DIE EVEN HARDER

DIE HARD 2: DIE HARDER (1990)
dir: Renny Harlin

DIE EVEN HARDER
MAD # 302, April 1991
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker

From article MAD's Video Reviews, a way for them to do several parodies at once.

The other critics in the theater are Gene Shalit and Leonard Maltin. The pin on Willis' sweater refers to Moonlighting co-star Cybill Shepherd, though they spelled her name wrong. The other action franchises in the last panel are Danny Glover and Mel Gibson of Lethal Weapon, Ralph Macchio of Karate Kid, and Sylvester Stallone of Rocky, though by now there have been more Die Hard films than any of those.

TRIED HARD 2: TRIED HARDER
Cracked # 259, December 1990
a: John Severin

Takes place a couple tears after the first film. John McClane (Bruce Willis) is at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC waiting to meet his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) and is about to see a terrorist plot and chases them to the baggage area.

McClane kills one of the terrorists who he later finds out was reported missing in action years earlier. He tries to tell this to the chief of airport police Lorenzo (Dennis Franz), something big's about eo happen, but gets shut down completely.

The "something big" is that Col. Stuart (William Sadler) has taken control of the airport. Gen. Esperanza (Franco Nero) is about to be extradited into the United States but his men demand a plane to rescue him and get away in. To show they are serious, they have made a pilots on a random plane think they're further in the air than they actually are. McClane decides to run out onto the runway waving torches in the air so that plane will see where the ground really is, but it's too late. An anti-terrorist unit, led by Major Grant (John Amos), is dispatched to stop it all.

McClane tries to stop Esperanza's plane from landing, and when he enters, they escape and trap him there, filling it with grenades. He manages to eject himself before it explodes. Grant's troop invades a church that was the terrorist group's nearby base of operations.

Hudson Hawk was another action movie Willis was in that year.

It turns out Grant was on the side of the terrorists all along and they're about to make their escape with Esperanza. McClane Heads them off with the help of a reporter (Sheila McCarthy) whose chopper drops him off on the wing of the plane where they're trying to escape. He fights Grant and shoves him into a propeller.

He then fights another terrorist and loses, getting kicked off the wing before they take off. What they don't know is that all this time they've been leaking fuel and leaving a trail behind on the runway. After being knocked to the ground, McClane lights the trail of fuel, which causes the plane to explode. This now means all the other planes that had been circling the air for hours now have light on the runway to land, including the plane that had been keeping Holly from coming home.