From beloved arthouse classics to forgettable horror revivals,
these franchises couldn't wait a full twelve months before releasing their next installments.
There are sticklers out there who will tell you that The Man with No Name — the strong,
quiet anti-hero played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's trilogy of landmark
Westerns — does have a name. In fact, he has three names. In 1964's "A Fistful of
Dollars" — wherein our man pits the rival factions of a small frontier town against
one another — his name is Joe. In 1965's "For a Few Dollars More," however, his name is Monco,
and he's a bounty hunter who joins forces with a rival to take down a Mexican bank robber. Finally,
in the 1966 semi-prequel "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," he is called Blondie
as he races against a ruthless mercenary and a wily bandit to find a stash of Confederate gold.
You might have noticed that Eastwood isn't really the same character in each of these films,
nor were they released in the same year. After the spaghetti Westerns
made waves in Italy and across Europe, United Artists released them all in
1967 — the first two in January and May, and "The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly" in December. The artwork for the American releases emphasized that the films were all of a
piece, and introduced the moniker of "The Man with No Name" in an attempt to bind the films
more closely together. The marketing campaign worked like gangbusters — and all these years
later, the three films are still packaged together as "The Man with No Name" trilogy.
The circumstances that led to both Roger Moore and Sean Connery playing James Bond in 1983
are complicated and go back several decades earlier. In the '50s, Bond author Ian Fleming
collaborated with writer Kevin McClory on an unused 007 film script that eventually became
the novel "Thunderball." Later, in 1961, McClory sued Fleming and eventually was awarded a story
credit on the novel's 1965 film adaptation, as well as ownership of certain story elements — most
notably, the terrorist organization SPECTRE and its cat-loving leader Ernst Blofeld.
McClory spent more than a decade in various legal battles with United Artists in order to
make his own film, and in 1983 he finally got his chance. "Never Say Never Again" — produced
for Warner Bros. — is essentially a remake of "Thunderball," with SPECTRE once again holding
the world hostage with a pair of nuclear warheads. Its ace in the hole, of course, is Sean Connery,
returning to the role he made famous for the first time since 1971's "Diamonds Are Forever."
"I hope we're gonna have some gratuitous sex and violence."
"I certainly hope so too."
The film also boasts solid action scenes from director Irvin Kershner and a great performance
from Barbara Carrera as the scenery-chewing femme fatale Fatima Blush. Meanwhile,
the official Bond franchise kept chugging along in the same year with the very silly
"Octopussy," which has 007 — played by Roger Moore in his sixth appearance — foiling a rogue Soviet
general and an exiled Afghan prince with the help of some beautiful circus-trained jewel thieves.
In 1984, the schlockmeisters at Troma Entertainment scored a genuine hit with
the superhero parody "The Toxic Avenger," in which wimpy janitor Melvin Junko is dumped into a vat of
toxic waste and emerges as a monster who dedicates himself to fighting crime. Five years later,
"the first superhero from New Jersey" returned in "The Toxic Avenger Part II." In the sequel,
Toxie travels to Japan to find his long-lost father, leaving Tromaville
helpless to the machinations of the supervillain corporation Apocalypse Incorporated. Thankfully,
though, he comes back to save the day. After all…
"If Tromaville was destroyed, there would never be a 'Toxic Avenger Part III!'"
The original cut of "Part II" reportedly ran close to four hours, so Troma mastermind Lloyd
Kaufman did the only sensible thing and made two movies out of it. "Part III" — subtitled
"The Last Temptation of Toxie" — picks up at the second half of the story.
When Toxie returns from Japan and runs Apocalypse, Inc. out of town, he finds that he did his job
too well, as there are no more bad guys left in Tromaville to defeat. In need of a job to
pay for a medical operation that could restore his blind girlfriend's sight, Toxie does the
unthinkable and takes a job with Apocalypse, Inc. But will success and the trappings of
yuppie life spoil our lumpy protector? And is the chairman of the evil corporation even more
evil than previously advertised? The "Toxic Avenger" saga has to be seen to be believed.
Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Three Colours" trilogy consists of
three films that have mostly unrelated characters and plots, but are united in
theme and intended as a singular experience. After all, when U.S. critics were preparing
their best-of lists for 1994, the films took up one ranking spot instead of three.
The title of each installment refers to the three colors of the French flag and
the ideals they represent: blue for liberty, white for equality,
and red for fraternity. "Blue" arrived in late 1993, starring Juliette Binoche as a
wife and mother who is cruelly "liberated" by the death of her husband and young child. Struck numb
by grief, she strikes up several unexpected connections as she struggles to move forward.
"White" and "Red" were both released in 1994. The former concerns an unhappy man who, after getting
a divorce from his wife, smuggles himself back home to Poland inside a large suitcase. Meanwhile,
"Red" follows a model living in Geneva who connects with a retired judge after
she accidentally hits his dog with her car. Each film has the lean efficiency
and finely tuned irony of a good short story, and none of them quite turn out as expected.
No other single film did more to define sci-fi in the 21st century than the Wachowskis' 1999 hit
"The Matrix." The dystopian-martial arts-superhero mashup coined a whole new cinematic language,
and its impact can still be seen in its aesthetics, special effects technology,
and — perhaps unfortunately — in real life today. A sequel was all but guaranteed,
but the task of living up to fans' massive expectations was daunting. Four years after
Neo flew through the air at the end of the first film, the Wachowskis returned with not one sequel,
but two: "The Matrix Reloaded" in May 2003 and "The Matrix Revolutions" six months later.
The films promised everything a sequel should have — like bigger and better action set pieces
and more of the characters we loved from the first film — along with a few answers to the
many questions posed by its increasingly convoluted mythology. But while the sequels
delivered the goods when it came to action — the highway chase in "Reloaded" remains an all-timer
decades later — it fared less well when trying to untangle its own dorm-room philosophical
inquiries. "Revolutions" was largely seen as a disappointing capper to the trilogy,
and when Lana Wachowski returned 18 years later to helm the reboot "The
Matrix Resurrections," she crafted a proper ending as much as she did a new beginning.
"That's the thing about stories… they never really end, do they?"
The 2000 Canadian horror flick "Ginger Snaps" took on the werewolf genre through the lens of
female adolescence and puberty, as spooky teen sisters Ginger and Brigitte work to control
Ginger's violent monthly urges after she is bitten by a werewolf. The 2004 sequel, "Ginger Snaps 2:
Unleashed" takes a page from "A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3" as Brigitte, now infected herself,
tries to resist her transformations while staying in a rehab facility for teens. Ginger
returns from beyond the grave, appearing to Brigitte in visions with ghostly advice.
Filmed simultaneously with "Unleashed," the prequel "Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning"
offers a frontier variation on the series. Stars Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins return not
as the Ginger and Brigitte we know and love from the first two films, but as their 19th-century
ancestors — also named Ginger and Brigitte — who find themselves orphaned and lost in the Canadian
wilderness. Where werewolves are a symbol for menstruation in the first film and addiction in
the second, "Ginger Snaps Back" uses the genre's sturdy framework to examine Canada's history of
colonialism and indigenous extermination. Even though the sequels weren't particularly beloved,
they weren't particularly hated either — and they both make for entertaining viewing nowadays.
The tongue-in-decaying-cheek "Return of the Living Dead" series ran for three bloody,
campy entries from 1985 to 1993. But just like a corpse exposed to the military-grade poison
gas Trioxin, the series rose from the grave more than a decade later. In 2005,
two brand new "Return of the Living Dead" sequels were unleashed upon the world,
putting a new generation of teens in the path of shambling corpses hungry for brains.
"Necropolis" — the first of the new sequels — follows a group of high school students whose
friend is kidnapped by a nefarious corporation doing research on reanimated bodies. Actor and
frequent documentary narrator Peter Coyote guest stars as the doctor in charge of the experiments,
and he appears once again in the follow-up "Rave to the Grave."
"What is all this for?" "Isn't it obvious?
World domination! What's everything ultimately for? Heh heh."
Taking place a year after the zombie outbreak that ended "Necropolis," "Rave to the Grave"
follows the surviving high schoolers — now in college — as a stray canister of
Trioxin gets synthesized into a party drug that starts turning ravers into zombies.
Beyond using Trioxin as the source of the zombie scourge, the films — which
wound up going straight to the Syfy Channel — bear little resemblance to the first three,
lacking their punk rock sensibility and love for gooey, goopy monsters.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 horror-tragedy "Pulse" was part of a wave of internationally acclaimed
Japanese spine-tinglers released at the turn of the millennium. Naturally, its inevitable
American remake — directed by Jim Sonzero and co-written by Wes Craven — arrived in theaters
in 2006. It stars Kristen Bell as a university student who discovers that her boyfriend's death
was caused by a supernatural computer virus that allows the dead to contact the living through the
internet. Like the Japanese original, the remake has the courage of its convictions,
ending on a note of defeat as the virus takes hold and the spirits of the dead invade the earth.
The two "Pulse" sequels, both released in 2008, take place in a world overrun with ghosts where
the living now exist as refugees in their own homes. "Pulse 2: Afterlife," which features a
man trying to protect his daughter from the ghost of his vengeful ex-wife, is nearly unwatchable —
every scene appears to have been filmed in front of a green screen. "Pulse 3" doesn't
fare much better visually or narratively: this post-apocalyptic take on the material features
a college student navigating the new world and a young woman who somehow discovers the world's last
working laptop. You should probably click away from these sequels if you ever run into them.
"I want to turn it off, but… I can't."
Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson's posthumously released "Millennium" trilogy became a global
sensation when the first novel, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," was published in English in 2008.
A feature film adaptation from Swedish production company Yellow Bird followed in early 2009,
along with adaptations of the other two novels in the series, "The Girl Who Played with Fire" and
"The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest," later in the year. The complete trilogy was given a limited
theatrical run in the United States in 2010 by the distribution arm of Chicago's Music Box Theater.
Starring Noomi Rapace as hacker Lisbeth Salander and Michael Nyqvist as intrepid
journalist Mikael Blomkvist, the films are a pitch-black journey into the sins of Sweden's
past. For international audiences, it's also possibly their first taste of the uniquely dark,
sexy, and disturbing genre of Scandinavian crime fiction. Director Niels Arden Oplev doesn’t shy
away from the sexual violence that is endemic to Larsson's work — the original Swedish title
of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" translates to "Men Who Hate Women," after all. While the
sequels may not have the same visceral thrill as the first film, all three were released together
to paint a bleak portrait of a culture that has yet to reckon with the rottenness at its core.