Direct-to-video sequels aren't new. Sure, it's a quick way to make a buck off the established names, regardless of the involvement of the original actors. The Butterfly Effect 3 just came out, in case anyone's interested, and this summer we'll see the direct-to-DVD release of the (not) hotly anticipated Donnie Darko sequel, S. Darko.
But those movies, at least, have huge cult followings that the sequelmakers are hoping to cash in on. It amuses me when they do it to a decade-old movie that was critically mauled and a moderate but hardly long-lasting success at best.
Movies like The Cell.
I certainly don't look back on the first movie that fondly. While I admired Tarsem's gorgeous eye-candy (which he applied much more proficiently in The Fall), Mark Protosevich's script was all but a disaster, and the performances by Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn pretty much killed it. Still, it had more sense than to turn it into a lame torture porn fantasy.
This sequel offers the exact same storyline as the first movie (with all-new characters), but instead of gorgeous production design, we get crappy greenscreen backgrounds and terrible CG Saw traps.
This movie is the feature film debut of Tim Iacofano, a producer on 24 who's also directed some episodes for the show.
