Another terrible retro superhero movie, Thor: love and thunder.
Thor Ragnarok was such a pleasant surprise for me; genuinely funny, but also with adventure, peril and character arcs. So I was really looking forward to the sequel but spent almost the whole runtime cringing.
Every joke fell flat and suddenly the story required exposition dumps and other bad writing.
I know this is a slightly controversial one, but I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t think it was up there with matrix 2 and the like for sheer badness.
I saw Bad News Bears when I was a kid when it first came out and I thought it was hilarious. I watched it again about 40 years later, and hoo boy it did not age well.
While I think that the worst ones have already been named, here are some other awful sequels:
Superman II – don’t fire the excellent director of your original film and have his replacement re-shoot most of the film. Also, don’t get the wife of your hero’s mentor from the first film to take the place of the mentor in the second film because the actor was asking for too much money – it looks cheap. If you want to get an idea of what the film could have looked like, get superman II: The Richard Donner Cut
Psycho II – alright, so they didn’t have to use Robert Bloch’s book Psycho II as the basis for the film, but they should at least have tried to make the film plausible. Too many people dressed up at Mrs. Bats and went sneaking down the back stairs in this pitiful sequel, which came 23 years (!) after the original. But the worst part is that lead to Psycho III three years later and Psycho IV in 1990 – but only on TV.
I haven’t seen it, but Vengeance of She (1968), the sequel to the Ursula Andress version of She received some abomminably bad comments and reviews:
I have seen The Vengeance of She - though not recently - and recall it being not so bad (especially compared to She). Ms. Berova isn’t called on to do much and consequently…doesn’t do much, but at least she doesn’t ruin the film. From certain angles, she more or less resembles Ursula Andress, enough reason (imo) to watch it once.
The real detriment is John Richardson as Killikrates. He is godawful, wooden and dubbed (as he was in She), sucking all the life out of the movie. Co-starring in his early films with Barbara Steele, Raquel Welch, Ursula Andress and Ms. Berova makes him one lucky dude, but it is clear he was only meant to be a prop next to them. Unfortunately, he tried to be more. He is definitely on my list of the fifty worst actors ever.