You mean, TITanic 2000?I think the lesbian vampires don’t diminish either Cameron’s version, or A Night To Remember. I think Cameron dropped the ball by not having lesbian vampires in his version!
Leonard Part 6
It was so bad, it erased parts 1 thru 5 from EXISTENCE
I only saw Godfather 2 a long time after seeing the original Godfather, and not long after that I saw Godfather 3, having seen Godfather 1 again shortly before.
Weeeeeeeeeeeeell, it rounds out the story, but 3 was just so bad it verged on parody. It rehashed several bits from Godfather 1 - BADLY. And Sophie Coppola deserves some sort of award for worst wannabe actress. Her limitations would not have been so obvious but for the all-star cast. The death of Al Pacino (Vito?) was a bad remake of the classic scene from Godfather 1. Last but not least, the whole plot was overblown.
I had to scroll through to make sure nobody else said it, but DAMN IT!
This is why Highlander II came to mind.
Not only did fans want to insist it didn’t exist, but when Highlander III was made the writers and production team made a clear point of ignoring Highlander II as well. The mistake was letting Mario Van Peebles play the lead antagonist and I could only assume he got the role because he and Lambert became good friends or had good screen chemistry while filming Gun Runners.
And Highlander IV was just capping off the TV series – nicely, mind you, but it seemed like it was just wrapping up the series & source movies with a grand finale.
My inclination is to agree (as usual) with Cal Meacham.
I loved T2 because it was a fun action film all on its own and it even had a nice anti-war theme going on in the middle of the Cold War era. Even the alternative ending was nice and reiterated that theme.
But IT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN MADE.
The problem (or lack thereof) was that the original was a perfect temporal loop:
[Spoiler warning, in case for some reason you’ve never seen this 1984 gem and still want to watch it.]
Reese’s boss/friend gives him a picture of his mother and Reese falls in love with her, so he goes back in time to save the woman, diverting her from a career as a diner waitress and setting her on a course that will shape history. Much hilarity ensues, plus Reese gets the chance to express his love for his friend’s mother*. In the end, some random kid takes a Polaroid of the heroine, who buys it and will give it to her soon-to-appear child of Reese.
The whole rest of the movie is a giant temporal loop! And there’s even an alternate ending (somewhere out there on YouTube and even linked in a thread on these boards), that tightens the technological aspect of the time-loop. Cameron really should not have messed with such a perfect loop. Every subsequent movie (and the TV show) simply added more flaws in the loop and unanswered questions to the story.
–G!
*And, as much as the semi-silhouetted love scene was fun to watch, its inclusion was integral to the story rather than simply gratuitous.
I so want this!
RoboCop. The sequels we’re ridiculously bad where the original was fantastic.
The problem with The Matrix is that it NEEDED sequels, just not the ones we got. It was clearly written to be Part 1 and left a lot of interesting ground to cover in the followups. But the Wachowskis simply whiffed. They apparently didn’t quite process what worked vs what didn’t in the original, and the sequels were just CRAMMED with bad CGI, cheesy art design, faux-religious yammering, and a story that just unravels the fun of the original. They probably screwed themselves ultimately with the back-to-back shooting schedule of the sequels. They could have taken the feedback about 2 and used it to course correct for 3 and hopefully land with a flawed-but-forgivable trilogy. But, instead, they were locked in to what they’d already shot and basically had to dump a terrible third movie into a market that was already hostile. Oof.
Star Wars is still the biggest “fall from grace” in my book. The original trilogy are genre masterpieces: career-defining films that told timeless grand adventure stories with an engrossing art design that still works to this day. A perfect mix of sci-fi and fantasy with big dashes of mythology and dream logic. The second trilogy killed every bit of that and reduced the series to cheesy action movies that take themselves much too seriously while also having way too much comic relief. The newer movies are much better, but it’s a “horses are already out of the barn” situation for me.
Did the sequels make the original worse?
No.
My vote is also for the prequels. For other series I am usually able to compartmentalize and ignore them, and I can even do so with Star Wars, with one exception. Mitichlorians. That took the magic away from the force. The new ones are good but they have to hold their own based on non-forcy stuff. Solo is the best post-RotJ star wars movie for me for that reason. Which isn’t to say there aren’t forcy elements that are good (especially in Episode 8) but it still just isn’t as cool anymore. Imagine how cool the force tricks of Episode 8 would have been if there wasn’t something in the back of your mind telling you that it isn’t magic but just some organelles?
Agree 100%. Also the remake, while technically gorgeous, was abysmal.
Look Who’s Talking with John Travolta and Kirstie Alley was very good.
The sequels were terrible and really hurt the reputation of the original.
Almost derailed Travolta’s career. He didn’t rebound until getting the role in Pulp Fiction.
That only happened because Tarantino requested him.
Gonna have to disagree with you there. Take Aliens and Aliens 3. Aliens was all about Ripley saving Newt and the whole climactic “Get away from her you bitch!” scene. In Aliens 3 – welp, kid is dead and the alien is back. I don’t think you can go back and watch 2 and not feel cheated.
The Matrix, by a mile.
The mitichlorians thing doesn’t bother me, I can ignore that. My problem with the prequels is that I simply cannot reconcile that Anakin and Darth Vader are supposed to be the same person. I can’t wrap my brain around the idea that the person in the black suit is supposed to be that whiny brat. So when I watch the originals, I find myself trying to picture Anakin in the suit, and my brain can’t accept it. Thus the original is diminished… until I let it go and think of them as separate people. 
John Carpenter’s original “Halloween” was a stone classic and wet-your-pants scary. But all its sequels (and copycat ripoffs) ran the formula into the ground and diminished the impact of the original. When I watched it with my teenage son he said, “What’s the big deal? It’s like every other horror movie ever.”
Frankenstein deserves a mention here. The original is a masterpiece, especially considering this was made in 1933. While the story is a bit hokey and the dialogue seems to be taken from a stage show, it really was outstanding for its time. Compared to other “horror” films, Frankenstein remains a classic for a reason. Karloff touches upon something that nobody has really topped. He provided a sympathy for the monster. He’s confused and lost and is abused by Fritz for whatever reason. What Karloff does with his hands and evocative whimpering is just beautiful. We feel for the creature. Watch the fear that sets in when he tosses the little girl in the lake and realizes she’s not coming up. He panics, scrambles and finally runs. He didn’t mean to kill her but he knows this is bad news and heads for the hills. I don’t know…it just gets me every time. Something about his facial features just kill me.
Obviously the sequel (Bride of Frankenstein) is pretty good too. Some say it’s better but I don’t know if I agree with that but I will say every single Frankenstein after that has sucked. So badly that it’s just a waste of time to see if anyone can live up to the original. No one has every touched upon Karloff’s portrayal with the same approach. I realized over time that while I like the story of Frankenstein, it’s Karloff who put his stamp on the franchise that made it so great in the first place. He did a wonderful job.
I agree with you, wonky. I gave up on the Star Wars franchise after the abomination known as Jar-Jar Binks.
I’ll agree with this (although, nitpick, the film was released in 1931). Karloff did a heluva job with the creature. He thought it was a capital mistake to let the creature speak in Bride, and I think he was right.
The movie Frankenstein is something odd. as an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s original novel, it’s terrible. It not only doesn’t follow the original, but subverts it at several turns. The story of how the movie achieved its present form is pretty twisted, starting with Peggy Webling’s play (itself, the outcome of earlier versions, and enacted originally by the same crew that dramatized “Dracula” for the stage, with the same actors ). But, even though they said the used her play as the basis for the film, they eventually jettisoned almost everything she had, and many other hands contributed to the film (including Richard Florey, who added some bits that remain, but whose film would’ve been abysmal). That the movie ended up coherent and watchable at all is amazing, that it turned out a classic is incredible
Nevertheless, the film ended up creating its tropes that had nothing to do with the original t all - the scientist’s laboratory with its extensive scientific gear in an old watchtower, the twisted assistant, the monster himself with that iconic flat head with bolts in the neck. And, of course, the “abnormal brain”. This is a far cry from Shelley’s undergraduate student creating his monster on the floor of his garret lodgings all alone without having to sew body parts together. Or his Byronic, eloquent creation. Karloff’s mute creature seems much more believable.
The sequel was a wholly different film, with Valerie Hobson in place of Mae Clarke as Elizabeth, that lush Franz Waxman score in place of the original’s haunting silences, Una O’Connor’s comic bits, and Ernest Thesiger as the wonderfully flamboyant Dr, Pretorius – a man who LOVED being a Mad Scientist. But the film, for all its visual flair, is inconsistent and disappointing in its resolution and looks, for all its polish, cobbled together.
*Hollywood in that period got away with this more times than it deserved. Casablanca and Wizard of Oz were similarly monstrosities with multiple hands pulling them in completely different directions and without a single guiding vision, which nevertheless turned out to be classics. Most of the time, the product ended up not being memorable. there are plenty of forgotten films from that period.
I thought of a good example this morning: Trainspotting.
In the original movie, Renton was a heroin addict whose social circle consisted of other heroin addicts. Everyone in the movie was shown to be following a self-destructive path to an early death. Most of the characters avoided thinking about this by not thinking about the future. Renton was shown to be different; he could see he was heading towards an early death and wanted to change. He tried to quit heroin but his friends led him back into it. So at the end, he betrayed and abandoned his friends. He knew it was an immoral act but he justified it by thinking it was the only way he could save his own life and that his friends, by their own choices, were not going to be able to save themselves and would take him down with them.
Then a sequel, T2 Trainspotting, was made twenty-one years later. I’ll admit I haven’t seen the sequel but the trailer reveals one of the key facts of the movie; the characters from the first movie are still around twenty years later. That fact alone invalidates the first movie. It means Renton was wrong. His friends were doomed to die; they apparently either quit using heroin or they have been using it for twenty years without dying. Either way, Renton wasn’t facing the extreme choice that he felt justified his act.