Top 10 Movie Sequels of the 80s and 90s

You will certainly not “go down in a blaze of glory” if you watch this awesome and fun early 90s Western. Featuring Emilio Estevez as Billy the Kid and a tremendous ensemble cast, Young Guns 2 has Billy and his gang looking for revenge.

This is full of action and it is one of the “cooler” Western movies that were made during this time. While most people say the first movie is better, I have always had a softer spot for the sequel. Plus, as I eluded to at the start, Young Guns 2 has an amazing soundtrack by Jon Bon Jovi, featuring the iconic song “Blaze of Glory,” which is one of the greatest movie songs of all time. Actually, the whole album he did based on this movie is fantastic!

I had to have this on my top 10 movie sequels of the 80s and 90s list. The tagline for 1993’s Wayne’s World 2 was “You’ll laugh again, you’ll cry again, you’ll hurl again”, and boy were they right! Mike Myers and Dana Carvey caught lightning in a bottle with the first movie and the second one is just as much fun!

This time Wayne is trying to put on an epic music festival all while Christopher Walken is trying to steal his smoking hot babe, Cassandra played by 90s schwing-inducing Tia Carrere! And who can forget their roadie, Del, telling the story about having to beat the shopkeeper to death with his own shoes? Wayne embarks on some kung fu fighting with Cassandra’s father and of course, Garth gets it on with Kim Bassinger who wants him to kill her husband! 

Is it a remake or is it a sequel? I like to think of Evil Dead II as its own thing. On a personal note, this was the first Evil Dead movie I saw so it’s my favorite. Once again Ash and his pals are in a cabin in the woods and they accidentally unleash the dastardly Deadites. How can you not love this movie?

This one, more than the first, gives us the wise-cracking, funny badass Ash that we would all grow to love. It has some truly amazing practical effects that hold up to this day as well. The thing with Evil Dead II is that it is just fun from start to end. It’s the perfect movie to fire up if you’re in the mood to turn your brain off and be entertained by the amazing talents of Bruce Campbell!

The Lost World had a lot to live up to after the dino-riffic success of Jurassic Park in 1993. While not as good as the original, The Lost World is still a fun time. Jeff Goldblum and Julianne Moore are the stars this time around, who find themselves on a second island that is overrun with dinosaurs, and InGen are planning on taking the dinosaurs to the USA to put them in a zoo!

There are many great moments here; the T-Rex duo looking for their baby is such a tense and epic scene. The raptors hunting the humans down in the tall grass and stalking our heroes through the complex. Even the goofiness that is the T-Rex rampaging through the city is fun. It may lack the substance of the first movie, but The Lost World is still super fun to watch.

If I were to do a worst movie sequels list, Friday the 13^th Part V: A New Beginning would have a high chance of being on that list However, Friday the 13^th Part VI: Jason Lives is the best Friday the 13^th movie ever made. They realized they made a mistake with Part V and this time the Jason in Part VI is what most of us think of when we think of Jason Voorhees. There are so many over-the-top and fun kills in this movie and it just ticks all of the boxes of what you need when it comes to a great Friday the 13^th movie. If you can only watch one movie in this franchise, this is 100 percent the one you need to watch.

We are going straight from Jason to Freddy on this top 10 movie sequels of the 80s and 90s list! It’s always up for debate as to who the best slasher monster/villain is, but Freddy has always been my favorite. The Dream Warriors is really what gave us the more wise cracking and sarcastic Freddy that we would all love.

This time around, Nancy is working at a hospital for kids where she meets Kristen, who has a special power that lets her pull people into her dreams. Freddy has well and truly met his match this time, but not before picking off many of these kids in very creative ways. The “puppet scene” is to this day my favorite kill that Freddy does. This is a fun movie and actually Part IV and Part V make up their own little trilogy of Freddy movies that take part in this franchise.

The bat is back in 1992’s Batman Returns! Batman ’89 was a game-changer, but its sequel is the better movie. Michael Keaton is back as Batman and this time he goes up against Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in a suit that gives Sandy D’s a run for its money in the tightness department! Batman also has Danny DeVito’s Penguin and crazy businessman Max Shrek played by the always dastardly Christopher Walken.

Batman Returns is just a really fun movie. Some may say it has a bit too much going on, but that’s what makes it such an entertaining movie to watch. Tim Burton lends his distinct “Burton style” to this movie which, along with the Christmas setting, gives it a very cool look. Also, the Super Nintendo and Sega CD video games based on this movie are fantastic and just as worth checking out as the actual movie is. 

Alien is a fantastic horror movie, one of the greatest sci-fi horror movies of all time. For the sequel, James Cameron went a different route. Instead of making another horror movie, James Cameron went the action route. Aliens has a very different feel to the first movie, so much so that it is hard to compare the two.

This time around, Ripley and a bunch of Marines are stuck on a planet that is overrun by Xenomorphs, including a Queen! We get to see Sigourney Weaver be an absolute badass in this movie. It was not common to see such a strong and tough female lead in a movie back in ’86, so she was a real pioneer in that regard. Aliens is just a great action movie, the aliens look amazing and as there are so many of them, it makes this a very tense movie where you never feel like anyone is actually safe.

Having The Empire Strikes Back on a list talking about the top 10 movie sequels of the 80s and ’90s is pretty much a guarantee, even if it does only just make the cut in terms of when it was released. Regarded as one of the greatest movie sequels of all time, The Empire Strikes Back had so much to live up to, and it proved that Star Wars: A New Hope was not a fluke.

From the Battle of Hoth, Boba Fett, Master Yoda, “I am your father” and more, this is a movie that has so many iconic moments that I could do a top ten Star Wars moments list and half of them would be from this movie. Another interesting thing about The Empire Strikes Back is that it ends on a real downer note, leaving fans waiting for a few years to see if Luke was going to save the day. An interesting tidbit is that it would take until 1996’s Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire for a video game to let fans experience what it would have been like to be in the Battle of Hoth. 

We have already talked about James Cameron, but as soon as this list was being put together, I knew there was only one movie that could be number one: Terminator 2: Judgement Day. This is the greatest sequel ever made!

This time Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a good T-800 sent back to protect a preteen John Connor from the T-1000, a Terminator made of liquid metal and played amazingly by Robert Patrick. This is just an epic movie in every sense of the word. It has so many incredible action movies and at the time, these special effects were like nothing we had ever seen before. However, this is not style over substance. T2 also tells an amazing story and truly makes you care about the characters. The making of this movie is just as interesting, from the short time they had to get this thing made and in theatres in 1991 to rock star Billy Idol being the first choice for the T-1000!