Worst...Sequel...Ever!

Yeah. Okay. I know. I haven't updated this site in a while. But I'm back.

Well, sort of.

I still need to write a fresh, original piece for the site. And yes, I will do that. Soon. No, really. But until then, here's something I wrote about a year ago in response to a special request from my best friend, JB: "Pick the top 10 Worst Movie Sequels starting with the least offensive and ending with the stinkiest stinker." And this piece is appropriate, too, for this time of year. After all, isn't the summer movie season the the time when sequels swarm all over us like flies on the windows of the house in the Amityville Horror movies? (Speaking of some bad sequels...)

10. STAR WARS: EPISODE ONE--THE PHANTOM MENACE
All right, so this is a "prequel" and it's not as painfully bad like some of the other entries on listed below, but it probably qualifies as the most disappointing sequel on this list. Unlike most sequels, which have pretty low expectations, this one had fanboys yelping for years before it came out. And with 15 years to think about it, all George Lucas could come up with was a thinly veiled remake of the original? With Jar-Jar Binks, a "comic relief" character no more advanced than the Chinese cook in King Kong, which was released over 60 years earlier? Episode One has great special effects, but that just makes it the best-looking bad movie I've ever seen--which makes it all the more offensive.

Speaking of the Chinese cook from King Kong...

9. SON OF KONG
RKO Pictures had pushed hard for King Kong to be a huge hit, and it was. But they got greedy & wanted to capitalize on it with an immediate sequel, so they rushed this movie into production that same year (1933)...and it shows. With only Robert Armstrong (as Carl Denham) and the aforementioned Chinese cook returning from the original film, this sequel needed some great monsters to get it by. So what did we get? A cute and fuzzy Li'l Kong. Kind of like giving us Scrappy Doo when we expect Scooby. Without the time to set up more elaborate sequences, special effects master Willis O'Brien had to settle for a couple of brief fight scenes and lots of the white fuzzy Kong Jr. making cute faces. Either RKO should have taken some time to come up with something even halfway decent, or they should have left well enough alone. (Then again, that can be said for most of the movies on this list.)

8. BATMAN & ROBIN
Okay, I'm not great fan of the Batman movies. But I could, at least, see why they would appeal to others: The first two films in the series (Batman and Batman Returns) had Tim Burton's creative energies behind them, and the third (Batman Forever) had two terrific, campy villains in Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face and Jim Carrey as the Riddler. (Nicole Kidman's presence didn't hurt, either.) But Batman & Robin struggles to be coherent, much less entertaining. George Clooney, usually a reliable screen presence, makes a bland Batman. Arnold Schwarzenegger throws off one-liners perpetually, eliciting more groans than giggles. Uma Thurman's sex appeal is muffled beneath glitter and a goofy accent. And Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl? Give me a damn break. Throw in editing that looks like it was done in a blender and you've got one headache-inducing mess. No wonder it killed the franchise.

7. SCREAM 3
The franchise was pretty well screamed out by this point. Yeah, the first one was entertaining, even if it engaged in some of the same "hack-up-pretty-girls" cliches as the genre it satirizes. And the second one had some sly commentary about film violence and sequels ("Sequels suck," one helpful film student points out early in the proceedings). But did we really need Scream 3? Does it do anything the first two didn't do already, and better? Was it necessary to kill off every single cast member of Stab 3? (Come to think of it, Stab 3shouldn't exist, since the Stab films are presumably based on the "real" events depicted the previous two Scream movies--is Stab 3 based on a psychic vision or just made up or did nobody involved in Scream 3 give enough of a white lab rat's ass to notice such a continuity glitch?) And does it have the guts to whack one of the remaining original characters, thus cutting down the odds of Scream 4? If you answered "no" to any of these questions, then you've got more sense than the director, the writer or any of the stars. And any movie that kills off both Kelly Rutherford AND Parker Posey earns a permanent spot on my cinema shit list.

6. POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE
The original "Poltergeist" wasn't a great movie, but it at least was fun. And it made us all permanently afraid of clowns (like we weren't already). But this nonsense sequel tried to go serious on us with some shit about family togetherness being able to fight off evil--were it that audience unity could have been employed to fight off the evil of this crappy movie or its even more useless followup, Poltergeist III. This movie isn't fun. It isn't creepy. It's not even so bad I can laugh at it. It's just boring. And annoying. And stupid. And did I mention boring?

5. HALLOWEEN II
I had the significant misfortune of catching this bloody bomb on the big screen, and it pissed me off. Not only is Halloween II a bad movie in its own right--with nasty killings, a fright wig intended to make Jamie Lee Curtis look like a teenager again, and that maddeningly slow walk that Michael Myers had--but it diluted the impact of the original film, which had a damn-near perfect ending that this film and all its lousy followups thoroughly trash. John Carpenter (who served as co-executive producer and co-screenwriter) said director Rick Rosenthal fucked up the movie and re-edited it. Rosenthal said that Carpenter's editing fucked up what he was trying to accomplish. Sorry, boys. You both fucked up. And we had to live with the results.

4. INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
You could try to write off my hard feelings toward this sequel to the classic Raiders of the Lost Ark to the fact that this was probably the most uncomfortable in-theater experience of my life: the Nortown Theater had recently been remodeled, but with little legroom, so I had to sit sideways on a aisle seat for two-plus hours (oddly enough, it closed down not long after that). But no. Even if I'd seen Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom in the luxury suite of the Hotel Intercontinental with Angelina Jolie and Bridget Fonda delivering full-body massages to my weary bones, this movie still would have sucked, sucked, sucked. Steven Spielberg replaces the thrills of Raiders with gross-out gags of bugs, hearts ripped out of chests and "chilled monkey brains." He replaces the tough, gutsy Karen Allen with the shrill, shrieking Kate Capshaw. And he engages in borderline racism in the treatment of Indy's sidekick, Short-Round, and the villains, all of whom are people of color. Or maybe he's satirizing the racism of the old movie serials that had stereotypical Asian sidekicks and ethnic villains. Whatever. Once you get past the opening action scene, which is fairly brisk and fun, watching this movie is about as entertaining as listening to someone file their nails for a couple of hours.

3. DAY OF THE DEAD
There are some who maintain that Day of the Dead, the third and, from all indications, last of George Romero's zombie extravaganzas, is the best of the bunch. I wish I knew what type of medication these folks are on so I could get a prescription--anything to dull the pain of watching this trash. I'm a big fan of the first two movies, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, but this one loses me across the board. The acting, never the strongest aspect of Romero's Dead movies, is particularly awful and amateurish here, with lots of screaming back and forth and maniacal laughter replacing any hint of subtlety, thoughtfulness or intelligence. Most of the movie takes place in an underground facility that looks suspiciously like an elementary school basement. And as violent and disgusting as the previous two entries could be (especially Dawn), this one surpasses them with dismemberments as flesh-chomping galore. (There's even one repugnant bit, where a zombie gets up from a table and its guts flop out on the floor, that Romero and special effects master Tom Savini were so proud of that they use it not once, but twice.) A lousy script, abundant overacting and disgusting special effects. Yep. Something for everyone.

2. ALIEN 3
Remember all the stuff you liked about Aliens? You know, like that cute yet spunky little girl? Or the tough yet tender Corporal Hicks? Or the android who risked his "life" to save everyone else's? Remember all that? Well, forget it: when Sigourney Weaver's Ripley crash lands on the prison planet at the beginning of Alien 3, two of those characters die instantly, and only one, the android (played again by Lance Henriksen), gets e brief, dismembered cameo. Things go downhill from there. Alien 3 is a tremendous downer, substituting the pedal-to-the-metal 'tude of the previous movie with gray, uninspired surroundings; grimy, untrustworthy characters (even the usually excellent Charles S. Dutton); and, ultimately, the death of the lead character of the series. No adrenaline-rush fun to be had here, kids--just a dreary march to a depressing end. The director, David Fincher, went on to make more critically acclaimed movies (Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room), but doesn't do a thing to keep the franchise going here. The series did continue, though. Alien Resurrection is even a marginal improvement on Alien 3, but that's damning it with faint praise: a blanks screen would have been a marginal improvement on Alien 3.

1. EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC
How do you go from one of the most frightening movies ever made to one of the most unintentionally hilarious movies ever made? Maybe by hiring an Oscar winner (Louise Fletcher) and a couple Oscar nominees (Richard Burton and Linda Blair) and sticking 'em with a horrid, contradictory, half-baked script and a director (the otherwise reliable John Boorman) in the midst of a nervous breakdown. The result? A movie that's barely watchable, much less scary. Burton's eyes bug out a lot. Fletcher looks sedated. Blair looks alternately confused and stoned. James Earl Jones (as an African priest who rides on the back of a grasshopper) and Max Von Sydow (briefly reprising his role from the original) are on hand to embarrass themselves as well. How bad is Exorcist II: The Heretic? The followup, Exorcist III--a bad sequel in its own right, but I digress--makes no reference to any of the events in Exorcist II. When even your own sequel disowns you, you know you've done wrong. And Exorcist II goes as wrong as a movie can go without the print spontaneously combusting--and even that unfortunate event would have been more entertaining than anything that actually made it up on screen.