13 Sequels That Were Bigger, Louder, And Crazier Than The Original Movie
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While the 2014 action spy hit Kingsman: The Secret Service was packed with outlandish action, crazy stuntwork, and ridiculous set-pieces, the sequel outdoes it in pretty much every department. Kingsman: The Golden Circle hits theaters this weekend (check out GameSpot's review here), so we've taken a look at some of the biggest, baddest, and wildest movie sequels ever made…
The Road Warrior/Mad Max 2 (1981)
Mad Max was a low-budget, small-scale Australian B-movie most notable for introducing the world to Mel Gibson (albeit redubbed with an American accent for US audiences). Although it did feature a few exciting car stunts, it mostly played out as an intense psychological revenge drama. But it was an international hit, and when director George Miller moved onto the sequel in 1981, everything got bigger and wilder. Miller strips the plot down to its basics and delivers some of the craziest, most exciting vehicular action ever put on film. At least half the movie is a car/truck/bike chase through the post–apocalyptic desert, combined with some unforgettably weird bad guys (Lord Humongous!) and Gibson’s grizzled, monosyllabic hero trying his best to stay alive.
Evil Dead II (1987)
With the success of Ash vs Evil Dead, it's easy to forget that 1981's original Evil Dead was not really a comedy at all, but an intense horror movie. This changed in 1987, when director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell returned for the sequel. Evil Dead II still has gallons of blood, but it is essentially an insane comedy remake of the first movie, with everything amped to 11. Campbell delivers a brilliant, hilarious performance as the beleaguered Ash, assaulted and tormented throughout one long night by creatures from beyond our world. Walls spray blood, eyeballs fly into mouths, trees attack girls, Ash is sent flying through the woods--all of which is delivered with breakneck, gleeful verve. In the film's most famous sequence, Ash severs his own possessed hand, and replaces it with a whirling chainsaw. Groovy!
The Raid 2 (2014)
In 2012, Indonesia-based Welshman Gareth Evans delivered The Raid: Redemption, a thrilling, brutal blast of action that woke up even the most jaded movie fan. With the sequel, Evans wisely didn't attempt to top the first movie in terms of intensity, but instead made a far more ambitious film. While The Raid has a single tower block setting, The Raid 2 spreads its action out across multiple Jakarta locations, and combines it with a complex story of undercover cops and gangsters reminiscent of movies like Heat and The Departed. The action sequences are still incredible, with Evans and star/choreographer Iko Uwais delivering a series of how-did-they-do-that moments that it's hard to see anyone topping anytime soon.
John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)
Most of the sequels on this list are the result of the huge success of an earlier movie. One exception is John Wick 2. 2014's reluctant hitman thriller John Wick was only a modest success theatrically, but its reputation continued to grow once it hit home entertainment formats, ensuring a bigger, more expansive sequel with more than twice the budget. Director Chad Stahelski embraces his increased opportunity to expand the world of John Wick, with bigger, more inventive set pieces, multiple international locations, and a cast that includes not only returning star Keanu Reeves, but Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, and rapper Common. As a result, John Wick: Chapter 2 went onto make more than twice what the original film made at the box office, with Chapter 3 due in 2019.
Final Destination 2 (2003)
The 2000 horror movie Final Destination had a great premise--a group of students narrowly escape death, but then find death catching up with them. The film was a hit and a sequel was quickly put into development; while the plot of Final Destination 2 remains almost exactly the same, the death sequences are considerably more extravagant and bizarre. Characters are decapitated by an elevator, sliced into three by a flying chain fence, impaled by a fire escape ladder, blown into pieces by an exploding barbecue--it's all here!
Aliens (1986)
These days, the vast majority of high-profile studio sequels adopt the tried-and-tested formula of simply repeating what made the first movie so successful. James Cameron's Aliens was different; instead of copying the slow, creeping horror of Ridley Scott's Alien, Cameron's sequel flipped genres and delivered a breakneck, thrilling war movie, which pitches heavily armed space marines against dozens of slavering Xenomorphs. The result is one of the all-time great sequels, completely different to the original in almost every respect, but every bit as good.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Of course, Aliens isn't James Cameron's only spectacular sci-fi sequel. In 1991, Cameron returned to the property that made his name and delivered Terminator 2: Judgment Day. While the original Terminator was a tight, focused thriller that makes great use of a modest budget, T2 was--at the time--the most expensive movie ever made, with pioneering special effects and some unforgettable set-pieces. From the freeway chase and the hospital breakout to the terrifying, relentless T-1000 and the massive Cyberdyne headquarters siege, the style and scale of T2 makes other movies of the era seem positively anemic.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
On the face of it, the second Indiana Jones movie isn't that different to the first. Indy and his companions find themselves on a dangerous adventure in a far-off land, and like Raiders of the Lost Ark, the movie is packed with sly humor and thrilling action. But Temple of Doom is a much darker, weirder affair than Raiders, that really pushes what you can get away with in a PG-rated movie. From the ghoulish banquet ("snake surprise!") to the sight of villainous Mola Ram pulling a heart from a man's chest, Temple of Doom gave many a pre-teen nightmares in 1984. Even director Steven Spielberg thinks he went too far, subsequently stating that it was “too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific.”
Bad Boys II (2003)
Lets face it--Michael Bay doesn't really make movies that aren't big and loud. But back in 1995, when he made his debut hit Bad Boys, he was perhaps a little more restrained with his filmmaking style. By the time Bad Boys II arrived in 2003, Bay had movies such as Armageddon and Pearl Harbor under his belt, and all restraint was out of the window. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence fight Russian drug dealers, Haitian gangsters, and the KKK in a series of increasingly ridiculous, hyper-stylized, over-the-top action sequences, with little regard for logic or taste. The critics absolutely hated its combination of violent action and vulgar comedy, but audiences lapped it up.
Crank: High Voltage (2009)
Jason Statham has starred in a lot of movies that are a bit interchangeable--Homefront, The Mechanic, Parker, Safe, Wild Card…. the list goes on. The big exception is Crank and its sequel; wild, self-referential action comedies in which Statham plays the wonderfully named hitman Chev Chelios. If Crank was unstable, Crank: High Voltage is unhinged, as Chev attempts to keep his artificial heart charged by any means necessary--jumper cables, public sex on a racetrack--while trying to get his real heart back. In one scene, Chev and his foe get electrocuted, grow to 100 feet and fight it out like Godzilla and Mothra. In another, ex-Spice Girl Geri Halliwell plays Statham's mum, and the movie ends with a flaming Stath giving the audience the finger while REO Speedwagon plays on the soundtrack. Glorious.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
The one of the great misconceptions about Tobe Hooper's 1974 horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is that it's a graphic, gory movie. It's certainly terrifying but actually very restrained in terms of violence, and its power coming from what you don't see. This was not the case with the sequel, made 12 years later. Texas Chainsaw 2 is everything the original was not--gory, flashy, silly, loud, and as subtle as a chainsaw to the face. But it's also deliriously entertaining--from the punk rock soundtrack to vfx master Tom Savini's gruesome effects work, Hooper took full advantage of his bigger budget and gave gore-and-metal crazed teenagers of the 1980s exactly what they wanted. Plus, Dennis Hopper delivers one of his wildest performances, which is really saying something.
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)
There's no reason to expect that the sixth movie in a 20-year-old action franchise should be anything other than a lame retread of past glories. But there's not really another movie like Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. The film does feature both Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, stars of the original 1992 sci-fi action hit, but that's where the similarities end. In the hands of director John Hyams, this is an art action movie that has as much in common with the films of Stanley Kubrick, Gaspar Noe, and David Lynch as it does Roland Emmerich. Complex, intense, and disturbing, but with some insanely violent action sequences courtesy of British martial arts icon Scott Adkins, Day of Reckoning is not just the best movie in the franchise, it's one of the best action movies of the decade so far.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Gremlins 2 is the Godfather 2 of wild and crazy sequels. Director Joe Dante resisted studio offers for a sequel to his 1985 comedy horror hit for years, but eventually agreed, on the condition that he was given complete creative control. With total freedom and a budget five times bigger than the first movie, Dante delivers an utterly berserk live action cartoon which he later described as "one of the more unconventional studio pictures ever." As Gremlins take a over a state-of-the-art Manhattan office building owned by an egotistical billionaire businessman named Daniel Clamp (sound familiar?), Dante throws in a joke or cameo every seconds, mercilessly pastiches the first Gremlins, and ends the movie with a musical sequence in which the Gremlins sing "New York, New York" in the building's lobby. The film was, unsurprisingly, a box office bomb. But the madness of Gremlins 2 is still celebrated today, not least by Key and Peele in this hilarious script brainstorm sketch.