“I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.” Orson Welles
“I study John Ford” Akira Kurosawa
I guess everyone’s entitled to their opinion and they are all equally valid.
I’d like to throw out something obscure, though I’m not sure if it’s two obscure entries followed by one well known one, or three obscure movies in a trilogy.
Enter the Ninja (1981), followed by Revenge of the Ninja (1983), and Ninja III: The Domination (1984). The common factor is Sho Kosugi, but he is the villain in the first one, the hero in the second and the macguffin in the last one. The first two are pretty standard ninja defeats evil movies, but it is the last movie that ascends into sublime batshittery (maybe a better title would have been Ninja III: Electric Domination).
Donnie had two sisters in the original. The titular S Darko is his younger sister, the one who was in Sparkle Motion. His elder sister is voting for Dukakis.
From a director’s/cinematographer’s point of view Ford will always be brilliant. Especially his use of landscape scenery. He knew how to film a beautiful movie. It’s the dialogue and the acting of his stable of actors that has aged poorly. I can still watch and enjoy them within the context of the time but it’s a hard sell to younger audiences. I did get my daughter to sit down and watch The Searchers and she loved it.
The 1982 movie The Sword and the Sorceror isn’t exactly well-known.* It featured wonderfully awful dialogue and off-kilter fantasy elements like a triple-bladed sword with jet-propelled blades (I kid you not) At the end, they promised a sequel, which, it seemed, would never be made. But they did, finally, in 2010, just 22 years later. It was **Abelar: Tales of an Ancient Empire **. By that time, most of the original cast were dead or uninterested, but it still had the same director. And they got Conan Lite actor Kevin Sorbo to star (hey, he was Hercules and Kull – that’s close enough)
*(although I have a perverse liking for it because they outright lifted some of the best moments from some Robert E. Howard’s “Conan” stories, making this arguably the best representation of Conan on film – none of the Legitimate Conan movies ever really caught the feel of Howard’s hero)
I agree with all of this, but would add as a demerit his overreliance on music, often inserted at inappropriate points and in overbearing form. Mister Roberts is one of my favorite movies (I was in the play in high school), but I can tell the scenes Ford directed just from the musical accompaniment.
They kinda had to do that – after demanding a sequel to King Kong, the studio then a.) gave them hardly any time to do it; and b.) gave them hardly any money. They clearly wanted to cash in while the Kong fever was high, and damn if it was any good. That it WAS halfway decent owes a lot to the ingenuity of the team that made it. Willis O’Brien and his effects team re-used animation models from Creation*, and cobbled together some on the quick (the Cave Bear, and the weird dinosaur that Son of Kong fights). Ruth Rose wrote a script with believable padding in it so that they could get away with less animation and other effects. Overall, it’s an admirable effort.
Later on, much of the team got another chance to show what they could do with adequate money and time with Mighty Joe Young
After the enormous success of the TV movie Rescue From Gilligans Island, the producers tried a couple more times (in the original Rescue movie, of course they wind up shipwrecked back on the island).
The second movie was called The Castaways on Gilligans Island. It was an attempt to make a Love Boat/Fantasy Island franchise, where a guest star would have their marital problems solved each week. It didn’t work too well (I know, I know, - scheduling, buried by the Network etc).
The third was called The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligans Island which, surprisingly, was even worse than it sounds. Imagine a basketball game between Alien Robots and the Harlem Globetrotters to save the earth - actually, on second thoughts, don’t,.
Cult classic The Boondock Saints actually has a sequel called All Saints Day. There was a hit piece done about the director Troy Duffy, saying he was a tyrant etc (to which The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus quoted “if you have enough footage of Santa Claus you can edit it to make him look like an asshole”) but despite this Duffy was able to reunite the cast from the first film, ten years later.
A Boondock Saints 3 has been rumored ever since along with a TV series but the last I heard there was some behind the scenes drama keeping any of it from happening.
I concur re: The Sword and the Sorceror & offer a hearty thanks for notice of the sequel. I’m not a big fan of Kevin "“Jesus would have voted for Trump” Sorbo tho, so I’ll prolly pass on seeing it unless I can know he’s not gonna make a dime when I do.
There was a 1968 film called The Detective starring Frank Sinatra. When they were making the sequel twenty years later (technically, the sequel to the source novel), contractually, they had to offer the role to Sinatra. He turned it down and they changed the main character’s name. The sequel is kind of obscure. I think it’s calledDie Hard starring Bruce Willis.
Angel (1984), a somewhat exploitational movie about a high school honor student with a double life as a Hollywood prostitute, had two sequels that kind of defined “diminishing returns.”
Emmanuelle, the Just Jaeckin-directed softcore porn sensation from 1974 starring Sylvia Krystal, has spawned 27 sequels (many of them made for television) and a video game.
I never saw that, but I always suspected that I Dream of Jeannie was inspired in part by the 1964 remake of The Brass Bottle, which featured Tony Randall as an architect who buys an antique brass bottle that holds genie Burl Ives. Barbara Eden plays the girlfriend of Randall’s character, So Eden almost fits this thread, having played girlfriend of modern-day genie-finder and the genie herself.
The Wikipedia article evens claims the film was instrumental in getting Eden the part in the TV show
I Dream of Jeannie came out a year later in 1965. Her own bottle does look a bit like Burl Ives’
(The movie is the third version of a film based on a 1900 novel by F. Ansley. The previous two versions were silent. If you read Famous Monsters of Filmland back in the 60s, you’ve seen stills from them.
Romero made plenty of sequels to Night of the Living Dead many of which are pretty well known.
Then there’s also a sort of sequel in Return of the Living Dead, also well known. Well, that one got a Return of the Living Dead: Part II a few years later, with basically the same plot but none of the charm. Return has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 91, and Part II 0. I wonder what movie and its sequel has a bigger discrepancy.
Then there were three more! The latter two came in 2005 and were filmed simultaneously with a mostly Eastern European cast and are really bad.
Romero’s 1978 film *Dawn of the Dead * was released in Europe as Zombi. Italian director Lucio Fulci released a film called Zombi 2 which marketed as a sequel. Zombi 2 itself has several sequels.
George Romero was not involved in any of them.
