Should you find yourself in need of some post-pub giggles this evening, you could do worse than watch Jaws: the Revenge on ITV1 (10:35pm). Famed for such stunning displays of ineptitude as Michael Caine’s amazing self-drying clothes, this film is notoriously bad, a stinker so irredeemably rotten that one US stand-up comedian based an entire stage show around it.

Before the fourth Jaws movie came out the series was a profitable, if increasingly trashy, franchise that looked set to run and run, but Revenge proved so poor that it killed the series stone dead.

Film producer Donnie Wahlberg once said of movie follow-ups: “Quite frankly, most sequels don't execute well”, and even a cursory acquaintance with Hollywood history bears this out. Oh sure, there are obvious exceptions to the rule like The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2 and Aliens, but in the main sequels tend to be rather bad. Whether the result of dodgy actor choices, nonsensical plots or lack of money, there have been scores of big-name movie franchises brought to a premature end thanks to a poor sequel.

For instance, Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather and Godfather II were bona-fide drama classics, each winning multiple Oscars. However, the series’ third entry was a turkey by comparison, marrying a hastily cobbled-together plot with horrible acting, especially on the part of Sofia Coppola, the director’s daughter, who was described as “hopelessly amateurish” (and worse) when the film came out.

But despite the fact that it was an entirely needless sequel, Godfather III at least starred Al Pacino and therefore had some connection with its predecessors. Stinkers like The Next Karate Kid, Son of Mask and Dumb and Dumberer all attempted to replace their forebears’ leading players and limp along on their titles alone before dying ignominious box office deaths, much like Grease 2.

Made in 1982 and set arbitrarily in 1961, Grease 2 was slammed for its lacklustre songs and by-the-numbers dance routines, but drew real critical venom by replacing John Travolta with British unknown Maxwell Caulfield, who wasn’t blessed with anywhere near the Terpsichorean prowess of his predecessor. “With the whole world to choose from, couldn't they have found a good dancer for the lead?” asked movie critic Roger Ebert, quite reasonably, at the time of the movie’s release.

What’s more, the film looked like it was made with the budget of a daytime TV soap, a criticism that could just as easily be levelled at Superman IV, the cut-price Christopher Reeve vehicle that banished the Man of Steel from the big screen for decades.

Superman IV got off to a bad start with its muddled plot and ageing actors, but the film’s most obvious shortcoming was its blatant lack of funds, which apparently ran out five months early. The whole thing looked unbelievably tacky, with every one of Superman’s flight scenes displaying wires for all to see and just one well-worn set redressed time and again as everything from Ellis Island to an Italian village. Apparently its distributors cared so little about this film that they sliced 45 minutes of plot out of it, seemingly at random, before turning it loose on the public, which made the whole mess even more head-scratchingly hard to follow.

Another film boasting a plot that made William Burroughs’s cut-up novels look straightforward was Basic Instinct 2, which was so bad it ensured that Sharon Stone would never reprise the role of Catherine Tramell again. Not only was the film stuck in development hell for years, its producers suffered the indignity of Stone suing them when they tried to back out of actually making the thing. Settling out of court, they pressed ahead and made a confusing, cheap ‘n’ tacky sex ‘n’ crime thriller that was poor enough to merit four Razzie Awards in 2007 and killed any plans for any further sequels.

I could go on and mention films like Staying Alive, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 or Highlander II: the Quickening, but the point remains that, to use an American sporting analogy, more often than not Hollywood fumbles the ball when it comes to making movie sequels.

And the reason for this? Well, most sequels exist solely as cash-ins on an earlier movie’s success, consign innovation to the wings, and give audiences more of what they've previously seen and enjoyed (which is what happened with the Austin Powers movies, all of which are practically interchangeable). And despite all the other factors we've discussed here,  this cynical profit-chasing is the main reason that quality control so often goes out of the window whenever a script with a ‘2’ in its title gets put into production.

But, movie fans, while I’ve railed against some of the worst that Hollywood’s pumped out at us over the past couple of decades, let it not be said that there isn’t fun to be had in watching these atrocities, especially when accompanied by a few friends and a box of wine. Ham acting, bad plots and rubbish special effects all make for brilliant, if unintentional, comedy. 

So do give the fourth Jaws film a look tonight. It’s a bad movie, sure, but to paraphrase a line of Victorian verse: there is no film, however bad, from which some good cannot be had...