further punishment

So I was sitting in the bargain theater, waiting for the $2 matinee of The Incredible Hulk to begin, and I got to thinking about my post calling T.I. Hulk possibly the first film do-over. While the bargain theater doesn't always show the officially attached trailers, I think the Punisher: War Zone teaser trailer debuted in front of Hulk a couple months back, and so though I didn't see it, I got to thinking about whether War Zone isn't a mulligan as well. It seems to be looked at as a sequel, but when the title character doesn't reprise his role in the second film, four years after the first, the semantics might come into play.

Punisher: War Zone shot under working titles of Punisher 2 (of course, Hulk shot under Hulk 2 as well) and the marquee-confounding Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank, the given title of the first in a relatively well-regarded Garth Ennis run on the Punisher monthly.



The troubled Punisher: War Zone production in brief:
John Dahl offered directing job, not interested. Cites script: "not that good."
Thomas Jane "regretfully and painfully" drops out, declines to state reason, though second-hand information claims it's due to his backing of director Walter Hill, whom Lionsgate decided wasn't the guy for the job.
Jane replaced with Ray Stevenson of Rome.
Kurt Sutter, writer of then-current draft, removes himself from credit arbitration (due to numerous other writers, he wouldn't likely have gotten credit in any case).
Lexi Alexander [pictured], director of well-regarded Green Street Hooligans, rumored off project after no-show at Comic-Con panel. Blog posts containing Punisher-related materials replaced with "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys. Monkey post shortly removed.
Alexander's composer Christopher Franke (who scored her Green Street Hooligans and Johnny Flynton) removed, replaced with Michael Wandmacher.
Extremely violent aggro jock-metal trailer makes rounds after Comic-Con.
Flick set for December 5 release.

Punisher '04 is itself a retry, of course, after Dolph Lundgren starred in an adaptation back in the 90s. And we know how well those both turned out!

..

Just got the word that the management company is gonna do some remodeling work on my apartment, so I'll be absent for a little while to clean house in preparation.

Neither Gilles Mimouni's L'Appartement nor Luna Kim's The Apartment is a remake of Billy Wilder's famed The Apartment. For that matter, neither is Tobe Hooper's 1999 made-for-TV The Apartment Complex, starring Obba Babatundé, Patrick Warburton, R. Lee Ermey, Charles Martin Smith, Tyra Banks, and with Jon Polito as "Dr. Caligari," but guess what? I'm gonna watch it anyway.

en serie

KOTOR II

"...we have another Republican nominee who’s telling us the exact same thing — that this time things will be different,” Biden said. “This time he’ll put country before party. Folks, we’ve seen this movie before. And we know the sequel is always worse than the original.”



Thanks to hollie horror for this!

Kinds of Light

Selected sequels from filmography of James Incandenza.

Cage II. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Disney Leith; 35 mm.; 120 minutes; black and white; sound. Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict (Watt) and a deaf-mute convict (Leith) together in 'solitary confinement,' and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; RERELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO.

Cage III — Free Show. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P.A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35 mm.; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-65.

Incandenza, certainly, not known for his originality. See Romney and Sperber, 'Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?' Post-Millennium Film Cartridge Journal, nos. 7-9 (Fall/Winter, Y.P.W.), pp. 4-26.

Funhouse

Uwe Boll is nothing if not defensive of his work. Loudly so, in most cases; physically, in others, as when he boxed several smaller, untrained film-critic opponents.

"I think I made a perfect House of the Dead movie," said Boll, referring to his comically idiotic action-horror flick, based on a fun, not-too-serious series of zombie-shootup video games. Later, re-evaluating his catalog: "House, 3 out 10 (for good action, CGI, sound)." At time of writing, House of the Dead is #39 on the IMDb's Bottom 100 list, with a 1.9 rating.

Boll is one of the internet's favorite scapegoats, a position he generally seems to enjoy. In any case, if the prevailing wind criticizes Boll's work, let no one say Boll does not also blow: he joins the fun today by re-releasing 2003's House of the Dead in a new edition, labeled Director's Cut. Also labeled "Funny Version." The problem here is that the original obviously was the funny version; short of subcontracting Rifftrax, there's probably not much you can do to punch up the comedy content.


























The specific content of the new disc is a bit sparse – Lionsgate's own site has nothing more than a small picture of the new edition buried in the catalog, but no description sets it aside from the original. Third parties cite "new dialogue, alternative takes, pop-up commentary and animation from the original video game." They may be understandably confused – animation from the video game abounds in the standard cut of the film. I can state this with certainty, because when I saw the original cut of the film, my friends and I lost count of the number of clips of the original video game. We're not unskilled counters. The number was in the thirties.

The Attack By Fire

Here's a nice, unexciting inaugural post for my series which I guess is still temporarily called "Direct-to-Video Sequels Not Really Called For By Readily Apparent Popular Or Financial Indicators." Obviously still more than willing to entertain alternate title suggestions.

The Art of War, 2000. Budget about $60 million. Domestic take about $30m, worldwide take just barely $40m.

The Art of War II: Betrayal is directed by Josef Rusnak, the man on the still-upcoming It's Alive remake. Rusnak, whose last flick was a Wesley Snipes direct-to-video actioner, takes the helm from Christian Duguay (Scanners II: The New Order, Scanners III: The Takeover, and Screamers).

Snipes returns as Neil Shaw, a loose cannon for a United Nations covert-ops squad. Shaw evidently didn't learn his lesson about diplomatic law enforcement the last time he played opposite Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa in an international-protocol thriller (Rising Sun). Here, Shaw must solve or prevent some type of international incident while staying out of trouble for his wild ways, including weapon-carrying, reckless driving, passport fraud, and tax evasion.

"God help us in the future."

In noting earlier this week that John Johnson, director of The Skeleton Key (2006), was not Iain Softley, director of The Skeleton Key (2005), I checked out Johnson's catalog. Nothing too notable, but the guy does his own writing, director, editing, cinematography, producing, and score, so that gets him a line of credit in my book.

It seems likely he'll max out that line of credit with his next project: Plan 9, a title-simplified remake of Ed Wood's infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space, a popular choice for the mantle of 'worst film of all time.'

Aiming for 9/9/09 (roughly coinciding with the 50th anniversary), Johnson hopes to make a film in the intended sci-fi/horror spirit of the original Plan 9, rather than the result. From the website: "a serious-minded retelling of the original story, paying homage to the spirit of Wood's film without resorting to camp or parody."

Conrad Brooks, sole surviving cast member of the original, will appear in the remake; the gig includes a promotion from Patrolman to Lieutenant. Brooks, who's acted in 21 direct-to-video flicks in the last ten years, has gotten his mileage out of time spent working with Wood. Besides a cameo in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, he's shown up in numerous Wood-related, Wood-inspired, and Woodesque flicks. Most directly related: I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, a 1998 adaptation of a previously unfilmed Wood screenplay boasting a rather surprising cast.

As far as Woodesque and Wood-inspired: Brooks has appeared in more improbably titled films than anyone this side of the Lina Wertmüller oeuvre. After dropping out of film in 1961 with Coleman Francis's worst-ever contender Beast of Yucca Flats, he returned in 1985 with Polish Vampire in Burbank. Since then, just to name a few:

It Came from Trafalgar
Zeppo: Sinners from Beyond the Moon!
Dr. Horror's Erotic House of Idiots
Corpses Are Forever
Max Hell Comes to Frogtown
Ghost Taxi
Armageddon Boulevard
Ice Scream
Rollergator
Blood Slaves of the Vampire Wolf
Baby Ghost
Little Lost Sea Serpent
And who can forget his immortal turn as Police Chief Arbogast in 2002's Raising Dead?

I was gonna give Brooks a hard time for performing in Jan-Gel 3: Hillbilly Monster, until I noticed that he directed the entire trilogy. I should probably give him a much harder time for that.


Plan 9 from Outer Space is in the public domain, allowing John Johnson to write a new screenplay. You too can take advantage of its status. Enjoy!

Slumming

Tonight, a two-hour pilot kicks off the relaunch of Beverly Hills, 90210. The new show – the Walshes are now the Wilsons – is just going by 90210, skipping both the passé Beverly Hills shout-out and the tacky Next Generation tag used in early prep.

A batch of TV vets – Lori Loughlin (Full House), Rob Estes (Melrose Place), Jessica Walter (everything from Arrested Development way back to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour) comprises the part of the cast whose names I recognize; the kids are vets of Degrassi, The O.C., and even The Wire in one case (Tristan Wilds).

I figure the folks who watched the first edition (which ran 10 years, fairly impressive for a high school show) are well past this, save an occasional guilty wallow in the first couple of seasons on DVD, and that the folks of the right demographic will stick with Gossip Girl.

No meat on these bones

When I saw a scheduled listing for DVD release today of Skeleton Key 2, I naturally assumed it to be a direct-to-DVD sequel to Iain Softley's 2005 Skeleton Key, a rather gray Cajun-themed supernatural thriller with a rather gray ending, notable only for getting John Hurt and Gena Rowlands to take starring roles.

While Skeleton Key's DVD sequel is probably in the works, Skeleton Key 2 is actually a sequel to John Johnson's direct-to-video 2006 Skeleton Key. It could be a clever marketing trick for a canny producer, come to think of it: pick a somewhat successful film with a fairly generic title, rush out a low-budget film of the same title, and then beat the studio production to the punch with the second installment, cashing in on all that sweet DVD sequel money.

Further research shows that the full title is Skeleton Key 2: 667 The Neighbor of the Beast. Though I'm sure it's older, I can casually date this terrible joke back to a horrible Lenny Dee industrial album I had to file and reprice occasionally since 2001, which means I've had a number of years to ponder that 667 would actually be across the street from the beast, and 668 its next-door neighbor.

Laborious

Happy Labor Day!
I'm off to work, but calling for naming suggestions for a new feature: an occasional series of brief posts calling attention to sequels even when I have no interest in seeing the film or writing too much about it. This way, when DMX passes the acting torch to Young Jeezy for Exit Wounds 2: Point of Re-Entry, you guys can hear about it and maybe see a DVD cover without me having to sit through either one. I am thinking "Films You Did Not Expect To Read About This Morning," or "Movies I Can't Be Bothered To Research," or "Direct-to-Video Sequels Not Really Called For By Readily Apparent Popular Or Financial Indicators," you know, something catchy.