MCHS’ Top Five Worst Movie Sequels

Image+via+i.ytimg.com

Image via i.ytimg.com

Levi Baxter, Staff Writer

This summer’s film releases were some of the most disappointing audiences have seen in years in terms of sequels or just general movies. From the “meh” box office performance of Jason Bourne to the controversy surrounding and the eventual box office tanking of Ghostbusters, this summer failed to live up to the height. Let’s examine the five greatest (or worst) sequels ever made.

Before we get started, this is the opinion of the writer not those of a third party source and these don’t necessarily have to have been released in a movie theater (which applies to one of the films listed below.) So with that in mind, today we are counting down the top five worst movie sequels.

  1. Jaws: The Revenge 

    jaws-revenge
    i.ytimg.com

Talk about a let down sequel. Jaws: The Revenge failed on everything that the Jaws franchise had built up until that point: the build up until the final reveal of the Great White.

The plot centers around Ellen Brody, played by Lorraine Gary, the wife of the late Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) from the original film. Ellen believes that a shark is out for revenge on her family because she sees one following her to the Bahamas.

Yes, a movie with that kind of synopsis had a $23 million budget and that was the best story they could produce. Plus the fact it took fewer than nine months when the original Jaws film took a total of 13 months, makes this film a contender for one of the worst movie sequels ever made.

  1. The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure 

    http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/
    Image via vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/

The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure is a direct-to-video release meaning that it was not released into movie theaters but instead was directly released to DVD.  

The plot follows Littlefoot, a young Brontosaurus, and his friends as a pair of egg stealing dinosaurs take an egg from a village. While running, they accidentally cause a landslide that opens up their home to outsiders. When the egg they bring back hatches reveals not to be one of their own, but a carnivorous tyrannosaurus, the youngsters decide to secretly raise it.

Steven Rea of the Philadelphia Inquirer said that the original film “looks like it came out of Disney from the 1940’s or ’50s. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” and calling it “meticulously crafted”. Compared to the originals tone and style, The Land Before Time II is a drastic change. The film has a saccharine tone and at times turns musical (one thing the original was not.)

With that being said, The Land Before Time 2 still holds the innocence of the original and the pure childlike wonder and sense of adventure that the series lost around the ninth entry of the series. The series total number of films thus far stands at a staggering 16 films. Since 1994, they have made at least one to two films every year. So for more ever growing disappointment, there are 14 more to watch.

  1. The Lost World: Jurassic Park 

    THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, Julianne Moore, Jeff Goldblum, 1997, (c) Universal
    THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, Julianne Moore, Jeff Goldblum, 1997, (c) Universal

The reason this film ranks this high is because we simply did not need a sequel to Jurassic Park. The original garnered just a little over $1 billion, but the sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park gained $618.6 million in both international and domestic box office returns .

The plot follows Ian Malcolm from the first film as he is tasked with finding his girlfriend on an island full of dinosaurs with no fences. She is tasked with documenting the animals behavioral patterns by John Hammond played the late Sir Richard Attenborough who is losing the company Ingen to his nephew Peter Ludlow (played by Arliss Howard) who is sending an expedition team to capture the animals to a future theme park in San Diego.

Along for the journey, his daughter, Kelly, sneaks aboard the boat that they are traveling on, and after a rash of stupid actions, Ian and company decide to break loose all of the dinosaurs that Ingen has captured so far from their cages. The dinosaurs proceed to trash the base camp of the only people that can get them off the island.

Now having to walk through the island they must find a radio to notifying Ingen that the mission has been compromised.they eventually do but not without casualties on the way. The helicopter arrives but as they are flying away Ian and company notice that Ingen is taking a tranquilized Tyrannosaurus Rex to San Diego which eventually gets loose and causes havoc in San Diego.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said, “Where is the awe? Where is the sense that if dinosaurs really walked the earth, a film about them would be more than a monster movie?” The acting in this movie was definitely worse than the original, but the single worst element had to be the wizard of “uh’s” himself, Jeff Goldblum, who during the 1990’s had a string of very successful movies.

So, this film is just a waste of critics and viewers time and money. Don’t bother with it.

  1. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 

    Image via nerdist.com
    Image via nerdist.com

Ever since the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983, there had been pressure on George Lucas to continue the saga of Star Wars, so after 16 years we got the most anticipated movie of the last millennium: The Phantom Menace.

The story follows a very young Obi-Wan Kenobi as he is tasked with training a young Anakin Skywalker in the ways of the force because Anakin has a high level of “midichlorians.”

Throughout the film, we are introduced to new characters such as Qui-Gon Jinn, Queen Amidala, and by far the most hated of them all, Jar Jar Binks. Not only is this character pretty much universally hated, it has also been embattled in some controversy. Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal described the character as a “Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit on platform hoofs, crossed annoyingly with Butterfly McQueen.” Needless to say, he is the butt of many Star Wars jokes.

  1. Batman & Robin 

    image via comicbookmovie.com
    image via comicbookmovie.com

In 1989 we got the first ever big budget Batman movie starring Michael Keaton  and directed by the master of the Gothic film style, Tim Burton. Three years later Batman Returns was released, even though it was considered to be a sub-par sequel with Michael Keaton reprising his role as the Caped Crusader. After another less than stellar sequel, this time with director Joel Schumacher in the chair,  we finally arrive to the creme de la creme of bad movie sequels with George Clooney taking over the role of the Caped Crusader.

With this movie, the audience has to endure the atrocity of some of the worst acting ever performed by A-list actors including but not limited to Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Clooney, Alicia Silverstone, and Uma Thurman.

This Batman is the worst representation of Batman in the whole reservoir of Batman movies by defying all of the requirements that make a Batman movie a “Batman” movie. Those requirements are the action needs to be better than the previous installment, great acting, a fantastic villain, and fantastic music to set the scene. All of these are broken in glorious fashion.
With all of that aside, we are also introduced to the most “essential” gadget in all of Batman’s arsenal: the Bat-Credit Card. This is arguably the most infamous item to come out of the entire franchise and possibly single-handedly could have derailed the film (not to mention the bad dialogue, jokes, action, and just everything, really). So in the end just don’t watch it don’t waste your time with this pile of dreck, and turn your attention to the more critically acclaimed Christopher Nolan trilogy of bat flicks.