Eight series that should have died after the first one

Some movies cry out for sequels. Others actively resist them. But if Hollywood has one inviolate rule, it’s this simple creed: if it works, do it again and again until it stops working. And by “working” of course we mean “making money.” If it ain’t broke, remake it.

Sometimes that actually works out okay. After all, what makes one movie good stands a decent chance of working a second (or third or fourth and so on) time around. On the other hand, some movies should have been only children. These eight, for example.

 

Halloween - To this day I’m a little surprised that they ever tried to make a series out of this. I know sequels make money and all, and the success of the Friday the 13th franchise must have provided some impetus. And to be completely fair, the second one probably did look like a good idea. The original left some genuinely unanswered questions, though leaving things hanging actually added to the spookiness. But then all it does is tie up loose ends. It’s got a twist or two along the way, but it’s still just a laced-up shoe at the end. Then the series drives completely off the road. And even after it returns to the original path, it’s pure Slasher Flavored Hamburger Helper.

Rambo - Imagine you’re a high school teacher and the movies in this series are kids from the same family who show up in your classes. Everyone assumes the first one is stupid, so he has to work really hard to prove that he actually has a brain. The second one makes the football team. He’s a talentless player, but the team does well enough that through no merit of his own he becomes the hero of the high school. The third figures he can coast by on his big brother’s popularity, so it comes as a real shock to him when everyone thinks he’s just a douchebag. The fourth one just sits in the back of the class and draws heavy metal band logos in his notebook. In other words, if she’d known what they were going to grow up to be like, Mama should have started taking the pill after number one.

Pirates of the Caribbean - Blame this precipitous plummet almost exclusively on the quality – or lack of same – of the scripts. The original defied my best guess about a movie based on a theme park ride by actually featuring witty dialogue and clever plot twists. But boy did two and three ever live down to my expectations. The sequels are effects-heavy monsters full of mailed-in performances, petty machinations and enough quibbling over rules to make them (especially number three) play like segments of Pirate C-Span. For what seems like the millionth time, let me ask once again: does good writing really cost that much?

Darkman - Unable to secure the rights to The Shadow, Sam Raimi made this Shadow-like-object that worked fairly well for the first round. But once the set-up is in place and the initial drama played out, the rest of the series never goes much of anywhere. The second one was passably entertaining without approaching the fun of the first one. And the third one was just pure crud.

The Amityville Horror - The whole “true story” thing worked the first time around. The fact that it was actually made-up nonsense really didn’t detract all that much from the fun. Indeed, the major failing of all the rest of the movies in the set was the absence of the pretend-it’s-real angle. By midway through number two, audiences could tell that demon-possessed houses in middle-class neighborhoods were one of those things like unexplained lumps or IRS audits. It might be scary if it’s actually happening to you, but watching it happen to someone else doesn’t make for particularly entertaining cinema. And yet they kept right on making them.

Creepshow - Unlike most of the other movies on this list, there’s nothing about Creepshow that automatically made it un-sequel-worthy. It’s a simple anthology piece with a bracket that would have been perfectly easy to reproduce. The comic books this movie apes have been doing it for decades. All Creepshow 2 had to do was select from Stephen King’s vast catalog of short stories and adapt a handful for the screen. I’ve no idea why that was so hard, but apparently it was. Of course if they’d let it lie after #2, I wouldn’t be picking on it now (a good original and a failed sequel don’t exactly count as a series). But then somebody needs money, so the Creepshow name gets vended to a pack of inept amateurs who produce a muddled mess that actually makes the second one look good.

Psycho - Classic movies in general were never meant to be more than one. Would anyone ever consider bothering with Citizen Kane II or Return to Casablanca? So why oh why did we have to have more than one Psycho? The drama is complete within the four corners of the original. Nothing about it screams out “Hey, let’s follow the further exploits of Norman Bates.” I suppose in theory Norman’s release from the funny farm might have had some potential. But what we get from Two, Three and Four is pure marketing, our anti-hero reduced to a bargain-basement serial killer on par with Jason or Freddy.

Raiders of the Lost Ark - Spielberg movies just don’t lead to good sequels. He’s come close a time or two, such as with Jurassic Park. Most of the time he doesn’t even try (I’ll bet the studio brass would have let him screw all their trophy wives in exchange for an ET 2, but nothing doing). Obviously Jaws wasn’t going to turn into anything re-sellable. But why not Indiana Jones? He’s patterned off the old pulp tales and matinee serials that were by definition series pieces. And yet every attempt to capture the magic and fun of the original has come across as crass, witless, strange or all of the above. It’s like the guy just ran out of charm. To be sure, they followed the formula fairly faithfully. But perhaps that was the problem. Rather than branch out and make something with a life of its own, they just kept hitting the corpse of the first one with a defibrillator. No wonder it never worked.