Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 07:12:27 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Most Disappointing Sequel

Started by Maybe Im Doing It Wrong, September 15, 2010, 09:32:41 AM

Previous topic - Next topic
Or threequel or whatever - i.e. what's the film where there's the biggest artistic gulf between it and the original film.

Godfather III (which I rewatched recently) looks pretty shoddy, especially compared with II which is generally agreed to be the best. There are some bad casting decisions (especially the dreadful Sofia Coppola, who really stinks), Pacino is fairly bad and over the top, and all the religious stuff looks ridiculous (I know the catholic church and the Mafia are in bed together in the real world, but gangsters and archbishops together is just ludicrous onscreen.)

Also - Blair witch/Book of Shadows
The Matrix and its two sequels
The Sequel to American Psycho

Jemble Fred

Quote from: Maybe Im Doing It Wrong on September 15, 2010, 09:32:41 AM
Also - Blair witch/Book of Shadows
The Matrix and its two sequels

The original Blair Witch being one of the single most disappointing films of all time, I actually preferred the sequel. At least it had a few schlocky scares and a hot chick with no pants on.

And I've not seen any of the Matrix sequels, but then I was crying tears of blood by the time I got even halfway through the first film, so how any sequel could be worse is beyond me.

I hated Four Lions 2 the most, that one about the gang of kooky ghosts who go around trying to spook people at the London Marathon.

An tSaoi

Terminator 3 was a real letdown. I know people praise the ending for doing something a little different, but for most of the film, it's just a bad remake of the second one, only with really forced humour that completely falls flat. John Connor is rubbish in it, Arnie is a caricature, and the villain is a less effective rehash of the T-1000.

Jake Thingray

Is it too obvious to say FIERCE CREATURES? Along with all the script and production problems, it was made several years too late. At a discussion at the NFT in early 1990, Michael Winner, in his first, last and only sensible pronouncement, criticised Cleese for going on one of his sabbaticals right after A FISH CALLED WANDA and urged him to do a follow-up now, while the iron was hot.

dr_christian_troy

Quote from: Maybe Im Doing It Wrong on September 15, 2010, 09:32:41 AM
Or threequel or whatever - i.e. what's the film where there's the biggest artistic gulf between it and the original film.

Godfather III (which I rewatched recently) looks pretty shoddy, especially compared with II which is generally agreed to be the best. There are some bad casting decisions (especially the dreadful Sofia Coppola, who really stinks), Pacino is fairly bad and over the top, and all the religious stuff looks ridiculous (I know the catholic church and the Mafia are in bed together in the real world, but gangsters and archbishops together is just ludicrous onscreen.)

Also - Blair witch/Book of Shadows
The Matrix and its two sequels
The Sequel to American Psycho

The Godfather III gets almost a jokingly vast quantity of hate put in its direction - I can understand why, but to be fair it's not an awful film. The character played by Sofia Coppola was meant to be Winononona Ryder, but she bailed out.[nb]This was later made up for with Bram Stoker's Dracula, sort of...a rather interesting account of this situation is discusses in part by Richard E Grant in his rather fun diaries.[/nb] I'd be intrigued to see if there was much buzz of high expectation prior to its release, but with such a vast gap, I think it's apparent it was never going to be on the same level as the first two films. It's a decent tie-up though, and disappointment can occasionally stem from high expectations, so for those who 'refuse' to watch The Godfather III, do, but just lower your expectations!

I completely agree with you on The Matrix. I felt by the third film like I'd met someone, become a close friend, then suddenly I've been invited to a party, only to discover he's actually just trying to convert me to some particular religion. A wee bit bamboozled, to say the least. The allegories and subtext were obvious from the start, but I think in retrospect I would have been quite happy to have just not seen those last two films.

Thankfully, the sequel to American Psycho is not considered 'canon'. To learn more of Mr. Bateman post-'Psycho', read Glamorama and check out the 'email correspondence' written after the film release, although some argue that this wasn't approved by Ellis. Lunar Park I enjoyed, but I'm not sure what to think of it in regards to the existence of the characters Ellis created.

Those sequels to Starship Troopers, Cruel Intentions and Wild Things are all watchable but predominately rehashes of the original plots with different actors.

I actually really liked Gremlins 2, Ghostbusters 2 Book Of Shadows, and Weekend At Bernies 2, whereas I found Blues Brothers 2000 to be a depressing affair.

Oh, and Cube 2? Utterly. Fucking. Dire.

Gregory's Two Girls is the winner I think. An incredible saddening piece of legacy-pissing.

ThickAndCreamy

Quote from: dr_christian_troy on September 15, 2010, 09:57:09 AM
Oh, and Cube 2? Utterly. Fucking. Dire.
Was it very disappointing though? I mean the original Cube is nothing at all special, it contains a laughable amount of predictable tripe.

The characters also contain some of the laziest stereotyping imaginable;

1) The black aggressive policemen who later turns into a rapist as all black men will rape young white woman when they have the chance, it's just insulting and racist.
2) The nerdy, white and overly left wing paranoid doctor who thinks too much.
3) The young, sexy girl who magically is a genius.

Then there is the plot which is just contrived shit of them being locked up in a cube. It's vaguely ambiguous how they got there but it's still utter shit and takes dystopianism to new levels of self parody. Sci-fi is often great as it highlights the problems of today that if not dealt with soon, will exacerbate to becoming something dangerous to the human race. However, when they say the
Spoiler alert
excesses of military spending in the US will ultimately lead to them creating a huge cube to kill people within due to the military industrial complex
[close]
you can just fuck off.

Cube is like Equilibrium, both want to send out a message and they do. The trouble is the message is so lazy, uninformative and unoriginal that it's the equivalent of someone in a pub constantly saying 'they're all the same' whenever the subject of politics comes up.

Doomy Dwyer

The Star Wars prequels. They go beyond 'disappointing'. I've not seen them all. But I don't need to, do I? They're shit. You know it and I know it. If you think differently, you're lying to protect yourself, and I can dig that. But one day you're going to wake up screaming. In the interests of fairness I sat through the first three hours of the first one. I felt betrayed. Lied to. It was like watching my seven year old self being bukkaked on by Fatneck Lucas and the board of directors of Palitoy. Every fond memory I'd ever had of the original films was shat on in the cruelest manner. They talk of the banality of evil, and this really brought home just what that phrase meant. Just the sheer cynical indifference of the perpetrators. Heartless, brutal and inhumane. I've been violated. Nothing is sacred. Everything is nothing. The temple is ashes. Fucking joke

Phil_A

Mission Impossible 2 was a massive disappointment after the first film. All the intrigue and paranoia ditched in favour of MOER STUNTS and SHIT BLOWING UP. And it coincided with the point where Cruise had jacked up his smugness to ridiculous levels.

Ginyard

Quote from: Doomy Dwyer on September 15, 2010, 10:27:29 AM
The Star Wars prequels. They go beyond 'disappointing'.

Yeah, problem started from the off when the fantasy politics scrolled down. Nothing about evil bastards with lasers and a planetfucking space station, just yack about trade routes and a supreme chancellor (whose name 'Valorum' sounds like some sort of roman commode). Then a dull bastard with a beard, a guy with a ferret hair extension, a tarty 3PO-alike and some stiff wisdom. It would have helped if the droids had looked and acted a bit more intimidating than a nest of pheasants and Lucas hadn't written with his paedometer turned off and shovelled in an i-ching faux-brit jailbait queen spruced up in Ming rags.



Also:

Smokey and the Bandit III and the Jaws sequels. All crap.


Ginyard

Jaws 2 trailer 1978

Hip hip for Roy hamming the shits as a papier mache corpse mounts him. Click on .24 and keep replaying for fun. No its not that bad, but I don't think its as powerful as the original either.

Doomy Dwyer

Quote from: Ginyard on September 15, 2010, 11:08:55 AM
Yeah, problem started from the off when the fantasy politics scrolled down. Nothing about evil bastards with lasers and a planetfucking space station, just yack about trade routes and a supreme chancellor (whose name 'Valorum' sounds like some sort of roman commode). Then a dull bastard with a beard, a guy with a ferret hair extension, a tarty 3PO-alike and some stiff wisdom. It would have helped if the droids had looked and acted a bit more intimidating than a nest of pheasants and Lucas hadn't written with his paedometer turned off and shovelled in an i-ching faux-brit jailbait queen spruced up in Ming rags.



But, do you remember how they reeled us in with those sweet, sweet trailers and it was like you were a child again and free and everything was going to be all right and they promised? And for once it was going to be better than before and how good it felt? And remember the spoof Austin Powers trailers and it made it even more exciting, like a real event, like something important was going to happen? And then they did all that up there you just said and they crushed my dreams and it's never been the same and it's always the same and I can't feel proper feelings anymore and it's them that's done this and now I can't sleep and must kill again.

Cerys

The problem with the papier maché corpse is that they were presumably trying to do a repeat of the Ben Gardener's Boat scene from the original film.  And failing.

Ginyard

Quote from: Doomy Dwyer on September 15, 2010, 11:42:44 AM
But, do you remember how they reeled us in with those sweet, sweet trailers and it was like you were a child again and free and everything was going to be all right and they promised? And for once it was going to be better than before and how good it felt? And remember the spoof Austin Powers trailers and it made it even more exciting, like a real event, like something important was going to happen? And then they did all that up there you just said and they crushed my dreams and it's never been the same and it's always the same and I can't feel proper feelings anymore and it's them that's done this and now I can't sleep and must kill again.

I hear you. Lucas dangled the lollipop then forced us to our knees and made us blow a wookie. Fucking Californian lumberjack gut bastard.

Quote from: Cerys on September 15, 2010, 11:46:15 AM
The problem with the papier maché corpse is that they were presumably trying to do a repeat of the Ben Gardener's Boat scene from the original film.  And failing.

Definitely. It was typical sequel failure material where a great formula is stuck in a microwave to make it hotter and it saps the taste. It does have good moments, like when his son's frozen with fear in the water, but its mostly just fluff and rubber.

Cerys

Three gets it back, though, I reckon.  Or maybe that's just because of Bess Armstrong.



I may have had a teensy bit of a teen crush.

koeman

Splash, Too.

Everything from that bloody ',Too', to the entirely new cast, to the fact that Allen wasn't meant to be able to go back to his old life if he left (the entire crux of the ending of the first film).

Danger Man



Wait ten years, don't use any of the original cast, kid yourself that Jackie Gleason has the same star quality as Robert Redford, suddenly decide that it isn't a sequel but is inspired by the original and change most of the character's first names but keep the same surnames as the original. But don't tell anybody why you did this.

What do you get? A piece of shit movie that isn't 'so bad it's good' it's just bad.

Famous Mortimer

I loved the first Blair Witch and didn't hate the second one - I think it got a lot of criticism for trying something different. And not being all that good, I suppose. Anyway.

Exorcist 2. They've done a good job trying to get us to forget it, but those of us who were there will never, ever, be able to wipe it from our minds. Not just the worst sequel, a close call for worst film ever - nothing interesting, either good or terribly bad, happens. Fuck that film.

Troll 2 lol

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Robocop 3 - The second one isn't up to the standards of the first film by any means, but it's a goddamned classic compared to the wimped up TV movie that is the third.

Little Hoover

Didn't the director of Blair With 2 say he hated the first film or something. I heard there was a fascinating commentary on the dvd where he shows himself to be slightly insane.

It's an oddly fascinating film Blair With 2 even though it's bad and the film just feels sort of incomplete to me.

Serge

'Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World' anyone? I know that the original is flawed, but I enjoyed seeing it so much at the cinema that I went back twice to see it again. Funnily enough, I didn't feel the same compunction with the sequel. It does have one absolutely outstanding moment -
Spoiler alert
the scene where they're tramping through the long grass, which cuts to an aerial shot of the 'raptors scything in from all sides
[close]
- and, admittedly, isn't as bad as '3' (did that have a subtitle? 'The Loster World'?), but still a pretty big disappointment for me.

Though the book is admittedly worse.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on September 15, 2010, 02:03:13 PM
Robocop 3 - The second one isn't up to the standards of the first film by any means, but it's a goddamned classic compared to the wimped up TV movie that is the third.
I think 2 and 3 were both written by 300-creatin', right-wing-war-lovin' comic maestro Frank Miller, which may be the reason it took people a very long time to give money to a film with his name attached.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

As I understand it, Miller wrote the first draft but there was a lot of executive meddling and the final result bore little resemblance, which caused him to swear off Hollywood for years. He later produced a comic of his original script, although I haven't read it, so I don't know if he's just talking rubbish.

Ignatius_S

Speed 2

The reason I suggest this one is that the first was basically a B-movie, but a surprisingly enjoyable one.  In some ways, it shouldn't have come as a disappointment that the sequel was such a turkey as Hollywood would surely think, 'Hmm, if we made a fuckload of money from a $30 million film, just think how much more we could make if we spend four times as much on the sequel.' On paper Speed 2 should have been at least slightly entertaining... forget the boat, they should have used a milk float.

Graham Yost who was the main scriptwriter recently created Justified.. it's ace!


Quote from: Maybe Im Doing It Wrong on September 15, 2010, 09:32:41 AM
.... The Matrix and its two sequels...
Yup.

Quote from: Jemble Fred on September 15, 2010, 09:38:28 AM
The original Blair Witch being one of the single most disappointing films of all time...
I was talking about this a while ago with a friend, who grew up in the States. He really liked it and I didn't – one thing that I found interesting was that in the States, people didn't know what to expect at all, but by the time it came out over here, people did have a pretty good idea and there was massive hype. Although with the hype, the film makers created a buzz around it on Ain't It Cool by posing as people who had seen it (even though it hadn't been shown publicly). Great website though.

It was just sooooo tedious and the characters so dumb... even for the standards of a horror movie.

-   Where's the map?
-   I threw it away.
-   You threw it away, why?
-   Well, you didn't know where we are.

Ad bloody infinitum.

Quote from: Jake Thingray on September 15, 2010, 09:56:34 AM
Is it too obvious to say FIERCE CREATURES? Along with all the script and production problems, it was made several years too late. At a discussion at the NFT in early 1990, Michael Winner, in his first, last and only sensible pronouncement, criticised Cleese for going on one of his sabbaticals right after A FISH CALLED WANDA and urged him to do a follow-up now, while the iron was hot.
Actually, that was one I thought of straight away. Although it's  a follow-up, rather than I sequel, I reckon it's a great example of what not to do. I wasn't expecting much but when I started watching it when it was last on, I was amazed just how poor it was.

Quote from: Danger Man on September 15, 2010, 12:13:03 PM


Wait ten years, don't use any of the original cast, kid yourself that Jackie Gleason has the same star quality as Robert Redford, suddenly decide that it isn't a sequel but is inspired by the original and change most of the character's first names but keep the same surnames as the original. But don't tell anybody why you did this.

What do you get? A piece of shit movie that isn't 'so bad it's good' it's just bad.
Oh god, yes! Quite an interesting cast though. One thing that really jarred is that in the first film, Charles Dunning character when looking for Hooker mentions he knows the type of girl Hooker's into – both of the ones Hooker is attracted to do very much correspond to that that but in the sequel, his love interest is conventionally prettier but not that type at all. It's a small point, but bugged the hell out of me.

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on September 15, 2010, 02:42:36 PM
As I understand it, Miller wrote the first draft but there was a lot of executive meddling and the final result bore little resemblance, which caused him to swear off Hollywood for years. He later produced a comic of his original script, although I haven't read it, so I don't know if he's just talking rubbish.
There was a lot of meddling with the script for the second – however, Miller does pop up in the film, so I don't think he was that pissed off. In any case, he got involved in the third one.

I've read some of that comic and it was terrible – on the whole, I think most of the reaction was poor.

Quote from: Serge on September 15, 2010, 02:12:32 PM
'Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World' anyone?...
It looked so promising on The Critic.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

It still manages to surprise me when I remember that The Lost World was directed by Spielberg. It feels like such a nothing film that I always think it must have been helmed by some second rung director.

Famous Mortimer

Lest we forget, give Miller his head and he comes out with a film like The Spirit, so I'm not sure how much of the Robocop franchise's crapness has to do with executive meddling.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

I really enjoy The Lost World, actually. It's fun.

All of you can die in a fire.

Big Jack McBastard

I didn't hate the Matrix sequels, there I said it, though I agree that some bits could have easily been culled and not missed.

Yes the Trade Federation droids were shit in TPM and Anakin was a badly acted pansy throughout and fucking Jar-Jar needed to die.

The Starship Troopers sequel was fucking dire, I nearly died of boredom and arseache watching it.


Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on September 15, 2010, 03:16:02 PM
Lest we forget, give Miller his head and he comes out with a film like The Spirit, so I'm not sure how much of the Robocop franchise's crapness has to do with executive meddling.
Plus, as you say, he's a right wing nutjob, whereas Ed Neumeier wrote the original Robocop as a satire of that sort of thing.