5 SEQUELS THAT MAKE YOU HATE THE ORIGINAL

5 SEQUELS THAT MAKE YOU HATE THE ORIGINAL

No matter how bad a sequel is it can’t do anything to tarnish the original, right?  Wrong.  Sometimes a sequel isn’t just bad it’s so bad that it wrecks the entire franchise, making the original amazing movies unwatchable.  Here are five sequels that ruined movies you thought you loved.

AUSTIN POWERS:  THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME

The original Austin Powers was a masterpiece of comic inventiveness.  The “60’s swinger meets the PC 90’s” plot line may have just been an excuse for a series of sketches and impersonations, but it was a series of mind blowingly funny impersonations and sketches.  Mike Myers had complete control over every weapon in his comedic arsenal; he could handle a tricky visual sight gag just as gracefully as he could an immature penis joke or a sophisticated bit of word play.  When The Spy Who Shagged me came out two years later everyone wondered what kind of inspired wackiness Myer’s had dreamed up this time.  

But instead of inspiration Myer’s settled for the same old, same old.  The movie is a bunch of re-heated leftovers.  And just like when you eat your favorite food too many nights in a row you kind of forget why you loved it in the first place.  Myers doesn’t even bother to heighten his old jokes.  He just changes the verbiage a little (Honestly, can you remember which Austin Powers movie featured Dr. Evil saying “shhh” and which one had him saying “zip it”?) or sets them in a new location (oh Will Ferrell is dying slowly at the bottom of the cliff now instead of a pit.)  If he had staid fresh with his sequels then maybe we could look back fondly on the original now.  Instead it just feels like another part of some indistinguishable cinematic lump.

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD

John McClain isn’t a super hero.  He doesn’t do amazing things.  He just fights when he’s forced into a corner.  Well except when he has to battle a Jet with a Truck.  Then you might as well give him a cape and call him “Captain Big Rig”.  That’s charm of the first Die Hard, John McClain has no interest in being a hero.  His first instinct isn’t to take out Alan Rickman and his goons, but to huddle up in a corner and call the police.  And when he does finally leap into action he messes up a lot.  It’s not easy being John McClain, it takes every last ounce of strength to get out of the Nakatomi Towers in one piece, and it’s one royally bruised and beaten piece.  

But in subsequent films that ideas is tarnished (McClain’s triumphs in the Nakatomi towers become less and less impressive when you realize that thwarting terrorists is a Christmas Eve tradition for him)  until we can get to the fourth installment where our image of the plucky underdog is totally shot to hell.  McClain is no longer the guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He’s the guy who travels half way across the country to stop thwart a band of super terrorists.  He’s the guy who forgets about getting any help from the authorities and instead gets it from a super hacker who lives in his mom’s basement.  He hangs from the wings of jet planes and can out maneuver a dozen car pile up.  He’s the super hero that he was never supposed to be.  So now when we watch the original it’s kind of like watch Clark Kent bench press 300 pounds.  It’s amazing until you find out that guy is actually Superman.

BATMAN FOREVER, BATMAN AND ROBIN

I know it’s trite to put Joel Shumackers Batman movies on a list like this but no one ever addresses the true travesty of these films… they force you to realize how bad the Tim Burton ones are.

Schumacher turned Gotham City the world’s biggest Drag Club.  He painted the Dark Knight in colors so flamboyantly bright and sparkly that it would had the guy who directed Xanadu snickering.  Watching it you can’t help but ask yourself “how could he do this”.  Batman and Batman Returns are so amazingly bad-ass. So dark and creepy.  But then you go back and watch those movies and you realize Schumacher and Burton were strutting down the same runway.  Parade balloons that spit out green poisonous gas, circus acrobats that leap out of giant presents and terrorize the city, a villain on a giant rubber duck.  Those all seem like ideas retarded enough to be cooked up by Schumacher, but no, they all belong to the Burton Batman cannon.  But Burton balances the ridiculousness of it all with an amazing cast.  Michale Keaton, Jack Nichlson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny DeVito all invest their comic book weirdo’s with such pathos that you get invested and just don’t register how campy the movie really is.  But Schumacher shoves the campiness in you face and, try as you might, from that moment on you can’t help but notice it in Burton’s film.

GREMLINS 2

Gremlins 2 is an amazing movie, don’t get me wrong I love it.  The problem is that it’s pretty much a giant F-You to the original.  It points out all the weird logic gaps and plot holes of the first one.  Now when I watch the first Gremlins I can’t help but ask stuff like “the snow is water , why shouldn’t it multiply the Gremlins” and “when they say midnight, do they mean Eastern or Pacific time”.  Damn you Gremlins, why did you have to go and de-construct yourselves?

 ALL THE OTHER LAND BEFORE TIMES

You may not remeber this but the original Land Before Time was actually a pretty good movie.  A sad and surprisingly dark tale about a bunch of Baby Dinosaurs journey to escape extinction.  It was amazing to see how many hard-ships these infants had to go through in order to surrvive.  Parents died, freinds almost got eaten.  It was a kids movie that actually respected kids and their ability to deal with unpleasant subject matters.

Then came the million direct to video sequels that reverted to the premise that kids were morons who deserved nothing but pandering crap.  The semi-relastic dinosaurs of the orignal are replaced with singing and dancing, neon colored disney knock-offs.  And the messages become things like "all bad people are really good, even that T-rex that tried to murder you in the first movie."  Couldn't they have made a half-assed series of animated dinosaur comedies that didn't take a dump all over a beloved film from my child-hood?  I mean the second movie came out ten yars after the first, no kids were gonna know what The Land Before Time was at that point.  It's like the only reason they did it was out of spite.  And now we can only look at the orginal as a seed that spwaned a library of crap as opposed to the amazing movie it really was.