And that’s why James Cameron makes the big bucks.

This is why I'm really excited about Titanic II - Zombie Sub

Will they meet the creatures from the Abyss in this pic?

Who else did you think really sank the Titanic?

Evil Dead went on the same journey, more or less.

It did, but I would argue that Army of Darkness is just as great as Evil Dead 2, and substantially better than the first Evil Dead, so we at least got three classic movies instead of two.

Though, I guess you could argue that Evil Dead 2 is much more of a "comedy slapstick remake" of the first one than a sequel.

And Army of Darkness is a comedy slapstick action movie. Right up there with UHF. Fantastic film!

Oh it's definitely a great movie, arguably better than Evil Dead 2, but I will say that a part of me wished they had kind of pretended to take themselves seriously more.

Let me explain: part of why I like Evil Dead 2 so much is because it does a great job of walking the line between "horror" and "comedy". At some parts it's pretty goofy, but always in a way that kind of feels like it could plausibly be in a regular horror movie. Stuff like the moose head laughing, or Ash cutting off his hand and replacing it with a chainsaw are silly, and even slapsticky, but still kind of works in the tone of a "regular" horror movie.

Army of Darkness on the other hand is basically a just a comedy. It has no pretense of being anything else, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, but a part of me wonders what it would have been like if they had kind of kept the goofiness into "potentially plausible in an action movie" territory.

> I guess you could argue that Evil Dead 2 is much more of a "comedy slapstick remake" of the first one than a sequel.

I really can't imagine what else one might argue.

I had a friend swear up and down that it's a sequel, not a remake. His argument was that instead of a group of friends it was just a couple, so it's a different story, but both have Bruce Campbell as Ash, so it's the same universe.

I didn't agree with him.

"It's too different to be a remake" seems tenuous, but not absurd. I'd probably call it a "reimagining" or something then, though. Sequel implies shared continuity which it obviously lacks.

Army of Darkness seems to subvert the trend in two ways.

There’s a strong parody element to the series, Ash is basically an idiot so it isn’t that annoying/unexpected to have him redo some character development. Oh he learned nothing in the previous movies? That scans.

It also manages to continue raising the stakes by shifting to a new genre. In this case, a sort of weird… fantasy/sword-and-sorcery/post-apocalyptic(?) universe. It confronts the protagonist with a new type of challenge so it doesn’t feel like a re-do.

At least they have the option to lean more toward the comedy.

And Tremors 2, we went through a bunch of this era of movies awhile back and all the sequels were better.

Wow that's a fascinating perspective, thanks for posting! I'm looking forward to using this to make people think I'm smarter than I really am.

Just to be clear, I didn’t invent the idea that Terminator is a horror movie in disguise, there’s lots of discussion floating around out there on the internet. Cameron was apparently very influenced by slasher movies.

>This is also why there couldn’t be a good third movie, there’s nowhere natural to go after action.

Rom-Com? Heist movie?

If someone could figure out the next step, that would be great. So many good series died on their third entry.

Heist might make sense.

The trajectory could be something like survive -> kick ass -> pulled back in at a disadvantage? Maybe.

The obvious disadvantage would be that they are now too old to kick ass. But that means you have to wait a decade or two before making the 3rd movie.

Plus it would require the audience to grapple the idea that people lose some of their capabilities as they age, which might be too uncomfortable. And it seems like it might be a bad idea for the main actor’s career, might get typecast into “aging action star.”

> This is also why there couldn’t be a good third movie, there’s nowhere natural to go after action.

I felt the third Alien film actually made a pretty good punt at this; it's not a perfect film without its issues, but I rather like it. The "female lands on abandoned prison planet with a bunch of violent criminals" setting was a good direction to go in after the first two films. It would have been better if they had focused more on the prisoners and such and less on the xenomorph running after Ripley (especially in the second half). In spite of the problems, I still like it more than Cameron's Aliens (which was certainly not a bad film, but also suffered from some issues IMO).

A problem with "big franchises" type of movies is that studio people with seemingly no sense of what makes movie great get involved and make things hard for people who want to do anything different that could make a sequel work. "People paid for aliens chasing Ripley in the previously films, so we must have more of that!" I have no problems they're focused on their investment and money, but it never seizes to amaze me how poorly these people sometimes seem to understand their market.