Wait, have you seen Neverending Story 3? I mean, it seems like it would be worse.
Lots of great nominees here!
Flesh Gordon was a crazy campy comedy but the sequel Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders was really freaking awful.
Heavy Metal 2000 was criminal.
Meatballs II and especially Meatballs III were way off the shit scale.
And don’t forget Porky’s II : The Next Day, WTF? Half the cast went missing overnight!?
Unfortunately, Highlander II did exist and I am scarred for life for having watched it. What separates it from other crappy sequels is that it actually destroys everything we believed in the previous film in the first 10 minutes.
Hard to beat that.
I agree entirely about The Sting II. Despite a script by David S, Ward, it hadn’t the wit, feel, or nostalgia of the original. Awful in every way.
Some others:
**Psycho II (and II and IV)
Return of the Living Dead II** So bad they actually have two characters admitting that they’re basically doing the same thing as in Return of the Living Dead. And don’t see II, either.
Jewel of the Nile well, *Romancing the Stone was fun, but they really didn’t have anything to say. I saw this one with my father, and halfway through he leaned over to me and whispered “What’s this suppose to be about?”
City Slickers II – It was hokey bringing Jack Palance back as Curley, but the ending was even hokier.
RoboCop II and III Totally lacked the wit and style of the original, and they changed the characters.
The Howling II – despite the presence of Christopher Lee, the only reason for watching is to see Sybil Danning rip her top off. They obligingly run this over and over during the closing credits – except when they broadcast it on anything but premium cable. Ignore the rest of the sequels, too.
Son of Kong – not really the fault of the film-makers, who were given almost no time and almost no budget to turn this out, so it’s got a lot of padding. The animated sequences are always worth watching although the cave bear and the dragon-lizard are way the heck too cute), but there’s not enough. And it’s super-sappy.
Superman II – why’d they throw out Richard Donner and most of his footage? It would’ve been great. (They released a reconstruction of the Donner version a couple of years ago on DVD – worth seeing). And Superman III is awful. So is IV and Supergirk
Star Trek V As if I have to explain.
Except for the ending, I liked V. Sybok was a fascinating character. The revelation about McCoy was fabulous “Three days later, a cure was found.” Then, it all falls apart.
If they had adapted the Dark Horse comics sequel, it would have been the best action flick/sf movie ever made.
The makers of Highlander III disagree: they actually ignored II when they made the third movie.
Yeah but Highlander IV ignored II and III.
Without a shred of doubt, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It even out-sucks the shitty Star Wars prequels, and I think we can all agree on how godawful they are.
Hell, I said that at the end of the movie…
My nomination is Beastmaster 2. Ok the first one was pretty cheesy, but it was a good flick. Ok, well an entertaining flick anyway. And even if you hated the first one, you have to admit the second was a a complete and utter cinematic disaster leagues below it. I’ve blotted most of it from memory, but IIRC the main character (played by a completely different actor with no explanation) finds some type of portal leading to our world and enters it for no good reason. There’s motorcyles, futuristic portals, bad guys with cheesy lasers, etc. Whereas the first was a typical fantasy with not a shred of technology in sight. For sheer WTF-itude, you’re not going to find a sequel more different than the original.
Boycotting S-M3 is a very wise choice, indeed.
Actually, I find Trek V to be eminently watchable. The nadir of the Trek movie series has to be either Insurrection (complete an actual scene featuring F. Murray Abraham mewling with rage) or Nemesis.
A lot of it has to do with the tone of the film. The first had a sort of gritty, working class texture that just went so well the story and the type of music they were performing. The second one has a kidified feel (it was rated PG-13) and a lot of the gags just felt dumbed down.
Also, in the first movie, it seemed like a lot of the performers were genuinely having a good time. Here they’re just going through the motions and you get a sense that the only reason they’re there is to collect a paycheck.
And then there’s the zombie sequence at the end…well, the less said about that, the better. I’ll just say that the producers must have had a videotape of Eric Clapton and BB King blowing goats, because there’s no other explanation for why they’d be there.
What’s a girk?
And that in itself is another problem. They’re not really doing anything original. They’re just going through the paces trying to replicate the formula that worked superbly in the first movie, but not doing a very good job at it. I suspect at some point Dan Ackroyd must have thought he had a good idea for a sequel, but the filmmakers didn’t try to make anything other than a pale imitation of BB1.
The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day.
None of the humor, charm or fun of the first movie.
Caricatures instead of characters.
No good quotes except maybe “It’s none of your fuckin’ business!”
Not even Julie Benz in leather pants can save this movie. It just sucks, especially compared to the first one.
Yeah, that was pretty awful.
Although The Road Warrior was itself a sequel, and was a fantastic movie. I liked the original Mad Max as well, although i believe that it wasn’t released in the US until after The Road Warrior had become a success. In Australia and many other countries, The Road Warior was released simply as Mad Max 2.
Oh hell yes, I’m not alone! And the later sequel, The Other Wind or whatever it is, is almost as infuriating. First they fuck up dragons as some kind of non-carnivorous (
:mad: Are you fucking SHITTING me?!??) long-lost evolutionary cousins, then they fuck up the Dry Land as a front for some kind of treacly rainbows-and-butterflies metempsychosis, and who even cares anymore?
Yes, UKLG, we know that Earthsea was a flawed human society that had things like racism and xenophobia and sexism and restrictive gender roles and a sometimes bleakly stoical and humanly limited outlook on death and sex and the universe, even among the wise mages! That was not a bug, it was a feature: it was part of what made the books so real! You didn’t have to go back and retroactively “fix” all that stuff in order to give Earthsea an imaginary politically correct former Golden Age and forthcoming renaissance of comfy ideological enlightenment! Dammit!!
The most frustrating part is that there are little glimpses of the real Earthsea shining here and there through all the hokey manipulation and self-conscious style. You basically have to imagine that you’re reading a genuine narrative of Earthsea that has been heavily redacted by an annoying feminist revisionist editor in later centuries. It’s still aggravating as hell, though.
That said…
Have you read the short story “The Bones of the Earth” in the collection Tales from Earthsea? About how Ogion came to Re Albi? Oh man, that’s pure gold. It actually expands our understanding of Earthsea in a realistic way instead of tearing down our previous understanding to replace it with a more ideologically correct version. I can forgive UKLG almost everything about the sequels for that one story. I think I have to go reread it now.
I still have a hole in my soul from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.
Yes. It did get a theatrical release.
I saw it with the same group that insisted I had to see Robocop. And, well, since I was so glad to have seen Robocop, which I never would have seen otherwise, I figured I should listen to 'em this time, too.
From that point on I was a lot more skeptical of their choices.
Me too! That was when a cornerstone of my teenage years died. First two movies were great then suddenly BAM we’re in Shogunate Japan with no rhyme or reason.