5. Beyond The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
A sequel to the
Beyond The Poseidon Adventure amounts to the same kind of logic that would warrant a re-visit to the Titanic: there's not really anywhere else you can take a sunken ship. And yet the success of the original movie warranted that a follow-up got made, and the filmmakers came up with
Beyond The Poseidon Adventure, which opted to tell the same story all over again, down to almost every last detail. The first movie is a good one: when a luxury liner flips over, a group of surviving passengers must work their way up to the top. This makes room for some fun and occasionally ingenius set-pieces. Instead of Gene Hackman, the sequel gives us Michael Caine, who is in full-on protagonist mode - as the leader of a salvage team, he takes others inside, and then the first movie happens all over again. At least it's a different set of characters this time, though, and not the same characters - which was what the producers wanted originally. Wouldn't it have been far easier to have made a sequel from the perspective of a different group of survivors, anyway? It makes sense from a logically, at least, which this really didn't.