Amy's Robot

It had to happen eventually

The first item in weird movie news is the announcement of American Gladiators: The Movie. Of course! Ever since last year's revival of the original 80s show on NBC, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to come up with a one-word plot concept like "superheroes" and make a movie adaptation.

I'm going to guess that the superhero Gladiators will fight an evil foreign government that's making death robots, and the Gladiators will have to use their 100% all-natural brawn to defeat the robots in a trapeze jousting battle while scrambling over an exploding foam rubber pyramid.

(By the way, Wikipedia has an unbelievably extensive entry on all the events that were ever on the show, with sub-entries on each individual event, like Gauntlet. It's overwhelmingly thorough.)

The screenwriter for the Gladiators movie is Peter Iliff, which inspires a little bit of hope because he also wrote Point Break. Point Break is one of the most re-watchable movies ever made, so, naturally, a sequel is in the works, also to be written by Peter Iliff.

But now that I think about it, my love for Point Break might have more to do with Patrick Swayze and the director, Kathryn Bigelow, and neither of them are involved in the sequel (of course: RIP Swayze.) The sequel is called Point Break Indo, which presumably means it will be marketed to stoner pretend-surfers. It comes out next year, probably right around the time Kathryn Bigelow is getting nominated for The Hurt Locker.

Peter Iliff's other new screenplay with a drug-themed title, Chasing the Dragon, will star Wesley Snipes as an FBI agent going after an Asian drug lord to avenge his fellow agents' deaths.

To recap: Point Break Indo is probably going to be straight to video, Chasing the Dragon will come and go while Wesley Snipes keeps appealing his three-year jail sentence, and American Gladiators will make $300 million.

In other weird sequel news, did you know a Donnie Darko sequel came out this year? Richard Kelly has nothing to do with it. It's about Donnie's little sister, Samantha, and it's called S. Darko. The cast includes: the little dead girl in the well from the American remake of The Ring as Samantha Darko (she played her in the original Donnie Darko, too,) Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl, and Elizabeth Berkley. I think it went straight to video.

Considering how terrible S. Darko looks, I'm even more impressed that Donnie Darko was as good as it was. The IMDb plot summary for DD--"A troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes, after narrowly escaping a bizarre accident"--sounds like a disaster, but even though I've only seen it once 7 years ago, I remember lots of great stuff about it.

Other sequels/remakes/not remakes coming out today: part 2 of the Twilight "saga" ("saga"?!), (Manohla calls it "bloodless") and Herzog's Bad Lieutenant (A.O. Scott says Nicolas Cage's performance "requires adjectives as yet uncoined, typed with both the caps-lock key and the italics button engaged". Haha.)

categories: Celebrities, Movies, TV
posted by amy at 1:33 PM | #