Horror Marathon, Anyone?Let's look closely at the all spooky scary franchises, sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, and etc. we're watching in the dark with no lights on.
Vote up the dumbest horror follow-ups that did one thing right.
Sequels are a touchy subject in the horror community. Many genre fans believe that, at best, sequels are a cash grab, and at worst, they destroy the sanctity of the original films. Those things may be true, but dumb horror sequels also provide an endless amount of entertainment for audiences who just want to have a good time.
Just because a sequel is dumb (and there's no shortage of dumb horror sequels) doesn't mean it doesn't do something smart. Sequels like Halloween: Resurrectionand Slumber Party Massacre II might not be on the honor roll, but they both do things that would become the norm for horror movies years later.
Don't worry if you love these dumb horror sequels - we do, too.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch really tried to do something cool by breaking away from Michael Myers and Haddonfield, IL. It's just that audiences weren't ready for a movie about an evil Irish cult who wanted to use Halloween masks to fill people's heads with bugs and snakes.
With no Michael Myers and no Laurie Strode, Halloween III tried to give audiences a break from the slasher genre that was being crammed down their throats by offering up a more tense science-fiction story that also happens to be very dumb. And that's okay because it's also super fun.
If we had a time machine, the only thing we'd change about this movie is its box office. Think about it: How great would it be to live in a world where the Halloween franchise was made up of anthology entries instead of directors trying to tell the same story about Michael Myers every couple of years?
For most of the films in the disjointed franchise centering on Hannibal Lecter, he's quite demure, even when he's eating the face of his mortal enemy. In Manhunter, he's snide but hardly scary, and in The Silence of the Lambs, he's downright charming. That changed with Hannibal, the Jason Lives of Lecter films.
In Hannibal, the titular villain doesn't just reminisce about his dietary preferences - he indulges in them. The actual movie is an incredibly pulpy horror movie that's nowhere near as restrained as The Silence of the Lambs, but it does have a few spectacularly bonkers scenes in which someone eats a piece of their own brain and a guy is fed to man-eating boars.
Silent Night, Deadly Night isn't a triumph of cinema by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a pretty solid holiday slasher. Following Billy Chapman on a Christmas rampage as he suffers a traumatic break after seeing his parents murdered by a man dressed as Santa, the film plays out pretty much how you'd imagine.
The sequel, the aptly named Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, follows Billy's baby brother, Ricky, as he goes on his own rampage. About half of this movie is just repurposed footage from the first film, but that's okay because the sequel includes one of the greatest scenes ever committed to celluloid: the garbage day rampage.
In this amazing, beautiful, perfect scene, Ricky becomes completely unglued and gets his hands on a handgun before taking out everyone in his neighborhood while cackling like a madman and making severely dramatic faces. Where is this actor's Academy Award nomination?
Rather than pick up right after Child's Play 2, the third film in this long-running franchise jumps eight years into the future and sends a 16-year-old Andy to military school. The decision to jump forward may not do anything exciting, but the time jump allows the audience to hang out with a teenager and not a whiney little kid.
That's not to say that Alex Vincent (Andy in the first two films and even a few later entries) is a bad actor or anything - he's just a really annoying little kid. The film itself is kind of ho-hum, but it gives the audience something new, and that's always good.
There's no way to top the original Return of the Living Dead. It's funny, it's scary, it's nihilistic, and it has a great soundtrack. The film's sequel essentially tried to recreate the first movie for the Goonies set, and it just doesn't work aside from the rad version of Anthrax's "I'm the Man." That's why part three had to go in a wildly different direction.
This very '90s Return of the Living Dead III is kind of a mash-up of The Doom Generation and Repo Man, but with zombies. The acting is wooden, and the story is a little Romeo and Juliet, but this movie takes the zombie genre in a new direction, and you have to appreciate it for that fact.
The coolest thing Return of the Living Dead III does is show what it's like to become a member of the undead. Melinda Clarke plays a young woman whose boyfriend reanimates her with Trioxin before taking her on the run from the military on the streets of Los Angeles. To deal with the pain of being dead, she commits self-harm and takes out her hunger on gang members who refuse to leave her and her boyfriend alone. It's a little over the top, but it's a cult classic for a reason.
Every Final Destination movie is dumb - that's why they're all so good - but Final Destination 3 is when the franchise really flexes its lack of brain cells. Characters haphazardly fire stapler guns at one another and explain that they need to be "really tan" for an upcoming funeral. It's good stuff.
All of the dum-dums in this movie aside, Final Destination 3 has two really big things going for it: The film is a stand-alone sequel, which allows it to be its own thing, even if it does get bogged down by the franchise's mythology in the second act, and it also has the best death premonition of the entire franchise.
The premonition sees an entire roller coaster full of teens get thrown to their deaths in a variety of worst-case scenarios for anyone brave/foolish enough to get on a carnival ride. You can't go wrong with the Final Destination movies - they're all dumb, blood-splattered fun - but Final Destination 3 sufficiently makes a case for the entire series with its neck-mangling opening sequence.
