Back to the Future Day Celebration Part 2! Time Travel Movie Fest: Back to the Future 2 (Movies-A-Go-Go)

1989 disappointing sequel

Rating: 12/20

Plot: I already whined about this movie here.

Movies-A-Go-Go Time! (Note: I do lose my steam in this one because I kind of hate most of this movie.)

I saw Back to the Future 3 with a girl, and it had to be love because I hadn’t even seen the second one yet. She told me about it, and her description ended up being much better than this actual movie. In fact, watching her eyes as she told me about this movie is still one of the best movie experiences I've ever had.

This opening sequence isn’t quite the same as it was in the first one, and it feels like they’re all in some 20th anniversary reunion where they’re acting out the scene again. It’s not a good start, Back to the Future 2. Not a good start at all. Is there a reason why they didn't just show the exact same ending sequence?

Clouds, likely because they couldn’t think of anything else to put here. From the wonderful clocks in the first movie to what appears to be a late-90's screensaver in this one. Again, this isn't a good start, Back to the Future 2.

Wait a second. This is 2015, and it doesn’t look like the 2015 in this movie. For one, nobody’s wearing totally impractical silver shades like Doc Brown is here. That's not to say I wouldn't wear them, but I don't believe I've ever seen them.

“All the kids in the future wear their pants inside-out.” Not quite, but it wouldn’t actually surprise me that much. Kids in 2015 are pretty stupid.

Yep, totally nailed the future. I actually don’t hold that against the movie. I like the chances they took here.

“You got to scrote?” Oh, my God. That combined with the headgear is enough to turn you completely off.

Bojo? What’s a bojo? Low-res scuzzball. As a child of the 80s, I'd like to defend the bad writing here. We were inventing stupid words so rapidly in the 80s that the writers of this had no choice but to think it would continue well into the next century.

"Save the clock tower” guy, Charles Fleischer, also the voice of Roger Rabbit. This is an interesting cameo here.

Cubs win the World Series, eh? Against Miami? Sure, it was prescient to give Florida a baseball team, but the poor Cubbies didn’t make it to the World Series and couldn’t have played the Miami team anyway. Nice try though, Back to the Future 2. I'm so happy that this baseball season is over, by the way. I was tired of hearing about how this movie predicted Chicago would win a World Series.

Why is there an Ayatollah Khomeini video waiter anyway?

Tranks, lobos, and zipheads live in Hilldale. Sounds like my kind of place!

Not even a talking parrot can save this. The height Biff wears his pants, an upside-down man who is clearly not Crispin Glover, Michael J. Fox playing a female version of himself. This is absolutely brutal.

How much more obvious could they make the “your father doesn’t like being called a chicken” thing?

Biff’s going to know exactly how the time machine operates. Yeah, I’m buying that. He can’t even drive it in reverse without hitting a dumpster.

Speaking of dumpster--this movie.

Flea. No, he can’t save the movie either. Not even one of the stars of The Big Lebowski can help.

“Chicken.” Cue string music!

AT&T product placement, as obvious as the “chicken” thing from earlier.

One thing this movie got right about the future of 2015--everybody’s going to communicate with personal fax machines. That was spot on!

After the near perfection of the first movie, the plot holes in this one make it even more disappointing. Its predecessor contained flawless science. This one is what the kids would call a hot mess.

Kudos to the dog playing Einstein. He’s good, especially when he’s allowed to improvise.

"Even I'm embarrassed about how this movie turned out. Woof!"

Geez. I guess Hilldale’s no longer a “nice place to live.” I guess the best way to paint a picture of the apocalypse as brought on by Biff and a sports almanac is to have a bunch of crashed cars. Biff becomes rich, and people no longer know how to drive? This movie doesn’t really make sense.

A heavily-armed Strickland threatening Fox’s nuts keeps me going, knowing that there will be a generous helping of Strickland in the last third of the movie.

Now the bum’s named Red? It wasn’t in the first movie, was it? That's the great George "Buck" Flower, by the way.

Marty, your mother’s eyes are up there. . .

Got to love Lea Thompson’s versatility in this, often even when she’s playing the same character. The way this character changes based on the timeline she happens to be in is fun to watch.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a spin-off to give Biff’s trio of pals a backstory or three.

Do you think Marty stumbled around the cemetery with a flashlight until he found his father’s gravestone, or was he given directions? Probably in this movie, he did the former.

I think I’d rather be watching the Clint Eastwood movie, preferably with a pair of bimbos in a hot tub. When I make my millions betting on sports, that's precisely what I'll do--watch Westerns in a hot tub with some whores.

Stairway chase. Heck yeah, I want to see that movie with Biff’s pals!

Biff’s stupefied celebration on the rooftop is mimicked by Wild West Biff in the next movie. One of the few nice touches in this movie there.

Yeah, keep explaining, Doc Brown. None of this is still going to make any sense to anybody.

Christopher Lloyd’s ridiculous, frenetic pacing on the street after landing in 1955 is one of the things that makes me want to forgive the first half of this movie.

I have to look up who does the voice of Biff’s grandmother. (As expected, it appears to be Thomas Wilson. Good work there.)

I do like the gaps this fills in for the 1955 storyline. They didn’t need to be filled in, and it doesn’t really enrich anything, but it’s still kind of fun.

“Get your cooties off of me!” If I had a dime for every time somebody said that to me in elementary school, I'd have a few more bucks than I have now.

There are three Delorean time machines in 1955 at one point. Is my thinking correct there?

“Five-eighths? Don’t you mean three-quarters?” For a guy so concerned with not changing the past--as well as a guy who’s seen the worst-case scenario of that happening--he really has no problem with changing things.

Was that a fake Crispin Glover dancing? If so, I assume that’s where they used a guy with a Crispin Glover mask and therefore the thing that made Glover a buttload of money.

Ahh, never made the connection. Biff has these same three idiotic friends in the 50’s. Minus the 3D glasses unfortunately.

Following Strickland and the “sports almanac” was never the right move, Marty. Didn’t you remember how this turned out? Strickland didn’t own a casino in the mid-80s!

“What’s CPR?”/“He just took his wallet” guy. CPR Kid, or "Lester" in the novelization of this movie, played by Wesley Mann who was also in Parker Lewis Can't Lose three times. And he apparently looks like this now:

Now that's what I call versatility!

There’s fake Crispin dancing in the background while Marty talks to Doc on the walkie-talkie, and it’s not even close. Even somebody who isn’t a Crispin Glover aficionado could see that.

Oh, my God...the chicken thing again! And things were going so well at this point.

Does Biff never use his rearview mirror?

Maybe you should just land the car, Doc?

Am I the only person who watches this and hates everything involving the stupid hoverboard? The crap with the train in the third movie, this 1955 action stuff, the 2015 chase that parallels the 1955 one. The hoverboarding was just not a good idea.

I’m sure there’s some physics explanation, but how is Doc zapped to 1885 there? He wasn’t traveling 88 miles per hour. This movie doesn't make sense.

Still just love how the storm stops immediately after the clock tower is struck by lightning. It’s like the storm said, “Ok, mission accomplished. We’re done here.”

Back to the Future III, coming Summer 1990. That was back when I still had a pulse and was convinced I could work myself into other people’s dreams. What a damn fool I was back then. It's also the time when I realized that I had been in love.