Quite unfortunately, I found myself watching Look Who’s Talking Too last night. (That’s what happens when you only get two channels and are too tired to get off the couch).
While it was a terrible movie, I realized that it really set a standard – you simply can’t make movies about talking babies without being compared to Look Who’s Talking.
What other bad movies set a standard for their category?
Tron. A lousy movie, but it was the first to have computer animation (though less than five minutes of it). Quite a few animators were influenced by the computer animation (even the parts that weren’t computer animated – Disney gave the impression that everything was, so animators loved the effects).
Gone With The Wind
It set the standard for overblown historically revisionist epics. Some fine performances wasted in the service of a ridiculously bad interpretation of the American Civil War. It’s a good looking movie, which then leads to more fine looking but empty epics like The Natural (and yes, I know that’s fiction - it’s a matter of the epic).
I would say that the Police Academy series set the precedent that absolutely ANY movie can have a sequel.
What, there were like six sequels in all, each one stupider than the one before. Granted there had always been sequels but these were usually reserved for movies that were reasonably successful the first time through.
Also, it seems you rarely had more than one, two max, follow-ups to the original story. Now the Hollywood mentality remains that if something even marginally works the first time, run it into the ground for as long as you can.
The standard for porno that went crossover to Art Cinema was Deep Throat, which got improbably great mainstream reviews, wide release, and prompted the creation of the NC-17 rating.
I’m going to disagree with this. Police academy didn’t start this. I have no idea what movie really started it, but you only need to look at the Planet of the Apes series to know this started a while before.
Granted, PotA did fantastic (relative to its cost) at the box office, but a sequel was the furthest thing from their minds when they made the movie. Ta da! There was a sequel. At the end of the second one, they basically said “OK, we’ll just destroy EVERYTHING! Let’s see them make a sequel out of this!” And yet there was a sequel. Finally, by the third, they just resigned themselves to the fact that there would be a fourth and built in a cliff-hanger. And then a fifth.
And 20 years hasn’t stopped this. There’s another one coming out with Marky Mark in a few weeks!
How’s this: no movie where it’s one man vs the terrorists can be made without being compared to Die Hard.
If so, it sure took it’s sweet time about it. Deep Throat came out in the early 1970s. The NC-17 rating was first used on Henry & June, which came out in 1990.
Perhaps you were thinking of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which precipitated the creation of the PG-13 rating, and quickly, too, might I add.
I agree with that statement, but not that Die Hard is a bad movie. Personally, I think it is far and away the best of its genre.
Now that I’m done nit-picking everybody else’s posts, I’ll open myself up to some abuse. My nomination is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a milestone in its genre, and (from my recollection) an absolutely abyssmal movie.
Alright, my turn to disagree. First you are right that I hadn’t thought of the Planet of the Apes series as possibly setting a precedent. Also, you bring up a good point that this was a movie that seemed to suggest a formal ending with the original but then had producers et al scrambling around to cash in. (Unlike, say, the Tarzan movie series that were meant to be a long-running saga.)
However, I don’t think PotA set the trend that Police Academy did. Planet of the Apes came out during the 60’s, right? During the 70’s you didn’t see the sequels craze that seems to have begun during the mid 80’s. Granted, movies like The Exorcist and Jaws begat crappy sequels that most would like to forget, after Police Academy (or possibly the Friday the 13th series but that is a slightly more-exclusive genre) there began a trend that exists today. I would say that close to half of all “original” movies today that produce decent returns and maintain a hint of a possibility to continue the story, will beget a sequel.
Also, there are a number of completely forgettable films, that someone inexiplicably found the need to continue working on.
I’m not saying we owe it all to Police Academy, but that movie definitely has to be considered as the front-runner.
More so than Planet of the Apes.
Sorry all. When I made my reply, I didn’t see the “bad” part of the thread title. So yes, Police Academy would apply because I happened to like PotA (and it’s sequel, but don’t get me started on the 3-5).
I also liked Die Hard and don’t think it was a bad movie.
But “bad” really puts things in perspective. I kept thinking “Talking baby movies? Surely there’s another genre worth considering here.”
Hmmmm.<–lubricious throat humming.
I’ll draw the red plush curtain over Ed Woodian genre masterpieces. Too easy.
Of a lesser standard: Red Dawn, wherein sweaty, vacant-eyed beeves whup major furrin’ bootie witha their huntin’ rifles and spunk. (Yeah, cliche, but it’s the one that updated the John Wayne cliche.)
War Games: defined a new cliche–weedy computer-mole loners who threaten/save the world at whim. Revenge Of The Nerds without the funkiness, sweetness, wisdom or humanity. Fed paranoia and enthusiasm in equal parts. Trivialized and glossed a real human revolution.
Pretty Woman: a pitifully lame update of “sluts have more fun”. Which may be true, but lacking in edge, wit, depth or fun.
Hmmmm–again. Not easy to define standards because so much of it’s already been done.
Veb
Yes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre started it all, but in the 90’s, the Scream series (yes, they were BAD) re-started the trend of Dead Teenager movies (more like Dead Twentysomethings, really).
Furthermore, I think Scream started the trend of ALL the bad twentysomething movies that we have been subjected to for the last 6-7 years and made it possible for people like David Arquette and Jennifer Love Hewitt to become “movie stars”.
It’s time for Leatherface and the family to come back and do away with them all.
How about “I Spit On Your Grave”? Now that movie was very awful. It made “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” seem like an episode of “Friends”.
Vincente Minelli’s Father of the Bride (1950) was a great movie, but it did spawn a sequel, Father’s Little Dividend. I think we’d better ask Eve for the first sequel.
Didn’t Halloween kick off the Slasher/Dead Teen-ager deluge?
Porky’s: The bad movie that defined teen sex comedies. Teenage boys desperately trying to lose their virginity, crude jokes, and, most of all, shower scenes with cheerleaders!
–sublight.
I’ll have to seriously disagree, if only because Tron inspired John Lasseter, who then went on to give us all those terrific movies and shorts of his – Luxo Jr., Geri’s Game, Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and the upcoming looks-great-already-and-I-can’t-wait Monsters Inc.
Besides, the light cycles were cool. 
Oh, and to address the OP, I’ll nominate Independence Day. Started the current bad trend of summer “blockbusters” filled with lots of explosive noise and nothing else. Tomb Raider being the latest example, oy…
rjung – sure some of the movies inspired by “Tron” were good, some even great. But “Tron” itself was a stinker.
Another movie that fits the original criteria is Super Mario Brothers*, the first film inspired by a video game. That particular genre has been particularly dismal.
and none of you have mentioned Humanoids of the Deep? with the obligatory gorgeous-how-could-she-be-a-scientist, the corporate greedy bad guys who Pollute :eek: our waters, and create, the (cue deep voice) Humanoids of the Deep (/deep voice) who walk out of the water and carouse around the beaches, killing (well half anyhow) of the couples they find, some how or 'nother never killing the busty babes…