Difficult Second Child: The 5 Best Bad Movie Sequels

A FILM SEQUEL can be a beautiful thing (c.f. "The Godfather II," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Dark Knight.")

But for every sequel success story there are dozens of other films that are so crappy it's hard to understand how any movie executive gave them the go-ahead. See: "Starship Troopers 3," which recently came out — straight-to-DVD — and stars Casper Van Dien (fresh off the set of other winners such as "Slayer" and "Meltdown"), who reprises his role as the bug-fighting badass Johnny Rico. Hey, a job's a job.

Yet this latest installment of the bastardization of Robert A. Heinlein's book raises a few questions: First, who knew there was a "Starship Troopers 2"? And second, not all bad sequels are actually bad, right? Just kind of bad. A little bit bad. So deliciously, guilty-pleasure-ish bad, in fact, that we're not afraid to admit they're almost good.

Express does the dirty work for you and breaks down the top five best bad sequels — and we're sure you can snag them on DVD. No one else has.

5) "The Devil's Rejects"
When it comes to slasher films, 2003's "House of 1,000 Corpses" is as disgusting as they come, with villains who taxidermy their victims, force a girl to make out with her father's skinned remains and line underground laboratories with countless dead. But director Rob Zombie made things even fouler with 2005's "The Devil's Rejects," which sees the Firefly family on the run for the murders in "House of 1,000 Corpses" — and, you know, the 70-plus people they killed before that. At first glance, "The Devil's Rejects" might look simply psychotic and sickening, but watch it again and you'll see how strangely successful the acting is (seasoned horror actor Bill Moseley is particularly impressive as killer Otis B. Driftwood) and Zombie's shoot-'em-all ending actually works. If you don't mind nightmares, go for it.

4) "Jaws 2"
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the movie theater, "Jaws 2" arrived in 1978, scaring the crap out of swimmers all over again. Roy Scheider returns as Police Chief Martin Brody, who — despite skepticism from coworkers and Amity Island's mayor — is convinced that another shark is preying on their town. When his two sons sneak out to go sailing, Brody has to use his all his shark-pertise to save them from the toothy beast. While "Jaws 2" lacks the crucial horror of its predecessor, its Hitchcock-like treatment of the shark (viewers don't actually see it until around the last third of the film) coupled with the teenagers-as-snacks plot works well. Who doesn't want to see annoying, screaming, adolescent hoodlums get chomped on? And while the lack of Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw is a downgrade, Scheider's exasperation with sharks, people, whatever (maybe he looked into the future and saw how just-plain-bad "Jaws 3" and "Jaws 4" would be?) is just as charming as ever.

3) "Return to Oz"
While many may consider 1939's "The Wizard of Oz" a heart-warming, fantastical film about how there's "no place like home," the skeptics among us saw the eeriness for what it was — a murderous witch, a power-hungry ruler, Munchkins and flying monkeys. (Bravo even listed that last simian bit as No. 86 on its list of "100 Scariest Movie Moments.") But something even more cracked-out came along with "Return to Oz," the 1985 semi-sequel starring a 9-year-old Fairuza Balk. While "The Wizard of Oz" might have seemed bright and cheery with all that Technicolor, original author Frank L. Baum's darker, denser vision is more manifest in "Return," with Auntie Em forcing Dorothy to receive shock therapy to forget her adventure over the rainbow; a destroyed yellow brick road; police in the form of Wheelers, part-human machines with wheels for hands and feet; and a villain in Princess Mombi, a witch with 31 different, and interchangeable, heads (think of a treacherous Pez dispenser). It's campy, creepy and riddled with production errors, but if you're a fan of "The Dark Crystal," "Labyrinth" or "Legend," you'll probably eat this up.

2) "The Lost World: Jurassic Park"
Ask any self-respecting dinosaur fan what the best thing about 1993's "Jurassic Park" was, and they'll tell you the raptors. A close second, though, could be found in the very human, all-black-wearing, chaos-theory spouting mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). The actor brought his intensely awkward quirkiness to the role, but there just wasn't enough of him — so the fact that 1997 sequel "The Lost World" focused mainly on his full-on transition into a skeptic antihero is a definite plus. While flat performances from Julianne Moore and Vince Vaughn make sitting through the film somewhat miserable, placing dinosaurs in real cities — i.e., watching a T. Rex destroy San Diego — helps balance out the film's tolerability factor. Plus, "Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues," the film's accompanying video game for SNES and GameBoy, is straight-up ballin'.

1) "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome"
In a post-apocalyptic, very leather-y future, Tina Turner wears ridiculous headdresses, Mel Gibson saves crash-landed children; and when two men enter the Thunderdome, only one leaves. The third installment in the Mad Max franchise (as of last year, there was a fourth film, "Mad Max: Fury Road," in the works), 1985's "Thunderdome" focuses on Gibson's Mad Max character, who, while wandering through a desolate landscape in a constant search for oil and water, stumbles upon Bartertown and its rulers, Master Blaster. Tina may be over-the-top as the manipulative and power-hungry Auntie Entity and those kids lost in the desert seem far too similar to Peter Pan's Lost Boys, but any Gibson film before "The Passion of the Christ" is good in our book — and this one fits right in.

Written by Express contributor Roxana Hadadi

"The Devil's Child" photo by Gene Page/Lions Gate Films