The first thing I thought of was The Exorcist (an eerie ghost story) and The Exorcist II (a freaky, tripped-out science fiction/fantasy horror flick).
Serious example:
Night of the Living Dead - psychological horror movie with a critique of America as a racist, sexist society with a generation gap.
Dawn of the Dead - swashbuckling adventure movie with a critique of American people as being willfully ignorant of social problems and determined to live inside a bubble of materialistic semi-affluence.
Day of the Dead - straight-up action movie with a critique of Reagan-era military build-up.
Halloween - Crazy Killer in creepy captain Kirk mask stalks teenagers.
Halloween II- Crazy Killer in creepy captain Kirk mask stalks his sister in hospital.
Halloween III - Season of the Witch - Crazy doctor builds some androids and hides computer chips in Halloween novelties that will kill the wearer and all those around them when they see his television commercial.
Karaoke and Cold Lazarus are both fantastic miniseries written by the inimitable Dennis Potter in a race against his own mortality.
Karaoke is a little bit noir and a little bit surreal, revolving around a writer (“Daniel Field”) racing against his own mortality to complete a series called Karaoke, and becoming alarmed to find his work apparently manifesting into reality. Surrealism aside, the presentation is contemporary and realistic.
Its sequel, Cold Lazarus, is set five hundred years in the future, in a dystopian ultra-corporate society, with a civil war with terrorist groups bent on returning to a more “human” existence being waged by the status quo. Daniel Field’s head has been cryogenically frozen, and is being exploited for commercial entertainment through the use of technology which derives a video signal from directly from his memories. Gradually, it becomes clear that some consciousness and awareness remains, and the disembodied head has some misgivings that his most personal memories persist as commodities for the entertainment of the masses. Its presentation is superficially OTT comic-booky Sci-Fi.
House of 1000 Corpses and Devil’s Rejects
House of 1000 Corpses is a horror flick.
Devil’s Rejects is more of … well um… i don’t know what it is, but it’s not a horror flick. The director (Rob Zombie) refers to it as a violent western / road movie.
Cars is a fish-out-of-water/redemption story set in a near ghost town.
Cars 2 is a globe-trotting, save-the-world spy movie.
Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs trilogy probably fits the bill here. Altered Carbon is basically a hardboiled private eye novel, but the sequel Broken Angels is more of a military thriller, and then the third book in the series, Woken Furies, is hard to categorize at all.
Do spin-offs count?
Mary Tyler Moore Show - half hour comedy
Lou Grant - one hour drama
The Saw series has gone from psychodrama with horror elements to what is basically extreme slapstick.
Highlander 2.
I can’t confirm this because the sequel was so bad that I (and almost everyone else) avoided seeing it, but The Mask was a regular comedy with action elements, whereas Son of the Mask appears to have been full-on slapstick.
Both sf dramas, but Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a let’s-see-what’s-out-there adventure (although too slow-moving); Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was a revenge fantasy/Napoleonic naval war movie.
I’m guessing the producers have video of Levy doing immoral things with animals.
Close enough.
Seriously though, the original trilogy was pure Journey of the Hero space opera action. The prequels drowned in political drama.
Along those same lines:
MAS*H - situation comedy
Trapper John, MD - medical drama
Aaaahhh! :eek:
You had to mention that one, didn’t you?
Fans pretend that one never happened.
Non-fans pretend none of it ever happened.
—G!
“Yes! We’ll keep on trying!
'til the End of Time
'til the END of Time!”
. --Queen
. *Innuendo *(from Innuendo)
…or pies.
Good one.
Never seen the second one, I’ll try to set up a double feature. Thanks!
That works especially well if we consider the characters to actually be recurring characters (in some magical-realist sense of course considering the fatalities) as opposed to different characters filling the same tropes: The woman, the sensible black guy, the loudmouth kinda-incompetent white guy, the ethically challenged scientist et al. I’ve definitely thought about that before, especially the three women as one. In Night she is catatonic and just falls down and surrenders, in Dawn she starts out passive and quickly asserts herself and in the end is kicking ass. In Day she’s taken charge from the start, and struggles with the bad guys and keeps her moral center intact. Eventually she moves on to try to rebuild from a truly safe haven. Of course they can’t literally be the same character because of the different stories, but it can be taken as a larger personal growth arc in a way…
Interesting, I’ll check them out
Never seen either - I didn’t know they feature the same characters.
Thanks!
Good one. I had been trying to think of TV shows that apply. I am interested in this kind of “same character in a different genre” thing.
Predator 2 was pretty much a police procedural, whereas Predator was a definitive 80s action/monster flick.
“Seven Against the Sea” was a 1962 TV drama about US military personnel stranded on an island in the Pacific after a devastating Japanese attack, who live in hiding, eventually virtually becoming part of the native tribes that are sheltering them, and thus facing severe challenges in returning to military life after finally being contacted by US forces wishing to restore their base.
“McHale’s Navy” is the sequel! McHale's Navy - Wikipedia