Mark Hill
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We all like to complain about unnecessary sequels like Transformers 5, Taken 3, and The Hobbit 4: Hang On Guys, Bilbo Forgot His Wallet. Well, believe it or not, sometimes Hollywood agrees with us, and refuses to greenlight further installments of successful films that absolutely nobody asked for. However, that doesn't stop those movies from getting made, resulting in a handful of truly hilarious unofficial sequels to popular films, flicks so terrible even the shameless studio executives would have nothing to do with them.
We've told you before that a legal struggle over the rights to Thunderball produced competing Bond movies, in which Eon Productions lost enough of the franchise that they had to quickly kill off one of the most iconic movie villains ever with as much dignity as flushing a goldfish down a public urinal. But we neglected to tell you about the dumbest part of that whole story, namely the unofficial Bond movie, Never Say Never Again.
After jilted director Kevin McClory won his suit to make an independent Bond movie, he sat on his hands for twenty years before deciding to do anything with it. However, it's pretty hard to make a Bond movie when all you're allowed to work with is an aging Sean Connery and the half-written script that inspired Thunderball, so the movie sort of feels like a 13-year-old boy trying to explain the plot of Thunderball to someone who has just awoken from a 60-year coma and has no idea who James Bond is. Franchise regular characters like Blofeld, M, Q, and Moneypenny are all played by new actors, the iconic score and introduction are gone, and Connery acts like he's just killing time until he can sneak into the alley for a smoke. It's as if Connery's hosting an episode of SNL with only one really long sketch, a feeling that only intensifies when Mr. Bean shows up as a comedic relief bureaucrat who talks like he's constantly trying to swallow his own tongue.
His character is Nigel Small-Fawcett. Get it? Small Faucet? He has a small dick!
Also, while typically Bond is a cold, quippy killer, this Bond takes down a thug with a sample of his own urine. Granted, when you have as many STDs as 007 it's a wonder your pee doesn't melt right through the container.
Originally he burned the bad guy's eyes by making him read the script for A View To A Kill.
Then someone tries to murder Bond with weightlifting equipment ...
... Bond gets attacked by a radio controlled shark ...
... he gives Kim Basinger a "massage" by flailing her arms around ...
... and he impresses the villain by beating him at an electro-shock video game the villain himself made.
"The name's Bond, xXx420SmokeWeedEveryDay69 Bond."
At one point the evil henchwoman, Fatima Blush, corners Bond but, instead of killing him, forces him to write and sign a statement saying that she gave him the best sex of his life. Fortunately, this gives Bond the opportunity to kill the egomaniacal nymphomaniac by using a pen that's secretly a gun.
"And also write that I was the best part of the all henchman performance of The Pirates Of Penzance!"
Oh yeah, and Bond escapes a fortress by riding a goddamn horse off of it.
"James Bond will return in Animal Cruelty Trial"
They accomplished that amazing special effect by, uh, not giving a fuck and just using a real horse. That scene was cut from the British release due to animal welfare concerns, and also to avoid dozens of smartass critics calling the movie Never Say Neigh Again. If it's any consolation, the movie was also cruel to its human actors, as noted maniac Steven Seagal broke Connery's wrist while training him in aikido. Never Say Never Again is either the worst Bond movie ever made or the best attempt to destroy the reputation of a movie franchise out of sheer spite. An impressive feat either way.
Filmation, the animation studio responsible for sweatshop quality work like He-Man, decided to make a sequel to Pinocchio -- a mere 47 years after the Disney original -- called Pinocchio And The Emperor Of The Night. Despite its grandiose title, the movie is actually about Pinocchio, as a real boy, falling in love with a puppet.
Seconds away from him making it a sex doll.
Unfortunately, it was all a trick by an evil puppeteer confusingly named Puppetino (indeed, his parents selected his career path for him by giving him that name), and Pinocchio is turned back into a puppet. Where's Geppetto in all this?
That's exactly what Child Services wants to know too.
The Good Fairy shows up and tells Pinocchio that it's his fault because he took his freedom for granted, which seems harsh considering he's a goddamned child who has been a real boy for like one damn year. Anyway, after dealing with the puppet-shaming fairy, Pinocchio later finds himself in a place called the Neon Cabaret, where children are partying and drinking a mysterious green liquid that makes them hallucinate. Yup, the only way they thought to upstage Pleasure Island was having Pinocchio tripping on absinthe at a rave. Not a lot of late nights in that writers' room.
Or sober ones.
This somehow eventually leads to Pinocchio doing battle with the Emperor Of The Night, who's voiced by James Earl Jones and looks like a four-armed vampire with force powers.
Still a better follow-up than The Phantom Menace.
Pinocchio uses the power of love to make the Emperor fucking explode ...
... and as a reward the Good Fairy makes him a real boy again and -- because it should be obvious by now that she's just winging it -- turns his lady puppet friend into a human too, because by defeating an arcane evil and saving a bunch of lives he probably learned a lesson about freedom or life or whatever. The narrative kind of loses the thread, but maybe it's a metaphor for puberty or something.
Disney sued Filmation, but Filmation successfully argued that the character was public domain, and also the movie flopped so hard that even cold-hearted Disney lawyers probably felt a little sorry for them. The movie is objectively terrible, with one film critic deriding it as a " wooden effort" before high-fiving himself so hard that he broke his hands and never wrote another word.
You all know Frankenstein, the classic story of a monster who gets pissed off at humanity because people keep confusing him with his creator. When horror movies first hit the scene, Frankenstein quickly became a crowd favorite, his most famous movie being shot all the way back in 1931. But because Frankenstein lives in the scariest of all known realms -- the public domain -- companies caring as much about art as cats do about passed hairballs were able to churn out Frankenstein movies with abandon. And churn they did, including a 1958 film with a setting so futuristic that it's almost impossible to imagine: Frankenstein 1970!
Behold, the future! Jeans are slightly wider now!
Starring a sad Boris Karloff (presumably paying off a shit-ton of gambling debts), Frankenstein: The Nixon Years stars senior citizen Baron Dr. Frankenstein. In desperate need of money, the geriatric scientist lets a camera crew into his castle to film a TV movie about his family's history of monster making. It's a B-movie within a B-movie, like if Jason invited a documentary team to watch him slaughter horny teenagers because he needed money for reconstructive surgery on his machete arm.
They stretched the budget by having the mummy suit double as the crew's toilet paper.
If you guessed that Baron Dr. Frankenstein starts slaughtering the crew for body parts, then you too have what it takes to write a terrible Frankenstein cash-in. The doctor wants his new monster to carry on his family line, but it instead turns on him and they're both killed in a blast of radioactive steam, because '50s horror movies featured radiation like contemporary movies feature MacBooks. And so Dr. Frankenstein learns of the folly of cobbling something together that should be dead, again, and also discovers the downside of trying to get rich quick through a sketchy movie deal. Two lessons wasted on crappy movie makers, who quickly recycled this radioactive Frankenstein's monster to fight a Godzilla knockoff.
So honey, now, take me into your loving arms, Kiss me under the light of a thousand stars, Place your head on my beating heart, I'm thinking out loud, Maybe we found love right where we are
That's from Japan's Frankenstein Conquers The World in which, spoiler alert, he does not conquer the world. He does, however, get made gigantic by radiation. The Japanese fear him, but the gentle giant redeems himself by defeating a rampaging monster. Then he gets swallowed up by an earthquake. It's like King Kong crossed with Akira crossed with the dream journal of an idiot child. Two of his clones then fight in the sequel, by which point the moral of the story had evolved to "Wow, look at how much money we can make from total nonsense! Hubris rules!"
"Yeah!"
In Italy, Evil Dead was released as La Casa, although the cabin in the promotional material in no way resembles the cabin from the actual film.
Directed by Samuel Raimi.
After La Casa 2: Mi Casa Es Mal Casa, Italian filmmakers just ran with the name and pumped out unconnected low-budget horror movies that had about as much to do with Evil Dead as, well, Army Of Darkness did. Most notable is La Casa 4, released in America as Witchery, because America will not be outshone in the dumb movie naming department. It stars none other than David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair in their acclaimed roles as "actor who isn't famous enough yet" and "actress whose career took a brutal downturn," respectively.
Blair and the Hoff are guests at a hotel, which is like a big cabin, that's besieged by an evil witch, because this was a simpler time before Yelp reviews.
"Not enough towels in the bathroom, possible demon issues, good breakfast options. 3 1/2 out of 5."
Blair, to the surprise of no one, gets possessed.
And Hasselhoff gets, uh, crucified.
Both in the movie and by critics.
To give you a sense of the film's quality, the NSFW trailer biggest selling point is a rape dream that cuts back to the victim writhing on a bed topless like she's in a Whitesnake music video. Not that the movie's without its brilliant twists and turns, like the seemingly random shot of a seagull ... who later turns up dead.
The Gods Must Be Crazy, the most commercially successful South African movie ever made, is a screwball farce about a Coke bottle that falls out of an airplane, lands among an isolated tribe, and is mistaken as a gift from the gods. Predictable shenanigans ensue, delighting audiences and producing one official sequel. However, unbeknownst to most of us, a decade later three unofficial sequels were made in Hong Kong. One of which has a vampire. Crazy Safari, aka The Gods Must Be Crazy III, is, to quote Wikipedia, "part of a trend of jiangshi films, horror comedies with hopping corpses, that were popular in Hong Kong throughout the 1980s and 1990s." Wikipedia does not explain why they were popular, presumably because whatever was in the water back then got covered up by the government.
The gods must indeed be crazy.
The story, such as it is, kicks off when an ancient Chinese corpse is bought at auction by a descendant who wants to give his ancestor a proper burial instead of him being displayed in some rich dude's house next to a Hank Aaron rookie card. The remains are put on a plane to be shipped home, but fall out and land in the midst of the same tribe that encountered the Coke bottle, and who at this point are probably getting pretty sick of divine gifts. So it's basically a remake, except instead of a pop bottle it's an ancient, reanimated, hopping Chinese vampire. Same twist as Die Hard 3.
Jeremy Irons would even go on to play him in the Tony-winning musical adaptation.
The vampire is embraced by the weirdly easy-going tribe, and he helps them scare off their evil rivals and do chores. The hero forms a bond with the corpse, and eventually manages to return it to its rightful owners. But first, the grateful vampire helps them win a decisive battle against the bad guys by using his mystical powers to channel the spirit of Bruce Lee.
The gods must be high.
Hey, so we have, like, eight thousand questions about this plot, and unfortunately none of them are answered in later installments of the The Gods Must Be Crazy Cinematic Universe. But what's even stranger is that the star of all of the films was the same hunter-gatherer from the original movie. He was chosen for the first movie because he made it feel authentic, probably because he had never seen a settlement larger than his village of huts, and a decade later he was flown to Hong Kong to help them make a wacky slapstick comedy about a vampire. Honestly, that story sounds like a much better movie than the one they made him film.
The classic Night Of The Living Dead came out in 1968, a distant, mist-shrouded era of human history when being a zombie movie maker was considered ground-breaking, instead of a sign that you really should've finished your accounting degree. And, because the movie was never copyrighted thanks to a clerical error, anyone with a camcorder and a lack of vision can make a sequel. Which they have.
Fans will remember Barbra, Romero's first ever character, who spends a lot of the movie running around and panicking before being dragged off and eaten by the zombie horde near the end.
The first of many "I'm about to get eaten by zombies" faces.
But the creators of Night Of The Living Dead: Genesis posit "What if the character played by the actress we happen to know survived?" And so Genesis features a 71-year-old Judith O'Dea, who looks just thrilled to be there.
Eat shit, Daniel Day-Lewis, she's been method-acting reluctantly talking about zombies for 50 years.
Its teaser trailer portrays it as an investigation into the events of decades ago, with O'Dea introducing scenes then shown through flashbacks. Because nothing creates that edge-of-seat suspense more than knowing in advance that the protagonist got out just fine.
The graveyard scene where Barbra is introduced is recreated ...
... and the next day she's picked up by some rednecks who got turned down as stand-ins for The Walking Dead.
There's also a scene where some legitimately impressive effects and makeup are ruined by the fact that two characters who are supposed to be living in the '60s are driving a car with very modern window stickers.
If it seems like there's very little of import to say about this movie, it's not because it's that bad (it is), but because there's not enough of it yet. Their IndieGoGo campaign made only 2 percent of their 35,000 dollar target, which they seemed to have spent on the trailer, but you do have to admire their dedication to a story they love in the face of complete public indifference. And, if nothing else, it offers a preview into a future where modern blockbusters have fallen out of copyright and some random dude will be making Die Hard 8: What If Ellis Survived And Started Fighting Crime? starring an aged Hart Bochner.
The 1984 sci-fi comedy Repo Man is an acclaimed cult classic, a bonkers film about Los Angeles punks and aliens that kick-started director Alex Cox's promising career. But by 2009, that career was long dead and Cox, who was already kind of crazy, was deep into 9/11 conspiracy theories. So obviously, his next move was to make Repo Chick, a pseudo-sequel wherein a spoiled rich girl loses her inheritance, needs to get a job, and ends up foiling a plot by eco-terrorists to ban golf and force people to be vegan. It's, uh, not quite as charming as the original.
If this movie looks like a flipbook of royalty free stock photos, that's because the actors are all standing in front of a cheap green screen. In fact, the entire movie was made on a soundstage in under 10 days, and boy, does it show.
Nickelodeon has gotten a lot grittier since we were kids.
A critic braver than us who managed to sit through the entire movie noted that, while Repo Man is light-hearted and optimistic, Repo Chick is a bitter, hateful mirror image, which we guess is what you'd expect from someone whose career imploded. There's also something that vaguely resembles commentary on the mortgage crisis!
The subtle commentary in this shot is almost Kubrickian. Almost.
The whole affair is kind of sad, like watching an aging boxer struggling to describe his biggest prize fight, if the boxer then also got threatened with a copyright infringement suit. Universal Studios slapped Cox with a cease-and-desist, while Cox argued that Repo Men, the Jude Law action movie you almost certainly hadn't heard of, was made solely to distract the public from Repo Chick, a movie you definitely hadn't heard of. But Cox was able to fight the power, get the cease-and-desist dropped, and make his movie in possibly the only case of the underdog beating the big suits that's somehow even more depressing than if his dream had just been crushed in court.
Mark is on Twitter and has a book that's secretly just an unofficial remake of Hamlet.
Also check out 5 Insane Sequels That Almost Changed Movie History and 5 Sequels That Ruined The Original Movie's Point.
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