Saturday, July 4, 2015

Fixing crappy screw-ups.

So I went to see the new Terminator movie today, which was actually pretty good. They did good casting Emilia Clarke as Sarah Conner, who looks like a young Linda Hamilton.

No so much with the hair, but their faces look similar

And it made me wonder about other entries to this ongoing and almost tiresome franchise. Terminator: Salvation came out a few years ago introducing Christian Bale (Batman) as John Conner and Anton Yelchina (Chekov) as Kyle Reese. If they wanted to have ANY continuity between movies they would have cast Bale as Conner once again and cast Yelchina as Reese, but they didn't. And in doing so, they made the fourth Terminator movie a pointless entry into the franchise and a waste of millions of dollars of studio money, and created a film that should never had existed. It made me wonder how many other franchises have made the same mistake. I'm not talking about movies that have come out with shitty sequels, because any moderately successful film has done that.

I'm talking to you, Johnny Five.

I mean movies that have released a sequel that nobody gave a damn about, then ignored that film's existence and tried again to reboot the franchise with a new film that ignored and rejected the attempts of the previous film. It happens more often than you think, but I've listed what I think to be the worst offenders.

Halloween III: The Season of the Witch


Seriously, why was this film made? Anybody who is a fan of Halloween – what are the movies about? Michael Myers killing the shit out of people. What was Halloween III about? An evil corporation who stole one of the rocks from Stonehenge to make masks that will kill the children who wear them on Halloween. Why? To what end? What does this have to do with the other films before and after this movie? How the hell do they make watching a Halloween song to the tune of "London Bridge" cause snakes and spiders to emerge from a mask and kill the wearer? 

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning


For anybody has ever taken a knife to a vegetable or taken a stick to a stuffed animal and comically yelled "Die! Die! Die!", guess where that came from? Jason Voorhees was and is the most unkillable movie villain out there. In Friday the 13th part four, appropriately named "The Final Chapter", Jason Voorhees dies. He actually dies. And his death comes from a young Corey Feldman holding the psychopath's own machete, swinging it over and over again onto the hockey mask-wearing assailant, yelling "Die! Die! Die!"
             
That's where that shit came from. It came from the hockey mask murderer's actual death. But fans didn't want Jason dead. They wanted more killing, so in a desperate attempt at a cash grab before figuring out a way to revive the dead, the studio came out with Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Sorry for the spoilers, but if you haven't seen this movie that came out in 1985, at this point I couldn't give a damn if I am spoiling a movie that has already come out with seven additional entries to the franchise. The movie is about a man whose mentally unstable son is murdered. He dresses up as Jason and takes his revenge, basically as a copycat killer. The next film brings back Jason, but part 5 was a waste of film, almost independent from the rest of the franchise with the exception of Tommy Jarvis's character as the only means of linking the films together, but after watching part 6, one can easily argue that part five could be skipped over without missing anything at all.

Highlander II: The Quickening


                Considered by many to be the worst film ever made, this long awaited sequel to the most awesome fantasy/adventure movie ever thought of or filmed was a huge disappointment. The entire theme through the entire first film was "There can only be one". In the end of the movie, there was only one. It was great. It was awesome. Leave that shit alone. Let there only be one. Instead, they turned the immortals into aliens from a warring planet and made a film about saving earth from the o-zone layer. Stupid fucking movie. Horrible ass movie. The other films after this, which could never suck this bad even if they tried, don't ever acknowledge any of the events of this film, as though nothing in it ever happened. I don't blame them.

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

                Freddy Krueger is one of the most iconic villains in modern film history. He started off a brutal stalker of nightmares, escaped to the real world in part 2, people learned how to kick his ass in part 3, but then things just started going downhill after that. Anytime they have to replace a main character with a different actor or actress for the direct sequel to the last film, you know something is wrong.
Patricia Arquette

Not Patricia Arquette

Part 4, 5, and 6 all sort-of sucked in this series, but I guess you got to give them props for determination. But in part 6, Freddy's Dead, the series reached an all-time low,

Tom and Rosanne Arnold in the film should have been a major red flag!

               Freddy took one of his victims, sucked him into a dream video game, and controlled him, having the guy jump around like a stiff jointed Mario until he fell and died.

Rocky V
                So in Rocky IV, what I consider to be the best in series, especially after the bro-love fest that was Rocky III, The title character has to become the most all powerful badass to defeat Dolph Lundgren's character Ivan Drago after Ivan killed Apollo Creed (Rocky's best friend) in a boxing match at the beginning of the film (one of the most "Holy Shit" moments in film history, at least for me).
Don’t fuck with Drago

Then they went and made part 5, with a character named Tommy Gunn, a dumbass with a mullet named after a mobster weapon.

Fuck Tommy Gunn
                They made the sixth Rocky movie (Rocky Balboa) and had Rocky actually boxing again (unlike the horrible fifth film), and  now they have a part 7 I am looking forward to where Rocky is training Apollo Creed's son to fight.
Might be good, might suck. You never know.

This next one doesn't count, because like I said, I'm not counting shitty sequels alone unless they had a better follow up to make up for the previous shitty entry into the film series - but if they ever do make a sequel, this one is a notable mention:
The Matrix II and III


                Sorry, but I just had to go here. Such an awesome movie, the first Matrix movie. It ended greatly, and spawned part two, which can be summed up quite easily – there is a lot of cave dancing where people with dreadlocks fling there sweat everywhere, then a complex mesh of puzzles set up to find this guy called "The Architect" who uses language that only a person who has recently studied for the GRE could understand.           
                Part III came out during a lot of anti-war real world stuff, and the movie seemed to make a political statement. It ends with Neo asking for Peace with the machines, while the entire purpose expressed in the first movie is to release humans from being slaves in the Matrix. Basically this franchise took one of the most awesome films ever made and transformed it into the most disappointing franchises ever.

How many did I miss? Any other film series that had shitty entries but made up for them with a better follow up? I'm certain I missed some. Leave me your comments and let me know what other offenders there are.