Well before remakes became Hollywood’s big cash cow, studios would attempt to milk a horror movie for all its worth with sequel after sequel. While the name value was often enough to draw in the masses, the majority of the time audiences left the cinema feeling as though their minds and eyes had been as defiled as the bodies they’d seen on screen.
But to be a terrible horror film, a truly worthless piece of dreck, takes quite a special skill. These kinds of films are best enjoyed in an inebriated state, with plenty of buddies around to make the viewing experience actually, you know, fun.
So gather some friends, crack open a cold beer, stick your feet up and enjoy these woeful horror flicks.
Lost Boys: The Tribe: An unnecessary follow-up to a great vampire flick, this showed up around 18 years too late for it to have any relevance. The Lost Boys was a terrific movie of its own time. By the time the sequel was released, there had been so many vampire flicks that it seemed wholly unnecessary even before watching. It didn’t help that the film itself was woeful. There were few shocks, it’s pretty boring and shoddily made. Not worth wasting your time on (sober, at least).
Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2: Dear me, has there ever been such a blatant cash-in as this one? Following the original’s stellar performance at the box office where it became one of the most profitable films of all time (based on the cost-to-earnings ratio), this buys into the folklore created by its predecessor but is just head-bashingly awful and not even remotely scary. It completely dismisses the found footage aesthetic (and in the process completely destroying any notion that the first film was a documentary) to create a suspenseless mess that looked like it just rolled off the horror factory line and had a ‘Blair Witch’ sticker slapped on it.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch: I’ll admit it: this one’s a bit of a cheat: In and of itself, this isn’t actually a horrible movie. It’s perfectly serviceable 80s schlock, where a mask company owner tries to kill American children through his products. Outlandish and nonsensical, yes, but it was also half-decent and even had some a point to make about consumerism. But one question remains that makes this rotten as a sequel — Where the hell is Michael Myers? Halloween <i>is</i> Michael Myers. Stamping a ‘Halloween’ tag on this is little more than a name brand cash-in and an easy way to continue the series without having to bother to come up with anything for its star to do. Lazy.
Saw V: The first Saw was a tremendous thriller, packed with mystery and intrigue as well as some clever gruesome inventions. Since then though, the series has had varying degrees of success — with VI marking a decent return to form. The previous entry, however, was excruciatingly bad. The plot was threadbare, the traps and those caught in them almost an afterthought and a severe lack of Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) meant that this sequel was less terrifying than turgid.
Jeepers Creepers 2: If you’ve ever seen Jeepers Creepers, you’ll have seen around 20 minutes of sublime filmmaking. That opening sequence is as good as just about anything — completely terrifying and fingernail-shreddingly nervy. It’s a shame that the rest of the movie didn’t live up to those heights, but the sequel is pants from start to end. It completely removes any intrigue you might have had about the Creeper. While the film’s logical from the monster’s point of view (it needs body parts to live, can only figure out which parts to take from which person by scaring the crap out of them, makes sense to give a bus-load of high school kids the heebie jeebies at once), it’s a real chore to endure and would have been much better had it not been made at all.
What are your choices for the worst horror sequels ever?
