I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

And Now For Something Completely Different


Movie Franchises


If you've been following this blog (and if so thank you and you must have a lot of patience) you may have noticed a glaring omission from my reviews: horror movies with endless sequels. Where's Freddy, Jason, Michael, Chucky, Pinhead and the other knuckleheads that have endless movies churned out one after the other?


My main problem with these 'franchises' is that once you've seen the first one, you pretty much know just what's going to happen in all the others. They all involve teenagers (okay there are a couple of adults), many die, few live, the 'monster' is vanquished just to quickly pop up for the next movie. I liked Final Destination. It was creepy, although the premise that 'death' has a plan you can't foil is silly, still the movie wasn't bad. But every one after that is the exact same movie just with different people and those silly Rube Goldberg setups used to kill the teenagers one by one.... here's the synopsis of every FD movie: They escape death, death chases them, Tony Todd tells them death can't be denied, they die. The end. The same with the others: No matter how many times they're set on fire, chopped up, drowned, melted (Chucky) or other methods of destruction they 'reset' just in time for the next clone.

Boy couldn't even close his mouth .

What's sad is the first of each of these franchises weren't bad. Nightmare On Elm Street? Cool. Chucky? Eh, different but okay plus I like Brad Dourif so... but once you've seen it you've, well, seen it. The only differences are the people and the increased impossibility of any of these bad guys surviving but they still do. Where's the fun in that?


I watched a special once that examined all the Nightmare On Elm Street movies and even those that made them admit they got silly, off track and just plain monotonous. My favorite sequel if I had to pick is the one where they play themselves discussing the movie on a talk show... until they start acting like their characters and then boom... there's Freddy. Silly but at least it was a little different. Danged if I know which sequel that was.


Movies like Poltergeist and The Exorcist should never have had sequels either. Pure money-making schemes, nothing redeeming about them. Unfortunately that is the basic problem with most of the sequels of any movie. I loved Men In Black. Men In Black II, not so much. Ten years later we get Men In Black III in which the best part and the most fun to watch was Josh Brolin playing a young Agent K. Why so many Batmans, Spidermans, X-Men (with character spin-offs) and other movies when the best course would be to let it alone on the strength of the first one?


Money. Pure and simple. That and Hollywood is totally bankrupt for new ideas. I saw a news article that listed FIFTY movies that were to be remade (not sequels, remakes) by 2013. Some of the originals shouldn't have been made in the first place, others are such classics a remake seems sacrilegious. It's just another eight to twelve dollars out of your pocket (since a lot of them are in 3-D now) for something you've already seen with the same kind of ending.

That goes double for Tim Burton movies. Tim please, just stop. It was cute at first but it's obvious you don't have a single original idea so you churn out remakes of classics and in a lot of cases, just screw it up so badly that it's just sad. Take Dark Shadows. Please.