Creeps

Brief-ly: the loathsome Victor Salva has signed to write and direct Jeepers Creepers 3: The Creeper Walks Among Us (that title will get changed). Ray Wise will return as whatever guy I don't remember Ray Wise playing in the second one.

The first two made money despite an almost total lack of quality; though I remember thinking the first one had a promising opening, it gets bad real quick, and the idiotic ending takes care of any lingering doubt. The second is dumb throughout, though I am a little perplexed by the application of the IMDb tag "Gay Monster," so it's possible I've forgotten most of the movie, or at least certain apparently important subtext.

The first in the series made about $60 million worldwide on a $10m budget; Jeepers Creepers 2 made $63m on a $17m budget, and both have hit over $100m with DVD sales, according to Salva in an interview at Fangoria, wherein he angles for a theatrical release.

Nothing surprising about an announcement of the third, therefore, but I'm still surprised about the lack of compunction about giving work to convicted/admitted child molester Salva. Even without any further moral proselytizing here, Salva's just not a good enough director to bother dealing with the baggage, bad press, perennial risk of protests, etc., but it seems horrible human being + horrible director + horror movie = boffo box office!

Nobody wears beige to a bank robbery

Watching something-or-other on DVD, I caught a preview for The Hard Easy, an odd mix of good and bad casting in a straight-to-video crime thriller from 2005 (Henry Thomas, Bruce Dern, Peter Weller; David Boreanaz, Vera Farmiga, Nick Lachey, Gary Busey). The central conceit rang a bell immediately, but the preview made it hard to tell whether the setup was the main story or just a particularly dramatic scene.

IMDb research reveals that the scene in question is in fact the crux of the film:

Plot Outline: Two separate teams of jewel thieves, one low-rent and one upscale, both desperate, converge on the same score at the exact same time, and a simple job turns out very complicated and very bloody.

Jon Lindstrom, keep your screenplay credit, but that story credit rightfully goes to Woody Allen. Congratulations, you remade the bank gag from Take the Money and Run.

Happy 2008

Oscar night officially concludes the 2007 film year, meaning I can stop cramming my schedule with dreary award-bait (that's you, Atonement) and get back to the junk I'd rather be seeing (that's you, Catacombs). Postponed since December in the (futile) hopes of finding some more worthy entrants: a list of the top ten-ish sequels and remakes of the year, and maybe a few of the worst.

Here's what I got instead:

TOP TEN SEQUELS/REMAKES I liked:
Hostel Part II

TOP TEN SEQUELS/REMAKES I found enjoyable (a) or interesting (b) but with almost comically glaring flaws:
Resident Evil: Extinction
28 Weeks Later




TOP TEN SEQUELS/REMAKES that were well enough done but, you know, so?:
The Bourne Ultimatum
Interview
3:10 To Yuma
The Hills Have Eyes 2
Live Free or Die Hard
Ocean's Thirteen
Hannibal Rising

TRASH
Pirates of the Caribbean 3
Spider-Man 3

Wait 'til next year!

Second position

Somewhere along the line, Valentine's Day became a viable release date regardless of day of the week, though it's odd we're not seeing more shoddy romances taking advantage.

Your only sequel choice for a romantic evening is Step Up 2: The Streets, or due to some vague poster design, possibly Step Up 2 The Streets. The 2006 original was the directorial debut of former dancer/choreographer Anne Fletcher. In it, an uncouth street dancer meets up with a privileged ballet type, and I presume they teach each other about life, love, and the first five positions.

Step Up grossed just under a hundred million bucks worldwide on a $21m budget, so here we are, though it's not the first of the modern crop of dance flicks to reach sequeldom. 2001's Save the Last Dance, in which a couth but troubled street dancer (Sean Patrick Thomas) teams up with an unprivileged but talented ballet type (Julia Stiles), helped kick off the new wave of teen dance flicks. Its success led to a direct-to-video sequel in 2006, which invoked the twin concepts of stepping and upwardness with the working title Steppin' Up: Save the Last Dance 2, but released as Save the Last Dance 2. Chelsea Hobbs was to take over for Julia Stiles in a proposed TV series, and a pilot was filmed, but never aired.

Credited on all four films (writer of Save the Last Dance and Step Up; character credit on sequels) is one Duane Adler. Hot on the heels of Save the Last Dance came another 2001 Adler-scripted dancer, The Way She Moves, a TV movie about Houston-based Annabeth Gish, whose premarital mambo lessons teach her that her heart is full of salsa, not stuffy fiancé Daniel Cosgrove. Please do not confuse The Way She Moves with How She Move, the non-Duane Adler-scripted 2007 dancer about a high school student who gets into street dancing to find a way out of her crime-infested hood.

Next up for Adler is Make It Happen, scheduled for release some time in 2008. Mary Elizabeth Winstead (The Ring Two, Final Destination 3, Die Hard 4.0) aims for a career in dance. No crime statistics yet available for her neighborhood. Also no word yet on whether her second-billed consort Riley Smith is from the opposite side of the tracks.

Un Homme est Mort

Roy Scheider, dead at 75. Though I've got a head start on the Monday morning news sources, I assume this'll be heavily covered, so just a brief word on the man's sequel and remake work. He garnered a brief, snarky mention in this blog a few weeks ago, but the man generally did good work.

Scheider appeared more reputably in sequels to two AFI Top 100-type movies, reprising his role as Chief Brody in Jaws 2 (before getting out while the getting was good) and taking over William Sylvester's role as "moon...American...Floyd, Heywood R." in the unloved 2010. He didn't make it into The French Connection II, or it could have been three.

His chief role as Martin Brody in Jaws lent him an authoritative air in casting directors' minds; after Jaws, he went on to play three doctors (though I'm not entirely convinced of Dr. Benway's credentials in Naked Lunch)(despite the name, Marathon Man's Doc was not an M.D.), an officer, two colonels, a mayor, a captain (a sea captain, on three seasons of SeaQuest DSV), an apparently Spanish Cardinal, and Presidents Carlson, Baker, and Cahill.

His sequel work beyond the abovementioned is fairly limited: Angels Don't Sleep Here (the sequel to Backflash), Dracula II, and Dracula III. His only remake is the 2004 Punisher do-over, unless you feel like counting All That Jazz.

John Alvin

Don't do much reportage on this blog, but as I'm not seeing it much elsewhere, a mention of the apparent (I don't see an obit anywhere yet, but it seems to be claimed by reputable sources) death of poster artist extraordinaire John Alvin yesterday.

Alvin's poster art is ubiquitous, and since he broke into the biz in 1974 with the great Blazing Saddles poster (he's the man behind the History of the World Part I, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, and Young Frankenstein cover work for Mel Brooks as well), he created some iconic and instantly recognizable posters – the Blade Runner cover's a pretty good example.


He worked heavily with Disney for their more major offerings – Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Lion King – and painted double-digit quantities of art for Star Wars and its sequels/prequels. The award-winning art for E.T. was the most satisfying to him, claims a blurb at Chuck Jones' site. Quite a bit more at this fan site, and more officially but less extensively here.

Of sequelly relevance, his work for Star Trek VI, Batman Returns and Batman Forever, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, and certainly Arthur 2: On the Rocks.

A tip of the New York Mets cowboy hat to John Alvin.

Meet the feeble

Delighted to see a precipitous (if not Cloverfield-level) second-week drop for the loathsome (no, I didn't see it) Meet the Spartans, but a few words on it before it drops from sight. Around the time of my year-end summary, I discussed (with no fewer than two people) whether Epic Movie counted as a sequel or part of a series with the other [Adjective] Movies; since Meet the Spartans is likely to show up on the 2008 list, we might as well sort it out now. Josh Levin's entertaining Slate review points out that audiences will stop going as soon as they realize the movie they're considering was made by the same people who made Epic Movie and Date Movie. "Film"makers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer seem to be in agreement; Meet the Spartans used Epic Movie 2 as a working title before someone thought better of it. (Despite successful first-weekend returns and $79 million or so worldwide, Epic Movie currently rests at #61 on the IMDb's Bottom 100 list and has clearly engendered some bad feeling.)

So it's clearly a sequel. On whether or not the whole thing's a series:

Date Movie billed itself in 2006 as from "two of the six writers of Scary Movie." That'd be Friedberg and Seltzer, though neither of them would be asked to return for Scary Movie 2, even though it went into production almost immediately after the first installment hit.

A third writer, Phil Beauman, would go off in another direction (or more accurately, the same direction with a different project) to co-write and co-produce Not Another Teen Movie, which isn't all that great, but certainly better than the Friedberg/Seltzer flicks.

After Date Movie made healthy money – plus, its IMDb rating of 2.7 is temporarily keeping it out of the Bottom 100, which currently tops out at about 2.5 – Friedberg and Seltzer moved on to Epic Movie, and then very quickly on to Epic Movie 2.

However, this means that Spartans actually has no creative personnel in common with Not Another Teen Movie. While Date, Epic, and Spartans were all produced at New Regency and distributed by 20th Century Fox, NATM was at Columbia and Scary Movie at Dimension. It seems like a non-issue, except that an alternate working title for Meet the Spartans was Not Another Scary Epic Teen Date Movie. While it's not a legal issue with regard to title copyright (plus, a quick check yields Not Another Tolkien Movie, Not Another Indian Movie, Another Gay Movie, Not Another Jewish Movie, and a spate of similarly titled XXX offerings, all post-NATM's 2001 release), it's still a clear attempt at capitalizing on someone else's work. Which, of course, I tend to cover pretty heavily here.

Monstrous (promotional title)

To cap a week spent discussing mostly Cloverfield and rip-offery, a week-ending post combining the two: the Cloverfield clone from The Asylum, entitled Monster. While I have little admiration for their general concept, I was impressed enough by Cloverfield having to do much of its shooting between its July 3rd trailer premiere and committed January 18th release date under intense scrutiny; Asylum had to scramble the jets to start throwing together their own version as soon the summer hype started (poor screenwriters, having to work on July 4th) and still be able to beat Cloverfield's release date by three days.

The Asylum entrusted directorial duties to Eric Forsberg, their go-to guy for all things tentacular: he'd previously scripted last year's 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea, during which I can only assume there's a doozy of a squid scene.

Monster is about two young female American filmmakers in Tokyo to interview an environmentalist when an apparent earthquake hits. They happen to catch some monstrous post-quake hijinks with the shakiest of cams, which seem to consist of a lot of large tentacles waving wildly in front of high-rises and in the general direction of military aircraft (up). The trailer is as close to the Cloverfield trailer as you could imagine; The Asylum simply can't make a movie look like I Am Legend, but they may have experienced their most skillful moment here. While Cloverfield's capable cinematographer Michael Bonvillain does his best to frame shots carefully enough to catch all the carefully planted visual cues, he still has to emulate uncertain, unprofessional, amateur videography. The Asylum's got the genuine article.