8 More Movie Sequels With Visual Effects Inexcusably Worse Than The Original

5. Escape From L.A.

Escape From LA surfing scene
Paramount Pictures

John Carpenter made a name for himself with his superb practical effects work on movies like The Thing, so it was seriously confusing to see the CGI in 1996's Escape From L.A. fall hard on the other end of the spectrum.

Sequel to Escape From New York, Escape From L.A. came out 15 years later, with a budget that was around nine times larger. So, more CGI was always inevitable, especially after movies like Jurassic Park and Tron had showed what visual effects were capable of - in the right hands. But on Escape From L.A., those hands just weren't there. Maybe Carpenter isn't as skilled with a computer as he is with a makeup brush, but regardless, the movie's visual effects are dodgy, and the surfing scene is proof.

Starting with a shot of a car being swallowed up by some waves that everyone involved should be embarrassed about, the scene than shows Kurt Russell and Peter Fonda ridin' those waves, with both men trying their best to act like they're surfing, while actually being stuck against an amusingly obvious green screen background.

One of the biggest issues here is that Russell and Fonda are both balanced too well: they're not moving and shaking as much as they would be if they were actually surfing on the waves. And that's without mentioning some awful compositing, and the blocky, undetailed CGI water found in certain shots. Escape From L.A. is too campy for its own good, foolishly moving away from the straighter tone of the original, and this scene is the visual manifestation of that issue.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!