Blood Diner (1987) and The Long and Winding Road of Sequels or Not

When it comes to franchise filmmaking, there’s nothing more important than finding the right sequel for a film. There must be a way for the characters to be sent on another journey so that audiences will come back and spend more money. It all comes down to finding the right story to continue the journey. Sometimes that story will come from a sequel to the source material, a sequel to the book that the original was based on or something of that nature. Other times, writers have scripts that get tailored to fit a successful intellectual property. And other times yet, it might just be a natural progression of the characters’ journeys. It doesn’t matter to filmmakers, as long as they continue telling stories that make money.

There are times, however, when the writing of a sequel doesn’t work out. There may be a script written or an idea conceived, but some circumstances that were not originally seen change the entire process. The sequel then becomes its own thing. Or, in some interesting instances, becomes a sequel to an entirely different franchise. What was originally intended to be one thing must be rewritten and reworked into something else. It could work. It could not. That’s the nature of the business.

Blood Diner was one such movie. Michael Tutman (Rick Burks) and George Tutman (Carl Crew) were two brothers who ran a successful diner. Unbeknownst to the patrons, the food was frequently made using human body parts. The owners were forcing cannibalism on the people eating their food. The cannibal diner was actually a front for something much darker and deadlier. The brothers were planning to resurrect a Lumerian goddess named Sheetar with the help of the brain of their uncle Anwar (Drew Godderis). Two detectives were hot on the trail of dead bodies that Michael and George left in their wake.

That might not sound like a sequel to anything. In the end, it wasn’t. But originally, it had a connection to one of the biggest cult movies of all time. Blood Feast was a 1963 film that truly kicked off the splatter horror subgenre. It made gore a major part of the story. When Blood Diner was conceived, it was meant to be a continuation of the Blood Feast story. It was meant to be a sequel to the iconic splatter film, since a true sequel hadn’t been made (one eventually would in 2002). This idea of being a sequel could be seen in the story. There was someone in the food industry murdering women and using their body parts to resurrect a goddess during a feast that hadn’t been held in over 5,000 years. Yet, somewhere along the process of moving from script to screen, the sequel idea was scrapped. Blood Diner became a standalone movie that shared a story with Blood Feast. The ancient goddess was changed from Egyptian to Lumerian. The catering business became a diner. And the 1980s influence came through.

The nail in the coffin of Blood Diner’s chances of being a sequel came in 2002 with the release of Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat. Before that, Blood Diner was considered a sort of spiritual sequel to Blood Feast, in the same way that Everybody Wants Some!! was seen as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused. It shared the themes, the overall story, and the gore with Blood Feast, though the characters and history were entirely different. But when the official sequel came from the director of Blood Feast, that spiritual sequelness all but disappeared.

The idea of sequels becoming something different only gets more interesting when the focus is put on the big blockbuster films. As opposed to the cult film passion project sequels, studio sequels are pushed based on the money factor. If the original film did good, they could make even more money by turning it into a franchise. They find a story and morph it into a sequel. Or they come up with a sequel idea. But that doesn’t always work out, and the movie must be turned into something else entirely.

The French Connection was a hit film in 1971. It was a police story that had one of the best car chases ever put to film. Popeye Doyle became an action hero of sorts, and Gene Hackman’s performance would be essential to Popeye Doyle’s success on screen. Gene Hackman would reprise the role in 1975 for The French Connection II, which also found success. People ate up the franchise as though it was the next big thing. Of course, the studio would want to continue it. They came up with a script for a third film and pitched it to Gene Hackman. He passed.

That wouldn’t be the end of The French Connection III. It would no longer be called The French Connection III, but it lived on. Gene Hackman passed on it. 20^th Century Fox passed on it. The script moved over to Universal where it was retooled with Sylvester Stallone attached in the lead role. It was released in 1981 as Nighthawks. It found some critical acclaim and made enough at the box office to turn a profit. But it was no The French Connection III.

Then there was the time when there was an attempt to make a sequel to Se7en. The David Fincher crime drama had been a success for New Line Cinema in 1995. It made careers. Mostly the career of David Fincher, but it helped push Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey to stardom as well. It was well received, it made a lot of money at the box office, and it was even nominated for an Academy Award. At some point, there was going to be an attempt at a sequel. It was only a matter of time before that would happen.

Fast forward six years to 2001. Ocean’s Eleven had been released to great success. Brad Pitt was a huge star and was part of the reason Ocean’s Eleven did so well. Another reason for it doing so well was the writer, Ted Griffin. That writer was brought in to come up with a script for a sequel to Se7en, tentatively titled Ei8ht. He wrote and wrote and wrote, but David Fincher didn’t want to make a sequel, so the idea was scrapped. Until ten years later, that is. In 2012, a director was brought on to film the script. A few changes were done to change it from a Se7en sequel, and the film Solace was born. And it was forgotten just as quickly.  The critics didn’t like it and people didn’t go out to see it.

The most successful of the sequel to not-sequel films would span the late 1980s until the late 1990s. It would also span three movies. There was one action franchise that began in 1988 which would help shape the action landscape for years to come. Within that time, three movies were released that were a part of the franchise. Also within that time, three what-ifs were thrown into the mix because every good franchise should have some what ifs. That franchise was Die Hard.

The first Die Hard movie was based on a novel titled Nothing Lasts Forever. That might not seem like a big deal. However, Nothing Lasts Forever was a sequel to a novel called The Detective, which had been made into a movie in 1968, starring Frank Sinatra. They had to offer the lead role of the new adaptation to Sinatra because of contract clauses, but he chose not to work on the film. That led to Nothing Lasts Forever being adapted into a sequel to Commando before becoming its own thing and casting Bruce Willis as the now iconic John McClane.

Unlike most instances where sequels were turned into non-sequels or sequels to other properties, Die Hard became a resounding success. It soared well above The Detective and managed to eclipse Commando. It was by far the most successful of the three properties. It led to a bunch of movies trying to capture the same magic in different locations. Under Siege, Speed, Toy Soldiers, Passenger 57, and Skyscraper were only a few of the movies that fell into the category of Die Hard riffs. A couple of them even got tangled up in the Die Hard sequels.

Die Hard 2 came out in 1990, fresh off the popularity of Die Hard. The producers wanted to quickly put a third out, as well, and settled on a script called Troubleshooter. The script saw terrorists taking over a cruise ship that John McClane just so happened to be on. He would have to do his Die Hard stuff again to save the cruise ship. The problem was that Under Siege was in production while they came across the script, so Fox scrapped the idea. Troubleshooter would later get picked up by Fox again for a different franchise. It became Speed 2: Cruise Control.

That wasn’t the end of the line for a third Die Hard movie, though. Die Hard with a Vengeance came out in 1997. The eventual script that was settled upon was one titled Simon Says, where a terrorist took revenge on a detective who had wronged him in some way in the past. It was originally proposed as a Brandon Lee film, but Lee died before it could be made. The script then sat on the shelf for a while. The producers of Lethal Weapon tried to purchase it to make the fourth film in that franchise, but the purchase never went through. Eventually, it was rewritten into a Die Hard sequel, turning Simon into the brother of Hans Gruber, and things moved forward.

Three times in the Die Hard franchise, a film that was meant to be one thing was turned into another. The first film could have been a sequel to a Sinatra flick, or the second Commando film. That didn’t happen. The original idea for Die Hard 3 was sidelined by Under Siege before being turned into a sequel to Speed. The eventual Die Hard with a Vengeance began as a Brandon Lee action flick and almost became a Lethal Weapon sequel before being turned into the Die Hard sequel that it was. That’s a lot of franchise hopping for one series of movies.

These were only a handful of the instances where scripts went from sequels to standalone or standalone to sequels. Blood Diner was a sequel to Blood Feast until it wasn’t. Nighthawks began as a second sequel to The French Connection. Solace was a proposed sequel to Se7en that became its own thing. And Die Hard had a trio of swapped scripts. They all took a script that was meant to be one thing and changed it into something else.

Hollywood can be like that. Any ideas that get tossed around at one time or another will inevitably be tossed around time and time again. Sequels, remakes, reboots, and all those sorts of things come from the desire to use whatever ideas are available. The same goes for scripts. If a script doesn’t work for one franchise, it will be tinkered with until it works for another or works on its own. The franchises must go on, though. And the scripts must survive somehow. That’s how the business works, for better or worse.

For better or worse, here are a few notes:

• Once again, there are no cast connections, so I’m just going to share some of the 1980s horror movies I’ve watched for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. The Deadly Spawn (week 19), Monster in the Closet (week 55), Elves (week 106), Remote Control (week 246), The Lair of the White Worm (week 255), Slaughter High (week 279), Chopping Mall (week 306), New Year’s Evil (week 318), and Killer Klowns from Outer Space (week 361).
• Have you seen Blood Diner? Was it a good follow-up to Blood Feast, even if it wasn’t a real sequel? How do you feel about recycled scripts? Let me know what you’re thinking on Twitter or in the comments.
• If there are any movies that you think I should be checking out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies weeks, tell me about them. I’m on Twitter and I’ll check the comments. Just leave the suggestions at either of those places.
• There’s an Instagram for Sunday “Bad” Movies that you should be checking out. It’s fun stuff.
• And now we come to the part of the notes that everyone looks forward to. Here’s where I announce what will be coming up. And it’s a big one. Few adaptations of animated television shows get the same amount of hate that this one gets. The Last Airbender will be the topic of discussion next week. I hope you will join me for that.

Beta Test (2016) and Art Dictating Lives

Art can have an immense influence over people’s lives. It can inspire people. It can be an emotional outlet. It can be entertainment. Art can be many things to many people. It’s tough to imagine a world without any forms of art. It’s difficult to imagine the soft caress of art no longer being there to comfort people who need it. A world without art would be a completely different world. It would feel incomplete.

Movies are a form of art. Better yet, movies frequently portray art. They will show the making of certain pieces of art. They will feature characters who work in art. They will feature characters who watch, look at, read, or listen to art. Art becomes an intrinsic part of movies, which is only fitting since movies started as an amalgamation of different art forms. They were photographs put together to give the illusion of movement, frequently with accompanying music to add more emotion. Movies were created by joining a visual art form and an aural art form.

Some movies went deeper with their look at art. They portrayed how characters’ lives were deeply affected by art. This doesn’t necessarily mean they loved art, worked with art, or created art. There have been some movies where art determined what happened in a character’s life. It wasn’t through the character seeing art and being affected by it. It was through the character becoming a part of that art. The character was the art and they couldn’t control it. Their life was being determined by another person in control of where that art would go.

Consider a movie like 2016’s Beta Test. Orson Creed (Manu Bennett) was a former employee at a video game company. He left the company after disagreeing with CEO Andrew Kincaid (Linden Ashby) on the use of a revolutionary piece of hardware. Kincaid took revenge by sending mercenaries to Creed’s home. Creed was connected to a chip that controlled his body. Beta tester Max Troy (Larenz Tate) unknowingly controlled Orson Creed while testing a new video game. He was playing as a real person. When Max found out, things got much more complicated.

The video game world and the real world of Beta Test came together in a big way. Max Troy was testing out the newest video game for Sentinel, the leading video game company. He was given the task of stopping a bank robbery with his avatar, Orson Creed, by whatever means necessary. He went into the bank, killed the thieves, and walked out with their money. Soon after, he found out that the real Orson Creed had gone into a bank, killed a bunch of thieves, and walked out with the money. He was controlling the real Orson Creed. The video game world was becoming the real world.

Beta Test was about more than the video game world and the real world coming together. Much like another movie that will come up soon, capitalism was a large part of Beta Test. Andrew Kincaid wanted control of the video game world. Orson Creed didn’t see Kincaid’s way, which was why he left the company. Kincaid couldn’t have that and came up with the whole video game to control Orson Creed as revenge. If Orson Creed was going to fight him on the capabilities of his video games, he would use those capabilities to take Orson Creed out of the picture.

This was a similar idea to the film Gamer. Gamer was set in a future where convicts were put under the control of a video game chip, making them the avatars in a Call of Duty style death match. If the convicts were killed in the battle, that was fine. They were convicts. Their lives didn’t matter anyway. To the characters in Gamer, at least. Criminals were being used to make money for a video game company by risking and losing their lives for the entertainment of players and audiences around the world. There was also a Second Life type of video game that featured actors allowing players to control them in a simulated world that was actually a real world.

Both movies featured a world where video games and real life were intertwined. Real people were being controlled through video game technology to live out the entertainment of other people. The art was affecting real people in the real world. It was still art, but that art involved real lives being manipulated for the amusement of the players. It was as real as video games could get while still having that level of dissociation for the players. They were controlling other people, but they still had that anonymity and safety of holding a controller. They weren’t the people doing the deeds. They were the puppeteers.

Video games weren’t the only works of art to become a piece of a movie’s world. There have been movies that also involved someone’s life being manipulated and directed through a different kind of art. With the many ways to create art out there, it would be impossible for video games to be the only way that a character could be controlled by someone else’s work. That brings us to writing and how some characters have been controlled through prose.

A writer’s work on a new novel was an important part of Stranger Than Fiction. The main character of her novel turned out to be a real man whose life was being controlled through the author’s words. Everything she wrote would happen to him. She wrote him into a budding relationship. He heard her words in his head as the relationship blossomed. She wrote about his strokes while he was brushing his teeth, and he wondered why she knew this about him. He needed to find out why he could hear her voice, so he sought the author out for answers.

Stranger Than Fiction functioned much in the same way as the video game movies in terms of logistics. There was a person whose life was being controlled by the choices of another person. Instead of that other person being a gamer with a controller, it was an author with a typewriter. The words that were typed became the reality for another person. That other person lived a life decided by the author. Whether or not the author’s other books and characters had been real life funneled through her writing was not determined. It was alluded to as a possibility, but nobody knew for sure. In the case of the current main character of her newest novel, however, the writing was real life. He was living it in the same world that the author was writing it.

That wasn’t nearly the only time a movie has featured an author’s writing becoming real life for a character. Ruby Sparks featured a novelist who wrote about his ideal woman. The more he wrote about her, the more he fell in love with her. One day, she was there. Out of nowhere, she had appeared. She could have been a figment of his imagination, but other people could also interact with her. And he showed his brother that everything he wrote about her would affect the person she was and the things she did.

The writing twist was a little different in Ruby Sparks than it was in Stranger Than Fiction. The main character of Stranger Than Fiction, as far as the audience knew, existed before the book and outside of it. The writing affected his life, but his life existed beyond the writing. Ruby Sparks, however, was wholly dependant upon the writing. She became a part of the real world. People in the real world could interact with her. Their lives would be impacted by her. But her life wasn’t separate from the writing. She wasn’t simply affected by it. The writing was what created her life. The writing was her life.

Then there was a movie like The Pagemaster. It may not have been a character being directly controlled by a work of art, but the work of art was definitely impacting what they could do and how they could do it. A child was thrown into a series of literary genres and had to traverse his way through them to get back to his normal life. Through his journey, he teamed up with Adventure, Fantasy, and Horror, three books whose genres were the stories that the child had to navigate. Those characters were inspired by the writing. Without the art, they would not exist.

Adventure, Fantasy, and Horror were physical manifestations of literary genres. Their personalities were based on the tropes of those genres. But the movie wasn’t about the characters having their actions decided by the writing. They were navigating through the writing. They still had their own free will. It was just contained within the world of the writing. They were placed into the setting of the writing. It was a different way that their lives were directly affected by the art. They were experiencing it as a part of the art. The child and the books were trying to survive the literature that they found themselves inside.

A similar movie to The Pagemaster was The Final Girls. This one wasn’t a movie where the characters were being controlled or created through video games or writing. This was one of those movies that Hollywood tends to love that was about movies. A group of characters got stuck inside a horror movie, Camp Bloodbath, that they were watching in the theater. They had to make it through Camp Bloodbath while trying not to get murdered by the slasher killer. With them in were the characters of Camp Bloodbath. They were interacting with the characters they had seen on screen.

Again, this wasn’t a case of the main characters’ lives being determined by the art. It was a case in which the main characters were brought into the art itself. The characters they interacted with in Camp Bloodbath were characters created for the movie. The main characters had the free will to change the immediate narrative of Camp Bloodbath, but they couldn’t change the eventual outcome. The Camp Bloodbath characters were destined to live out the movie in excruciating accuracy. They were written for the movie and could only live through the runtime. Most of them couldn’t even live for that long. Their lives were contained in Camp Bloodbath. The real-world characters could move on with their lives, while the characters from Camp Bloodbath could only live in the hour and a half horror flick.

Screenwriters like to explore the idea of characters’ lives being directly created, changed, or limited by works of art. Inspiration is good and dandy, but writers also like to see how a work of art could have control over someone or something. They like to write about people losing their complete free will due to the limitations of some form of art. Whether that would be video games, literature, or even movies, the art can greatly dictate what a character does, what happens to them, or what happens to the world around them. Art influences art.

Art can move people in ways that few other things do. It can inspire them to make art. It can push them to try new things. But it can never take away a person’s free will. In movies, that might be different. A piece of art could control a person’s life to the point where they no longer have free will. As much as they might try, the art will determine the choices they make. It will decide what they do, who they love, and when they die. The art will play with the characters as though they were characters and not real people. Luckily, that doesn’t happen in real life. We still have our free will.

 

Hopefully these notes are good:

• Linden Ashby played Andrew Kincaid in Beta Test. He could also be seen in Anacondas 4: Trail of Blood (week 80) and Mortal Kombat (week 140).
• Manu Bennett made a Sunday “Bad” Movies return this week. He was previously in The Marine 3: Homefront (week 30).
• Finally, Yuji Okumoto made an appearance in Beta Test after appearing in Robot Wars (week 37).
• Have you seen Beta Test? What did you think of it? Do you like movies where art determines the actions of a character? Let me know your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter.
• You can use Twitter or the comments if you want to throw me a line on what movies I should be checking out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies weeks. I’m always looking for suggestions. Anything helps.
• You should also be checking out the Sunday “Bad” Movies account on Instagram.
• Next week, I’ll be taking a trip into 1980s horror. Specifically, I’ll be checking out a 1980s horror movie that was intended to be a sequel to something from decades before, until it wasn’t a sequel and was changed into something else. Blood Diner is what’s up. I’ll see you next week for that post. See you then.