The very idea of Predators confuses me a little bit. It has been 23 years since the original Predator, a film that most everybody likes, and 20 since Predator 2, a film that very few people like, and in that gargantuan two-decade span, the only thing keeping the franchise alive, cinematically, have been Alien vs. […]
Studio Ghibli, as a rule, doesn’t do sequels; this is a core value stated outright by company leader Miyazaki Hayao, who has categorically refused to follow-up on any of his own stories, and the rest of the company’s artists has seemed content to follow suit (one must wonder what Miyazaki’s buddy John Lasseter thinks about […]
By the mid-1980s, the zombie films of George A. Romero had been ripped-off from virtually every imaginable angle, and attached to any number of bastardised “sequels”; this was mostly thanks to the efforts of the Italian horror movie industry, which had produced a truly inspiring number of awful hangers-on to Dawn of the Dead, known […]
The third sequel directed by James Cameron – but only the first sequel to a film he’d overseen originally – Terminator 2: Judgment Day holds a very special place in my heart; like a great many American males of my age, this was the first R-rated movie I ever saw, or at least the first […]
James Cameron’s rise to the top was swift: it was only his third film, and the second that anyone ever gave a damn about, that saw him win the coveted credit, “A James Cameron Film”. Of course, being the director of something as outstanding as The Terminator would do that for a fella’s reputation. Mind […]
The unprecedented financial success of The Little Mermaid, the highest-grossing animated film of all time at its first release, meant inevitably that it was going to be copied, heavily, by the films that followed it; for the Walt Disney Company certainly was not averse to making money hand-over-fist, and they also subscribed to the conventional […]
The massive success of 1931’s twin gods, Dracula and Frankenstein, left no doubt that Universal Pictures was Hollywood’s home for terror and the paranormal, and the studio flung itself into the burgeoning new genre with glee, whatever lingering moral qualms Carl Laemmle, Sr. might still have nursed. The next two years bore witness to the […]
There’s a common observation that the Alien franchise is something of a director’s showcase: take one lead character, one basic concept, one highly memorable monster design, and give it to someone with some very specific ideas for story and visuals, and you end up with four extraordinarily different movies that don’t even necessarily belong to […]
The passage of almost three years has done nothing to temper my embarrassing enthusiasm for Crank, the Jason Statham vehicle where he plays Chev Chelios, a hitman given an exotic poison that forces him into all sorts of ridiculously contrived situations where he must do something outlandish to keep his heart rate up. So I […]
It is a truth undeniable that Hellboy II: The Golden Army does not enjoy a particularly robust and tight story; it might not be that much of a mistake, in fact, to claim that its story is a confusing mess. If that’s the sort of thing that’s going to bother you no matter what, then […]
The question everyone has been trying to answer in regards to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – does it live up to the classic Indiana Jones films? – is inapt. Viewed with our objective caps on, neither Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom nor Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade […]
The traps awaiting the sequel to an unexpectedly successful comedy are easy to pinpoint, because virtually every such film stumbles into them. Everyone who has seen the increasingly desperate films in the Austin Powers trilogy knows this: the likeliest path for a comedy sequel to take is to recreate the gags from the original movie […]
