Crank was an adrenaline ride, fast paced, all action. Cranked 2 was half action, half crazy/stupid s**t happening for no other reason than to be stupid.
Replyit wa a brilliantly directed, brutal satire on the genre. The first movie, too, was supposed to s**t on mindless, plotless action movies and the dumbases who enjoyed them. Since some of the dumbasses actually enjoyed it for an action movie instead of a spoof on action movies, high voltage was made to kick it up a notch. It lost what little subtlety the first one had, but at least made it abundantly clear that if you enjoyed cranked as an "an adrenaline ride, fast paced, all action" movie, you were a complete drooling moron, because those are the types of people who enjoy those movies.
number of misspellings in skullsex's post: 2
number of things with which i agree: 0
crank was like jason x; it was a self-aware crapfest, and so much the better for it. "brutal satire" it was not.
I thought some of the jokes in here were funny, but overall the writing was disjointed and confusing. It doesn't help that I haven't seen most of these movies, but if Mckinney had given some more background (peppered with less Seanbaby-esque jokes) it could have worked.
ReplyMcKinney, you're not fit to wash Seanbaby's balls, come up with your own writing style. Weak sauce.
ReplyWhy is there no mention of the Tiger Attack in Game of Death 2?
Replyyou forgot to mention the scene in crank 2 that's straight up puppet work. yeah...
ReplyI assume Rocky 3 was too good to make this list? wrong!
ReplyTry Rocky 5.
I put on Game of Death.Didn't want to see a look alike and the quality looks good then when Bruce lee is in it the quality is worse. So I fast forwarded to the end where he fights Kareem Abdul-Jabar. Then the look alike comes back. Movie was a bunch of bullshit.
ReplyAlien 3 is by no means anything more than "OK", but for a movie that went through so much crap before release it actually wasn't that bad. It's still offensive to the excellence of the first and second ones, but it definitely isn't as bad as it could have been.
ReplyResurrection's gigantic alien vagina is the only thing in any movie, ever, that made me nearly puke in a literal sense. That movie is not good in any way.
BS. Alien 3 sucks and Alien Resurrection is awesome. It brought back the asskicking that Alien 3 lacks. The only redeaming feature of alien 3 was that we learned that yes, the Aliens do take on some of the features of their hosts. The rest was angsty BS. Fox really screwed up with that one. Resurrection is on par with Aliens as one of the more fun Alien movies to watch.
I'm shocked to see no mention of the god-awful halloween 2? the sequel that pushed micheal myers to the curb to replace him with mind possessing demonic rubber halloween masks corrupting the towns children. wtf was that sh!t?
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesThat was Halloween 3 (Season of the witch), Halloween 2 was the one with Jamie Lee Curtis in the hospital and it DID have Michael Myers in it
RE: Supernautus
yeah your right. it was 3 . i f*cked up. but yeah, halloween 3 was totally retarded
Watch the magic pumpkin kids, and be sure to wear you halloween masks!
Crank 2 had Maynard and Danny Lohner in it. For that, I own the movie. Plus my husband likes these mindless movies.
ReplyLook up "Voodoo shark" for some interesting info on the Jaws one
Replyi like the title of the article, it had me intrigued. i even liked the list of movies, since i know them very well, but the writer missed the mark. sorry but the excution wasn't very good at all. you didn't explain things clearly at all, very messy. it's very simple all you had to do was explain why the sequel doesn't fit with the original. the only part of the pieces that got it right was the crank and bruce lee portion.
Replyyour comment was more something than a group of somethings! i haven't seen this much something since a bunch of somethings somethinged.
On this one I'm going to have to go with the commenters that are saying that the author missed the point of crank 2...seriously, I didn't even see the movie, but just by looking it up on rotten tomatoes I realize how they made the sequel possible...and while it sounds like it may be somewhat implausible, at least the explanation is slightly more complicated than not giving a fuck.
ReplyAnd proofreading my man, proofreading. I'm not gonna hate cause it's still legible and all so it's not that big a deal, I'd just possibly be mindful of it in the future.
if you didn't see it why are you even talking..... go back to bed little kid
More evidence that proofreading is rapidly becoming a lost art.
ReplyHaven't read the whole article yet, but cello's awesome! I've never played string instruments, only wind ones, but who could hate on cello%Pr
ReplyThis article has more similies than a Zero Punctuation review of a videogame about similies.
ReplySeriously though, there's two in a row at one point.
I noticed the same thing. It's extremely annoying.
I agree with this list except for Crank 1 and 2. Luke clearly missed the point of the films which is funny because it's made blindingly obvious on many occasions throughout the films.
ReplyThe tagline for Crank 2 is "He died, but he got better". As Penguin said below, the author of this must not have seen either the original or the sequel.