Yo yo yo! Welcome to another Top Ten Things here at Enuffa.com!
As a companion piece to my
Disappointing Movie Sequels column I thought I'd compile a list of sequels that were actually superior to the original. It's something that doesn't happen often, but there have been numerous second or third cinematic chapters that have either expanded on or generally outperformed their predecessor.
**Please note, two common picks you won't see on this list are
The Godfather part II and
The Empire Strikes Back. Don't start throwing fruit yet, hear me out. While both of those films are great, I prefer
The Godfather I and
A New Hope, respectively, just by a hair. I can understand why some like the sequels better but I'm not one of those people.**
**Please further note, I also haven't included
The Two Towers or
Return of the King, as the
Lord of the Rings trilogy is really just one extended film.**
So let's get to business....
10. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
James Cameron's 1984 classic
The Terminator took Arnold Schwarzenegger's already burgeoning movie career to the next level by casting him as an evil cyborg sent from the future to destroy the mother of his enemy John Connor. From this simple concept Cameron created a mythic film saga of self-aware machines turning on their creators and laying waste to the entire planet; a concept borrowed for
The Matrix series, among others. Only problem with the first film was the modest budget, which didn't allow Cameron to fully realize the story. Some of the effects were quite clunky and prevented full audience immersion. Seven years later he more or less remade the movie but set it during John's childhood, when a second Terminator has been sent to kill him instead of Sarah.
Unbeknownst to the evil machines, John's future self has reprogrammed one of the original Terminators (played of course by Arnie) to protect little John.
T2 tells a very similar story but expands on it both visually and conceptually. John's mother Sarah is now a hardened badass who is determined to stop the creation of the network of machines before it ever starts, and she begrudgingly accepts Arnie's help despite her previous traumatic experience at the hands of his predecessor (not unlike Ripley's hangup with androids in
Aliens). As for the new evil Terminator, that one's an upgrade model comprised of liquid metal, who can shapeshift and is nigh indestructible. This character is the subject of some of the movie's most innovative and expensive special effects, as he morphs from one likeness to another. The result is a pretty thrilling action movie which, despite basically being a retread, is an improvement on the original at almost every level. My only two complaints were that Edward Furlong wasn't much of an actor, and I missed Michael Biehn's presence. Seriously, that guy rules!
9. Bride of Frankenstein
I first saw the original 1931
Frankenstein on the TV show
Creature Double Feature when I was probably seven years old, and like most kids I was fascinated by this little film about a man who creates a monster. It wasn't until years later when I actually read the book that I realized how simplistic the Karloff film was. So many story threads were tossed out and the moral ambiguity of Frankenstein himself was sort of glossed over in favor of a hero vs. monster scenario. Yes we somewhat sympathize with the monster, but he's kind of a mindless brute in the film, rather than the eloquent, tragic figure of the novel. In college I finally watched
Bride of Frankenstein, and my original assessment was that it strayed so far from the book and was so unabashedly weird that I hated it. But upon later viewings I developed an appreciation for the film's uncompromisingly bizarre tone and for how ballsy its anti-religious and sexual undertones were for 1935. The story is also much more complex and Karloff's monster is completely sympathetic, aided by his newfound ability to speak (Sadly all of his dialogue is monosyllabic and clunky, but you take what you can get). The performances by Ernest Thesinger as the sinister, rather flamboyant Dr. Pretorious, and Elsa Lanchester as The Bride are also iconic in the pantheon of classic monster films. The Bride's "birth" is obviously the most film's famous scene; Lanchester based her movements on those of a bird to achieve a sense of otherworldiness. That this was such a memorable character is even more amazing considering how brief her appearance is. My only real gripes with Bride of Frankenstein are a) that there was no effort to make the few characters recast from the first film look like the original actors, even though Bride begins immediately after the first movie ends (For example the Burgomeister is now thin and has a mustache and Frankenstein's wife Elizabeth is suddenly waaaaaay hotter), and b) that Frankenstein's lab has a lever in the middle of the room that blows up the entire building. What might I ask moved him to install such an easily-activated self-destruct mechanism?
