Hellriser (2017) and Standalone Sequels vs. Continuous

Franchises are a large part of the film business.  Finding what people like and making more of it is a strategy that filmmakers use to make money.  Sometimes they feel a need to continue the story to expand upon what happened in the first film, but most of the time it comes down to money.  People paid for something, so they would probably pay for more of the same thing.  That’s why there are six Mission: Impossible movies, five Transformers movies, and over twenty James Bond movies.

Many times, the story continues into the sequel and the sequel depends upon the knowledge that the audience has of what came before.  Back to the Future II was a movie built upon what happened in Back to the Future, and if the audience missed the first one, they might not understand what happened in the sequel.  Especially when Marty went back to the 1950s again and had to avoid himself.  The story of the sequel needed the story of the first film in order to exist and make sense to audiences.

Other times, there are standalone sequels that don’t need the background of the movies that happened earlier in the franchise.  They are their own story that doesn’t need all of that outside context to make sense.  A person could sit down and watch the movie without having any problems where the story needs further elaboration from a different story.  Or, at the very most, there are minor things that don’t affect the story but instead build it out.

Hellriser was one of those sequels that was able to stand on its own.  There were enough callbacks to Nocturnal Activity that the people who had seen it would be happy to continue the story with the sequel, but knowledge of the predecessor was not necessary.  Any background needed was available from the dialogue and character interactions throughout Hellriser.  For the most part, it was its own story that didn’t need to be seen as part of something bigger.

In Hellriser, Detective Locke (Steven Dolton) was working a case where prostitutes were being murdered in his patrol area.  He became one of the prime suspects because of how involved he was in the case without finding any concrete evidence.  His boss gave him a new partner, Detective Keyes (Charlie Bond), who was tasked with solving the murder and seeing if Locke was guilty.  Through their investigations, they discovered that Annie Dyer (Raven Lee) may have been orchestrating the murders from inside an asylum run by Dr. Unnseine (Andrew Coughlan).

Annie Dyer and Detective Locke were characters that came from Nocturnal Activity.  Annie was the main character and Locke was investigating what happened to her with possession and supernatural activity stuff.  They came over into Hellriser with Annie having been possessed and committed, and Locke continuing his policing.  That wasn’t needed to get into the story of Hellriser, though.  All that was needed was the idea of a detective who had a history with a possibly possessed person who was orchestrating murders.  The first movie wasn’t needed to understand the relationship between the characters.  It was perfectly set up during the runtime of the sequel.

Standalone movies are good in that they can be enjoyed on their own, but can also be enjoyed by people who have watched the other movies through callbacks and character growth.  For those that haven’t seen the other movies in a franchise, a standalone sequel lets them be entertained by a tight, mostly self-contained story.

From a filmmaker’s point of view, a standalone sequel can be a great thing as much as it can be something to avoid.  On the plus side, it makes it easier to get an audience.  Because they don’t have to watch all of the movies in the franchise in order to jump in on the third or fourth entry, they could start watching at any installment.  It’s easy for box office, especially when the trailer is cut well and people want to see it.  They don’t feel required to watch a long series to jump in, so they just jump in, and more money is made.

The James Bond franchise and the Mission: Impossible franchise thrive on this sort of storytelling.  The movies are much more about the action spectacle than the long-lasting story.  Most of the James Bond movies had no connection from one to the next outside of characters popping up again.  Until the Daniel Craig movies, there haven’t been any overarching emotional through lines for the character of Bond.  Most everything that happened with him would be completely forgotten by the next movie.  The Mission: Impossible movies had a little bit more story between installments, with the bond between Ethan Hunt and the other characters being the main story thread to go through the movies.  Ethan must always protect the people he cares about, and that’s what every movie has been about.  The friendships grow throughout the movies.  But there’s still not much need to watch them in any order, until the newest one which paid off some of the things from the three movies before.  Most of the movies stand on their own as a self-contained story.

The negative aspects of the standalone story concept for a filmmaker are that there might be a lack of growth to a franchise, and it might be as easy to lose audiences as gain them.  If a series of movies is filled with standalone installments, it might be hard to have any large growth.  It might become more difficult to give a character a bigger emotional story when everything needs to wrap itself up in every movie.  The character’s story must conclude within the runtime of one film, so the next film must start at a new status quo instead of simply continuing.  As for the accessibility, it might be easier for audiences to join at any point, but it’s just as easy for them to drop off.  Since the story wraps itself up in each movie, there might not be anything to keep the audience invested and wanting to continue to the next movie.  The lack of investment might push the filmmaker into a continuous narrative instead of leaning more to the standalone side of things.

Hellriser was a filmmaker choosing to go more in the standalone direction of making a sequel.  It had links to the movie that came before, but it stood on its own as a self-contained story of a murder mystery with supernatural aspects.  That might be part of what made it so accessible.  The story was its own thing, and that thing was entertaining.  If it had relied upon seeing Nocturnal Activity in order to move forward, it could have been incomprehensible, which would have made it worse.  Much, much worse.  It was a decent enough murder story, though.  That was good.

When filmmakers branch out into franchises, they have a decision to make.  They can continue the story in a direct way, or try to make their movie stand on its own.  There are benefits to both routes, though the standalone sequel might be better.  The story isn’t dependent on what came before, allowing people to enjoy the movie as it is.  It is one movie and that’s all that matters to the story.  A standalone sequel can be a great thing.

Here are some notes:

• Hellriser was suggested by @erincandy, who previously suggested the movies Glitter (week 22), Ghost Storm (week 97), Zombeavers (week 142), Dead Before Dawn 3D (week 149), Bigfoot vs. Zombies (week 218), Jem and the Holograms (week 238), Britney Ever After (week 258), and Aliens vs. Titanic (week 283).
• Have you seen Hellriser?  Did you see Nocturnal Activitiy?  Do you think that you need to watch one of them to see the other?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
• Twitter or the comments are good places to share movies that you think I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If there’s a movie that you think would fit with what I watch for the blog, feel free to share.  I’m always looking for stuff I might not know about.
• When I’m watching bad movies, I sometimes share clips of them through my Snapchat (jurassicgriffin).  If seeing these clips sounds like something you want, add me.
• With this post behind us, we look to the future, and I look to one of the toughest weeks ever in terms of time to get this stuff done.  Next week is a franchise week, which means that there will be two movies as the subject.  This is a little inconvenient for me as, all week, we are shooting our final drama film for school.  I’ve already watched the movies, so I’m ahead by that much, but getting the post up may cause me a little trouble.  Anyway, as the first week after Halloween, we’re out of the horror for a little bit.  The two Platinum Dunes produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies are getting their turn in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, so come back next Sunday to see what I’ve got.

From Hell to the Wild West (2017)

Serial killers have fascinated people for many years.  They may not have always been known as serial killers, and the psychology behind them may have only been deeply researched over the past few decades, but the idea of someone killing numerous people for seemingly no reason is one that has filled people’s minds with curiosity and anxiety for many years.

One of the most notorious serial killers in history was Jack the Ripper.  The unknown killer murdered five prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London in 1888.  Or so people think.  There may have been more or less, but the five that are generally considered to have been Jack the Ripper’s victims shared many similarities in how they were killed.

The legends behind serial killers can inspire many people to write stories sharing similar traits.  There are books, short stories, movies, and television shows that chronicle the brutal deaths caused by the serial killers.  Jack the Ripper is no different.  Fictional tales have been made time and time again that have some sort of a connection to the British murderer.  This week’s movie was one of them.

From Hell to the Wild West was a movie that didn’t necessarily scream Jack the Ripper before it began.  It felt like it would be a western about a cowboy fighting off demons or something.  Instead, it was a what if scenario where, after committing the murders in London, Jack the Ripper moved to the wild west and continued his killings.  Two researchers in the present discovered the connection between Jack the Ripper and a serial killer in the wild west, as the story of the past played out on screen.

Robert Bronzi starred in From Hell to the Wild West as a cowboy trying to hunt down the killer and clear himself of suspicion for the deaths.  Many lawmakers had thought that he was the person murdering women throughout the open land, but he knew who the real killer was.  He teamed up with a US Marshall to save some women and get rid of the killer for good.

The thing about Robert Bronzi was that he bore a striking resemblance to Charles Bronson.  He knew that when he changed his name to Bronzi from Kovacz.  The similarity in their looks wasn’t something unique to them.  Robert Bronzi wasn’t the first actor to try and cash in on how much he looked like someone else.  When Bruce Lee died, there were a bunch of Bruce Le and Bruce Li actors who popped up.  It’s just something of note that the main star of this movie was that kind of thing for Charles Bronson.

The story wasn’t all that strong in From Hell to the Wild West.  There was a murder followed by a chase followed by a shootout followed by character introductions right before the characters were killed followed by the researchers, and back to the chase to start the loop over again.  There wasn’t depth and there wasn’t any real way to connect to the characters because they ended up dying almost as soon as they were introduced with only the smallest amount of backstory given to them.  It’s hard to care for a character that isn’t fully formed.

As for the Jack the Ripper story thread, it felt unnecessary.  It was disconnected from what was happening in the past, which could have been the whole movie by itself.  It felt like the theory was tossed into the movie simply to pad the runtime because the movie would have been about an hour and ten minutes otherwise.  They wanted to be closer to the hour and a half, feature film time, and added the scenes in order to get the movie there.  That said, it contained the best acting in the movie because everyone that was in the wild west turned in bad, overwrought performances.  So there was that.

From Hell to the Wild West was not a good movie.  It posited an interesting idea.  What if Jack the Ripper had moved to a different place to continue his murders?  The execution of that idea wasn’t the greatest.  The stale acting and the main plot’s disconnection from that idea made the movie feel like a poorly put together conspiracy theory.

Serial killers have captured the minds of people all over the world.  With the rise of true crime shows and podcasts into the forefront over the past few years, fictionalized films were poised to go to the same places.  Some of them ended up being successful.  From Hell to the Wild West wasn’t one of the successes.  It has its place among the David DeCoteau and Jim Wynorski horror flicks that have come out in the past decade.  It’s not much more than that, though.

Here are some notes:

• From Hell to the Wild West was suggested by @einsteinsarcade.
• Charlie Glackin was in From Hell to the Wild West.  He was in another western with horror elements called Jonah Hex (week 249).
• Have you seen From Hell to the Wild West?  Have you seen other movies about Jack the Ripper after his five known murders?  What did you think of any of it?  Let me know in the comments.
• The comments are also a place where you can suggest movies to be covered for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Comments or Twitter, that is.  Let me know what you want to see me write about.
• Sometimes when I watch bad movies, I’ll share clips from them on Snapchat.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
• Next week, we’ll be finishing up another month of horror for the Sunday “Bad” Movies by checking out a movie about an asylum called Hellriser.  For some reason, I had expected it to be about an elevator.  I think the “riser” part made me think that.  It’s not about an elevator.  I’ll tell you about it in seven days.  See you then.

Movies Set on Holidays and ThanksKilling (2008)

Holiday season is more than just November and December.  There are holidays throughout the year.  Whether they are days off from work, or just goofy little things like National Hot Dog Day, there are holidays all the time.  And they celebrate almost anything.  Filmmakers know this, and they like to infuse their movies with a little bit of the holiday fever.  It adds something more to what could have been a fairly standard story.  The horror genre has notably been using holidays in storytelling for decades, and fans eat it up.

Many holidays have their classic horror entries.  Halloween has John Carpenter’s Halloween.  It also has Trick ‘R Treat.  Christmas has Black Christmas and Silent Night Deadly Night among all of the others.  Independence Day has Jaws.  Those are only a few examples, and they’re the ones that end up on the upper end of fans’ favourites.  What about the lower end, though?  What about the bad horror movies that use holidays?  There are many of them, enough so that there can be a whole post about the ones that have been featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.

Last week would have been the perfect week for some holiday horror.  As it was, the perfect movie was scheduled a week too late, this week.  Last Monday was Thanksgiving in Canada, and as such, this week featured a movie called ThanksKilling.  The movie followed five friends as they travelled home for Thanksgiving, only to encounter a bloodthirsty turkey.  The turkey was out to kill them all and wouldn’t stop until all five of them were dead.  The quality of that synopsis was about the quality of the movie.

The story hinged upon the fact that it was Thanksgiving.  That was the reason that the friends weren’t in their college classes.  It was the reason that their families got tangled up in the horrific events.  Thanksgiving was the reason that the Turkey was attacking.  It had something to do with the first Thanksgiving and the fact that the turkey wanted revenge upon the human race for what they were doing.  Unlike the family film Free Birds, where the turkeys simply wanted to replace themselves as the Thanksgiving meal with pizza, this turkey was out for revenge.  It wasn’t there every year.  It only showed up once every hundred and something years, but it was out to kill the people that killed its kind.  And it did so in outlandish ways.

Holidays influence all kinds of horror movies.  All year round there are horror movies that fit into the holidays.  ThanksKilling wasn’t the only one to be featured on the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It was the only one where a turkey raped a woman, dressed up as a man to trick a sheriff, then disguised itself as the sheriff with the sheriff’s own face for a face.  No other movies had that stuff in them.  But there were other holiday movies that sometimes bordered on that kind of insanity.

Valentine’s Day

There have been a few horror movies set around Valentine’s Day.  The most notable was the Canadian slasher film My Bloody Valentine, which was remade twenty-eight years later as My Bloody Valentine 3-D.  The two movies saw a miner coming after the people working and living around there, killing them one by one.  What set it apart was the level of violence in it.  The original was one of the most strikingly violent horror movies of the time, and ended up being one of the most entertaining.

No Valentine’s Day based horror movies have been featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, though there have been other genres that touched upon that day making their way into the blog.  There have been plenty of horror movies featuring weird romances, though.  Bigfoot vs. Zombies had a sasquatch falling in love with a scientist while helping her evade zombies at a body farm.  So, yeah, romantic.

St. Patrick’s Day

Drinking.  The Irish.  Leprechauns.  Those are the main things that people think about when St. Patrick’s Day gets closer.  There are mass drinking parties that day, which lead to mass passed out people or mass vomit or mass noise complaints and mass police.  It’s a day for loud day drinking and louder night drinking as a celebration of… Drinking?

Anyway, the Leprechaun movies fit into that St. Patrick’s Day theme.  Though they might not be directly tied into the day, it’s hard to say that the day doesn’t make people think of leprechauns.  Two Leprechaun movies were featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, and they were perhaps the best two entries in the franchise.  Leprechaun in the Hood took the slasher villain back to Earth after the disastrous Leprechaun 4: In Space, and saw him taking on some aspiring hip hop artists.  It was wacky, fun, and hilarious all at the same time, becoming an enjoyable bad rather than the bad bad of what came before.

Then there was Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood.  Though not as good as the first Hood entry, it was still a fun movie as the leprechaun interacted with people at parties drinking and smoking.  The two movies brought a fresh voice to the series, elevating it in a way it hadn’t been elevated before.

April Fool’s Day

This one’s an oddball because you wouldn’t think that there were too many movies that celebrated this day.  Yet, two movies featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies heavily depended upon the day and the pranks committed upon it.

April Fools was an early movie in the history of the blog that played very much like I Know What You Did Last Summer, except set in April with a different demographic.  A group of friends played a prank on someone from their school and ended up accidentally killing him in the process.  They covered up the death, only to be threatened by someone a year later who knew what they did.  They went after them, killing them, until a final showdown where their identity was revealed.  The day was rooted in the movie through the prank gone wrong.

Another movie that used the prank gone wrong idea was Slaughter High.  The high school bullies had played a prank on the nerd that caused him to have severe injuries all over his body.  Ten years later, they were invited back to the now closed school for a reunion.  Only, the reunion was thrown for the sole purpose of killing each of them.  Slasher movie again, eh?

Both movies utilized the same element of April Fools Day, which was that a prank went wrong causing serious harm to someone.  April Fools Day is a day all about the pranks, and there are really only two ways to take that concept and play into horror with it.  Either, a prank goes wrong, or someone is intentionally killing people through the pranks.  That hasn’t been featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies yet.  Maybe that twist will pop up in the future.

Easter

Because Easter has tended to be reserved for the religious movies like God’s Not Dead, or the date of the holiday is simply forgotten, there haven’t been any actual Easter horror movies featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  There are a bunch out there, though, mostly involving killer Easter Bunnies.  Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! and such other movies.

The closest the blog came to an Easter horror movie was Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, where Jesus was resurrected to fight off lesbian vampires in Ottawa, Canada.  It was a low budget action, horror, musical with heaps of comedy.  What worked was that the movie never took itself seriously, while the people behind it knew what they were doing with their low budget to make an actual movie.  It was a delightfully fun time watching one of the most religious figures in the world take on vampires.

Independence Day

As mentioned earlier, Jaws was one of the most iconic movies to be set on the 4^th of July.  It was about the shark attacks that occurred around Amity Island during the long weekend, and the police chief who set out to stop them.  It wasn’t a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  The Spielberg horror movie was too well done to be included.  That didn’t stop the sequels from being covered, though.

Jaws 3-D was about police chief Brody’s two sons trying to stop sharks in Seaworld, or a place very much like Seaworld.  What brought the movie down were the effects.  The movie attempted to try 3-D effects, but did them in a poor way.  Seeing it in 2-D might be to blame.  That doesn’t seem to be the case.  The scenes that attempted 3-D were horribly done.  Jaws: The Revenge failed in a storytelling way.  A shark followed Chief Brody’s widowed wife to the Caribbean for some reason.  She was having panic attacks thinking that sharks were out to get her.  It was weird.

Neither of the movies capitalized on Independence Day the was that the original Jaws did.  That weekend was a crucial part of the story.  It was the busiest tourism weekend for Amity, so the mayor didn’t want to shut the beaches down.  There was evidence of shark attacks, but the money that could be made from the tourists was too good to give up.  It was an opportunity that the mayor wouldn’t let pass by, so he kept the beaches open and more people were killed.  All because of the long weekend.

Halloween

The most notable horror movie to be set around a holiday is Halloween.  Halloween might not be an actual holiday, but it’s a day that people celebrate.  The movie spawned seven sequels, with an eighth on the way, and a rebooted two-movie franchise.  The eleven movies vary in quality, ranging from the great Halloween to the terrible Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.

The latter film was featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Halloween was an important part of the Halloween franchise, obviously.  Michael Myers always attacked people on Halloween.  There’s more to it than that, though.  Going back to the original movie, it’s easy to see that it wouldn’t be the same without being set on Halloween.  First, the day just makes things spookier.  Second, Michael Myers wore a Halloween mask as he attacked his victims.  And third, the whole boogeyman thing came from the bullies at school saying that the boogeyman came out on Halloween.  It all gelled together to make for solid horror franchise.

Even the one movie in the Halloween franchise that didn’t have Michael Myers as the villain utilized the Halloween motifs.  Halloween III: Season of the Witch was about a toy salesman who was producing Halloween masks.  He planned on using an advertisement on television to kill people through the masks.  He was using Halloween and children’s love of popular masks to kill a massive amount of people.  One man was out to stop him.  It was an interesting way to use Halloween to a horrific effect and there’s a reason that the third entry in the series recently found a surge in popularity.

Christmas

Skipping over Thanksgiving because ThanksKilling was already discussed, the next stop is Christmas.  There are way too many Christmas horror movies to count.  The Jack Frost movies, Elves, and Santa’s Slay were all featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, and each used the Christmas season in their own way to shape their story.

Jack Frost was one of the lighter movies on the Christmas elements, though it still had a lot of holiday influence.  It took place around that time of year, so there were Christmas lights and snowmen.  It wasn’t as heavy on Christmas as other movies have been, though.  The bad guy was a snowman and he did some crazy things, but a killer snowman could have been at any time of winter without really feeling out of place.  Where Michael Myers is only the way he is because of the Halloween influence, Jack Frost isn’t the way he is because of Christmas.

Elves, on the other hand, was very much a Christmas influenced movie.  It took place during the holidays, and the hero was a guy who had been a mall Santa.  While on his quest to save the protagonist girl, he interrupted a family’s Christmas dinner.  The villainous monster was an elf.  It was all Christmas themed.  The story itself might not have required the Christmas setting.  It was about a Nazi science experiment where an elf would have sex with a virgin girl to produce the master race.  Did that require Christmas?  Maybe not.  It was better to feature Christmas, though.

Santa’s Slay was even more influenced by Christmas in that it had Santa as the villain.  He had lost a bet many years before that made him be nice to children for a certain amount of time.  That time was up and Santa was going back to his old people-killing ways.  The killing spree brought him face to face with the man who had defeated him years before and now that man, along with his descendants, had to put a stop to Santa.  There was no way this could have been made without the Christmas setting.

New Year’s

A new year can mean a new beginning and some horror has managed to capitalize on that.  There aren’t too many horror movies based around the new year, or featuring New Year’s Day, even.  There are a few, though, and one such movie was a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies a couple years ago.

Antisocial was a movie about the problems with social media.  It didn’t take that on directly.  It wasn’t a movie about people being so absorbed in social media that they ignored the world around them.  It was, to an extent, but it was a zombie movie at its core.  A group of friends gather for a New Year’s celebration and are one by one turned into zombies through their social media pages.  In the most recent software update, a virus was added to the platform that would infect the brains of the people using it and effectively turn them into rage zombies.  The main character’s life was falling to pieces before that night, and the events bring about a new life in a new zombie world.  She was getting a new start in a new world.  The idea of New Year’s was baked into her story.

All year long, movies are influenced by the days that people celebrate.  Birthdays, holidays, national days.  People like to celebrate and with that, movies like to celebrate.  That’s why there are Christmas movies, New Year’s movies, Independence Day movies, Thanksgiving movies, Halloween movies, and Valentine’s Day movies.  Every day gets celebrations and every day gets movies.

Horror tends to be a genre that dives into the pool of celebratory days.  That’s why there can be a horror movie found for pretty much every day that can be thought of.  Some of them are good, some of them are bad.  Regardless of quality, they get celebrated as much as the days that they are based around.  People watch them at those times of year because they associate them with the day.  People watch Halloween on Halloween.  They watch Elves around Christmas.  They watch Friday the 13^th when there’s a Friday the 13^th.  The movies became a part of the tradition of that day.

ThanksKilling may not have become a part of the Thanksgiving tradition.  There have been better movies based around that holiday, outside of the horror genre.  For horror fans looking for a fun, low budget horror comedy, though, ThanksKilling is a breath of fresh air for the Thanksgiving season.  It’s a ridiculous, over the top horrorfest.  And it’s a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.

These notes are also a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies:

• ThanksKilling wasn’t the only movie mentioned in this post.  Other movies that were brought up included Free Birds (week 209), Bigfoot vs. Zombies (week 218), Leprechaun in the Hood (week 120), Leprechaun Back2 tha Hood (week 120), April Fools (week 18), Slaughter High (week 279), God’s Not Dead (week 230), Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (week 87), Jaws 3-D (week 240), Jaws: The Revenge (week 240), Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (week 48), Jack Frost (week 54), Elves (week 106), Santa’s Slay (week 263), and Antisocial (week 214).
• Have you seen ThanksKilling?  What did you think of it?  Are you excited for whenever I get around to covering the sequel?  Let me know in the comments.
• Another thing you can do in the comments is suggest something for me to watch.  I’m always trying to find movies I might not know about.  ThanksKilling was brought to my attention by someone I go to school with.  Do you have any ideas for what I should check out?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
• Sometimes, while watching bad movies, I share clips of them on Snapchat (jurassicgriffin).  Add me if that’s something you want to see.
• Next week, I’ll be continuing the month of horror here as I check out a movie called From Hell to the Wild West.  There aren’t too many horror westerns that get made, so this should be an interesting trip into an area that hasn’t really been featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I’ll see you then with my thoughts on the movie.