Like the Children of the Corn and Leprechaun movies, the Puppet Master franchise has quietly chugged along on the straight-to-video market for about 30 years. Since the first Puppet Master released in 1989 there’s been a total of 14 sequels and/or reboots. In fact, just last year, the latest spin-off movie, Puppet Master: Doktor Death, […]
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Few horror franchises – or any franchise for that matter – can produce quality outings the further along they go. Both Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street were running on fumes past their fourth outings with the exception of the occasional course correction. When Wes Craven resurrected his Scream series with Scream […]
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Once Paramount Pictures resurrected Jason Voorhees with lightning in Jason Lives, the franchise was running out of options for subsequent sequels. But increasingly ridiculous sequel setups weren’t the biggest problem for Friday the 13th. Audiences were losing interest and, as a result, Jason Takes Manhattan saw declining box office receipts. By 1993, New Line Cinema […]
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If Silent Night, Deadly Night is something of a Grindhouse cult classic, its sequel inexplicably became a belated meme classic. What you may not know is that the sequels kept coming. Like other B-level horror franchises, Silent Night, Deadly Night lived on with a handful of straight-to-video sequels. Bill Moseley (The Devil’s Rejects) turned up […]
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To date, The Howling remains one of the best werewolf movies ever made. What you may know is that The Howling was followed be several sequels. Like The Puppet Master or Children of the Corn, The Howling spawned a seemingly never-ending series of straight-to-video sequels. Unlike those B-level franchises, The Howling sequels have absolutely no […]
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No, the Child’s Play franchise isn’t as successful as Friday the 13th, Halloween, or A Nightmare on Elm Street. Yet its history might be more interesting. And Don Mancini’s creation has shown remarkable longevity. Following a ‘so so’ remake, Mancini got a new series off the ground last year that’s actually pretty damn good. With […]
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A decade passed between what was supposed to be the end, Scream 3, and Wes Craven re-visiting his creation in 2011 with Scream 4. Plenty had changed in the horror genre and Craven found a new voice for his belated sequel. Yet despite better-than-expected results, audiences largely stayed away. Ultimately, Scream 4 was the lowest […]
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Here we go, again. When Halloween found success going back to basics, it was only a matter of time before other horror franchises followed. Technically, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre already went this route. Before we were calling them legacy sequels or ‘re-quels’, the awful Texas Chainsaw 3D positioned itself as a direct follow-up to the […]
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