10 Awesome Horror Movies With Disappointing Sequels

Like many Steven Spielberg projects, Jaws blurs the line between genres, with elements of adventure, thriller, and bromance. But at its core, Jaws is a horror movie. In many ways it plays like a slasher flick, the plot punctuated by the shark’s gruesome kills. After the initial film’s huge success, Universal would end up greenlighting a series of increasingly crap sequels.

The connective tissue between instalments would be stretched increasingly thin as each new movie was cranked out. For Jaws 2 (1978), it brought back Roy Scheider’s Martin Brody, Amity Island was again played by Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and we had John Williams’ irreplaceable creeping score. It was no Jaws, but it was at least a recognisable relative with effective moments.

Then came Jaws 3-D in 1983, hopping onto the 3D bandwagon of the time. The cast is stellar but features none of the original actors, the closest connection being Chief Brody’s sons Mike (Dennis Quaid) and Sean (John Putch). The new setting of Sea World Orlando also distances itself from the original film, and with astonishingly bad effects and a resounding lack of scares, it seemed things couldn’t possibly get worse than Jaws 3-D.

But then we got Jaws: The Revenge in 1987, which implies that the Brody family is being deliberately targeted by a new shark as some kind of vendetta.