The 5 Most Awkward Sequel Setups of All Time

We’ve all seen it happen.  You’re watching a movie that for the most part is pretty fucking terrible. You sit there and watch the atrocious acting or listen to the awful dialogue; you let out long-winded sighs as characters bounce around on screen making terrible decisions and when plot twists come you could give two shits. After a fashion you glance at your watch and you notice that finally! the movie has got to be coming to an end. Yes, yes this loose, all-over-the-place excuse for a story seems to be winding down! And then just before this useless piece of box-office diarrhea cuts to black there’s one last shot, one last line of dialogue that makes you go, “Well, that was a little presumptuous.” I’m talking about the awkward sequel set up. They usually happen in films where the studios think they’ve got such box office gold on their hands that they can have the audacity to hint at a sequel right at the last second of the first film. Of course this ultimately blows up in their faces and the films are never made. Here are five examples where this really stands out, sometimes to hilarious degrees. SPOILERS AHEAD!

5) Unbreakable — Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson; M. Night Shyamalan dir.

M. Night Shyamalan was high up on Hollywood’s “It” list after 1999’s The Sixth Sense. A year later he released what appeared to audiences as a two-hour superhero origin story about a man (Bruce Willis) who comes out of a horrible train wreck with not a scratch on him. A mysterious, handicapped stranger (Samuel L. Jackson) tries to convince him that he is special and has been put on this planet for better things. It is revealed that Jackson’s character has been causing all of these horrible accidents, searching for someone to come out alive and unharmed. This person would be the exact physical opposite to Jackson’s frail and easily injured character thus allowing him to become an evil villain of sorts. After all of this is revealed and Bruce Willis realizes that there is a whole big world out there for him to try and help, the film ends. At points it was hinted at that Shyamalan had envisioned Unbreakable as a trilogy and that this first film left the door open for these two other movies. But thanks to a box office and critical failure (I happen to really enjoy the film) these plans were never made. I started out at the top with this one because it’s the loosest and least insane example of awkward sequel setups and as of right now there actually appears to be a possibility of at least a second film moving forward. But I’ll believe that when I see it.

4) Street Fighter — Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia; Steven E. Souza dir.

This masterful disaster is the first in two video game adaptations on this list. The film is the 1994 live-action re-imagining of the massively successful video game franchise of the same name. The story is pretty much the same as the game’s loose outline: Colonel Guile (Van Damme) and his followers are doing battle with the evil dictator M. Bison (Julia) for one reason or another. Maybe genocide is involved, I don’t know. But in any event by the end of the film the villains are defeated (shock) and poor dictator M. Bison has been crushed by a gigantic wall of TVs. Or has he? At the end of the credits the camera zooms in and suddenly we see his hand blast through the wreckage. M. Bison has survived! But sadly, Raul Julia did not.  Two months before the film’s release, Julia died of a heart attack. What makes this awkward sequel set up even more awkward is that in the credits the film is dedicated to Julia with the message, “For Raul, Vaya Con Dios.” Yeah, because in life as in death, Raul Julia wanted to be remembered for playing fucking M. Bison in Street Fighter the movie.

3) Godzilla — Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno; Roland Emmerich dir.

It really is hard to describe just how terrible this movie is without taking up pages. Suffice it to say there is a character named “Mayor Ebert” whose creation is intended to strike a real blow to the self-esteem of Roger Ebert and also make him think twice about giving a bad review to a Roland Emmerich film ever again (it didn’t stop him from giving this film a poor one). The film is an incredibly terrible “reboot” to the Godzilla franchise. And an American reboot no-less. Matthew Broderick plays a Greek scientist and Jean Reno plays a French scientist. They’re both determined to stop the giant lizard that was created as a result of French nuclear testing that was near some lizards…or something. After a moronic chase sequence through the hallowed halls of Madison Square Garden, Broderick & Co. kill all of Godzilla’s little babies and that pisses off the big guy even more. Oh yeah, and he’s totally a guy giant lizard because the type of lizard that Godzilla was spawned from reproduces asexually. Not to anyone’s surprise, Godzilla is killed off and the day is saved. Except of course for that awkward last shot where, after our heroes have gone off laughing about their crazy day, the camera focuses in on a pile of rubble outside the destroyed Garden. And it looks like, yup, uh oh! One of the baby Godzilla eggs wasn’t destroyed. The thing hatches and a big lizard comes out and screams at the screen. The film, while relatively successful at the box office, was a critical failure and it was clear to all involved parties that a sequel would be pushing Gozilla’s luck a little too far.

2) Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday — Kane Hodder, Kari Keegan; Adam Marcus dir.

Any common sense would’ve told New Line Cinema to not buy the rights to the Friday the 13th franchise from Paramount at the end of the 1980’s. The last Friday film at Paramount, Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manahttan, is a terrible, terrible, terrible film and was for all intents and purposes the nail in the coffin for the classic slasher era. But bad decisions got the best of New Line–see also The Golden Compass, Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, Blade Trinity, Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, Secondhand Lions, S1m0ne, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Mr. Deeds…and so on–and they decided to resurrect the hockey-masked killer for another outing. What makes this movie especially terrible is the fact that there is very little Jason on screen because the “soul” of Jason hops from body to body, possessing people and having them do his dirty work. There’s also a bunch of bullshit about Jason’s origin, the Vorhees bloodline and, I shit you not, some sort of magic dagger. By the time it’s all over, Jason is stabbed with the magic dagger and a bunch of hands come up out of the ground and drag him to hell, thus releasing all the souls of the people he’s killed. As the two surviving characters walk off screen hugging each other, we’re left with nothing but Jason’s hockey mask laying in the dirt. Then, to the surprise and excitement of every dedicated horror fan sitting through this piece of shit, Freddy Krueger’s glove rises up from the dirt and pulls Jason’s mask down into hell. Cue the Freddy laugh and the film goes to credits. The buzz about a Jason/Freddy team up or versus movie was instantaneous. Fans of the horror genre hadn’t been this excited since Frankenstein’s monster met up with the Wolf Man. Unfortunately the fans would have to wait a very awkward ten years before they finally saw Freddy vs. Jason and by that time the film was in no way a continuation of where Jason Goes to Hell left off. Which is probably a good thing considering Freddy vs. Jason turned out to actually be a good movie.

1) Super Mario Bros. — Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper; Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton dirs.

Unless I’m mistaken (and I very well could be) this is the first cinematic adaptation of a video game. What a fucking curse that’s been! I suppose it was only inevitable that the wildly successful Mario Bros. fanchise went to the big screen. It’s just unfortunate that it had to go up there in this fashion. The film stars Hoskins and Leguizamo as the two Brooklyn, plumber brothers who, for one reason or another, visit this alternate universe. The story loosely follows the plot of the video game where Mario and Luigi have to save the princess from the evil Bowser, King of the Koopas (here played with amazing conviction by Dennis Hopper). As if it wasn’t a big enough offense to give the brothers the last name of “Mario”, yes that makes him Mario Mario, the film also makes all of the Koopa world filled with dinosaurs. I suppose the filmmakers thought that instead of making the Koopas just look like the extra-terrestrial monsters that they are, the audience would find them more relatable if they were dinosaurs. Not to spoil too much of this wondrous epic, but the Mario Bros. save the day. As they sit in their kitchen back in Brooklyn, Luigi depressed over having to leave his beloved Princess Daisy behind in the Mushroom Kingdom, there’s a gigantic knock on the door. In bursts Princess Daisy (played by Pump Up the Volume‘s Samantha Mathis) dressed in war-torn rags and carrying this gigantic rifle/blaster looking thing. The brothers are shocked. As they stand there slack-jawed Daisy shouts to them/the audience, “You’re never gonna believe this!” And as Mario grabs his tool belt, “I believe…oh I believe.” Believe what? What is she talking about? Well who the hell cares? Apparently no one. The film bombed at the box office and no one wanted to touch another live action Super Mario Brothers movie.  It’s been sixteen years and no one has ever mentioned a sequel to this film other than to mention that they will never make a sequel to this shitty, shitty, shit film. Ever. And that’s something you can believe.

You're never gonna believe this? Fucking kill me

~ by allearsalleyesallthetime on July 16, 2009.