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 ...
Jaws: The Revenge
Jaws invented the summer blockbuster, is the most famous and profitable movie about people getting eaten ever made -- including Debbie Does Dallas -- and to this day, is the one joy of children made to learn the cello. The sequels were stuck with trying to make "SHARK! AGAIN!" interesting, and plausible.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.
Highlander: The Quickening
Highlander made audiences care about swashbuckling at a time when every action movie was required to feature explosions by inventing swashbucklers who caused explosions. When two of the film's Immortals fight, things explode for almost no reason, and when one wins even more things explode for even less reason. It remains the coolest thing films have done with swords after lightsabers. And just like lightsabers, more recent films with them suck like a Hydra stealing gas.
The ImpossibilityEvery 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.
Alien Resurrection
Alien was a breakthrough in sci-fi horror, Aliens kicked every ass that dared sit in a movie theater in front of it and Alien 3 urinated on both while screaming, "HAVE WE MADE THE RAPE AND PREGNANCY THEMES CLEAR ENOUGH, YET?" 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.
Crank: High Voltage
The first
Crank was pure action-porn, and you can tell someone's true gender by whether they say that as a good or bad thing. It was testicles translated into film. Jason Statham had to keep doing awesome things or it was all over, making it
Jason Statham's Career: The Movie, and it was even better than that sounds. Crank was action movie with all the pointless shit like comic relief and not-killing people removed. And in an unexpected parallel with Twins, all the pointless shit went into an unwanted second one.
High Voltage is the Danny De Vito of action movies.
The ImpossibilityThe whole point of the first movie was that the main character was going to die within an hour, and he did so as awesomely as possible: falling out of a helicopter, murdering a man on the way down and then falling asleep to death before hitting the ground because it was still the most relaxing thing he'd done all day. After brain-death, he hits Los Angeles cars and tarmac at terminal velocity. Even the sequel's posters admitted he was dead, meaning even the
High Voltage advertising couldn't believe what they were advertising.They solved the impossibility of having a sequel by not giving a fuck. Unfortunately this used up their entire supply of anti-fuck, so they completely fucked the rest of the movie. An offspring hasn't so thoroughly ruined everything about the original since Scrappy Doo. Jason Statham* wakes up after three months even though the brain death problem from the first film hasn't been solved. The movie addresses those questions by making you feel stupid for asking them, and it makes you feel stupid by reminding you that you're watching
Crack 2: High Voltage over and over again. *Don't even pretend his characters have names.The original excelled because it had nothing but kickass. They suddenly decided that "foreigners, sluts and Tourette's syndrome" weren't just hilarity incarnate but worth a third of a movie each. Statham suddenly has more annoying sidekicks than Sonic the Hedgehog. The movie spent more time on comic relief than the BBC. Bai Ling's entire character description and motivation was literally "Annoying Whore," and every time the Tourette's character started touretting they played wacky music.
We're here to chew bubblegum and ruin movies, but we can't walk when doing the first.
The first five minutes feature deeply internal shots of Statham before he sodomizes a man with a lubricated shotgun. It's like his career really did die at the end of the first movie and now he's doing porn.
If you want to see this, you want a different kind of "manly action."
Game of Death II
Game of Death was already impossibly bad. Bruce Lee died during filming and they not only released it, they used footage of his real funeral to finish it. It was a real-life, real-death and entirely humorless Weekend at Bernie's. People who use corpses in their plans are why Conan and Bruce Campbell exist to kill people. The fact the producers weren't spectrally kicked to death remains the most convincing proof there's no afterlife.
The ImpossibilityEight years later, Bruce wasn't just still dead, he was much deader. The producers scraped up every spare frame of film they could find just to remind people he was gone, which was a bit of a problem because they'd already done that two Olympics ago. Disney villains have had less pointlessly evil plans, and the remaining clips contained less action than most yearbook photographs. They built the movie around him standing and talking to people, filling in the rest with stuntmen. Not stunt doubles -- because the makers didn't know what Bruce Lee looked like. It was still billed as "starring Bruce Lee," because "The back of Not Bruce Lee's head!" wouldn't make them as much money.
"Hello, master, I am definitely Bruce Lee!"
Even by 1981 standards the editing was terrible, and back then, good editing means you didn't drop pieces of film as you sellotaped them together. Bruce Lee spends the movie teleporting more than Doctor Who, and used physical violence less often. Entire scenes were built around one second of Lee standing in a doorway. If he'd owned an answering machine, they would have made the movie about him chasing a drug dealer called "The Tone."
Advanced training gives the monk the ability to grow and retract eyebrows when Bruce is in shot.
His replacement's martial arts are based entirely on facing away from the camera. His fight scenes so ludicrously prioritize "what people see" over "actually hurting anyone" you'd swear he was doing capoeira. The amazing thing is that he's only in the first 30 minutes of movie. Lee is killed off in a scene which is either an attack of conscience on the part of the scriptwriters, or a brag that offers definitive proof that the film was produced by Satan: "Bruce Lee" dies while desperately clinging to a martial artist's coffin which is being stolen by greedy evildoers. It couldn't be a more accurate movie summary if it was IMDB.
"Dignity" and "Dangling" have never been compatible.
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Luke McKinney
