Movie Scum

For anyone who grew up in the late 80s or early 90s, the Karate Kid films were a staple of your childhood. Now, the story continues and ... what the fuck, is Daniel LaRusso the villain here?

In spite of positive critical acclaim for it’s first season, The Exorcist was not very likely to be renewed due to low ratings on Friday nights. But miraculously, Fox tapped the series created by Jeremy Slater for a second season pretty early.

According to Deadline , the powers that be are planning The Mist to be a weekly endeavor. It’s funny that I just watched the film with my son this weekend, to which he threw the remote in anger due to the ending. The overall gist sounds the same with a strange mist rolling into a small town filled with god-knows-what and presumably the plucky cast of characters who have to face it all. While I’m not sure that The Mist would be a suitable candidate for TV adaptation, it certainly sounds intriguing enough. Hopefully for some, there won’t be such a downer ending.

There was much complaining in the wake of last week’s finale that the pace was too slow with too little to justify its bloated runtime. While I can see the argument, I disagreed with that assessment. This, the second episode, should more closely match fan’s expectations: more zombies, more carnage, more collapse of society. As is stated in the episode: “it all goes quickly.” Madison, Travis, and Nick are mostly in shock at the start following the close of the pilot with Nick’s dealer, having been shot and twice run down with a truck, still giving them the glance-over with that glazed, zombified look in his eyes. Madison’s daughter, on the other hand, is concerned with her boyfriend who flaked on their last meetup and decides to go to his house. There she finds a house torn to pieces and Matt with a high fever and an unknownst to her bite on his shoulder. After finally prying Alicia away from Matt without any damn good explanation of why, the group heads back to their house only ...

Whereas the pilot episode to The Walking Dead began with a bang and a shuffling zombie girl clutching a stuffed bunny, Fear’s pilot takes the more nuanced approach of showing us the world of despair and decay, only for the sake of watching it be torn down even further. Opening in dank, darkened church but strange sounds, heroin addict Nick stumbles around to find a few of his mates eviscerated and his friend Gloria munching on a dude’s face. Unsurprisingly, Nick is shocked and appalled and runs his ass right out of the church into oncoming traffic. Nick is the son of Madison, the level-headed guidance counselor, who has long given up on her son’s drug problems. When Nick turns up in police custody after the accident ranting about what he has seen, Madison is quick to renounce them as ravings of a drug addict and not a looming threat to the world at large. Oops. For as much as this series was built upon the premise of a first-hand report of the collapse of civilization, very li...

Unbreakable   was a modest success for director M. Night Shyamalan after his genuinely good (remember when that was true) debut and now, Night longs to bring it to TV. Speaking with IGN , Shyamalan expresses interest in continuing the saga of undercover superheroes (note: I haven’t seen this movie in forever) saying. “as a way continue the story, yes. That would [interest me].” We here at Movie Scum are strongly in favor of the shift to great, truncated TV dramas but are hesitant that M. Night (regardless of whatever acclaim his recent show Wayward Pines is getting) should be allowed anywhere near the same medium as The Good Wife , Game of Thrones , or Breaking Bad . And let us not forget that he directed The Happening . And The Last Airbender . And After Earth . And ...

The only film director more past his prime than Kevin Smith, George Romero , will have his groaning, shuffling corpse of relevance displayed on weekly TV. Romero, fresh off the disappointments of his last several zombie movies, apparently turned to Marvel to create ‘ Empire of the Dead ,’ a story which features humans, zombies, and vampires for some reason all vying for control or social issues or some nonsense. And according to Variety , it will be joining the growing party of the undead on weekly broadcast. No word yet on how much it will suck.

Not willing to let a 22-year-old sleeping dog lie, Warner Brothers is kicking up the old pooch for another installment of 1993’s The Fugitive . No word yet on any returning players including the incredible old duo of Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones according to Deadline . Considering the original Fugitive started as a TV series back in the 60s, was turned into a film of the same title in ‘93, was followed by the forgettable U.S. Marshalls sequel in 1998, and then repurposed again into a TV show in the early 2000s, I suspect we’ll see another half-dozen sequels and TV adaptations before we all succumb to death by the one-armed man.

Many have proclaimed this period to be the “golden age of television,” and with high-caliber, expertly done shows like The Good Wife , Game of Thrones , and Big Bang Theory , they may be right. But what does this upcoming season’s crop of new series show? Rather than recycling ideas for movies, they are now being recycled for TV. Case in point, by my count (and granted I might have missed a few), there are no fewer than four (4!) old movie properties re-purposed for weekly consumption by the masses. Let’s take a look at CBS’s upcoming show based on when Chris Tucker had a viable career. Rush Hour - “A stoic, by-the-book Hong Kong police officer is assigned to a case in Los Angeles where he’s forced to work with a cocky African-American LAPD officer who has no interest in a partner.” Stars Justin Hires, Jon Foo,Aimee Garcia and Wendie Malick. Sign me up for more fish-out-of-water shenanigans with a clueless foreign detective and a loud-mouth know-it-all. I give it a 13 episod...

The Tanners are returning to your television after a twenty year hiatus. Or should I say ... the Fullers are returning? Because you see, the apparently real show is apparently really titled Fuller House! Because DJ’s last name happens to be Fuller! Oh boy, this sounds ridiculous already! John Stamos dropped the news on Jimmy Kimmel last night that the rumored Full House reunion was on with a 13 episode order from Netflix. This time around, DJ (Kirk Cameron’s less insane sibling Candace Cameron Bure ) is newly widowed, pregnant, and with two rambunctious boys who enlists the help of her younger sister Stephanie ( Jodie Sweetin ) and enternally annoying best friend Kimmy Gibler ( Andrea Barber ) to help out. Series creator Jeff Franklin is back on board with Stamos to produce and likely guest star with negotiations with the rest of the series originals said to be ongoing. No doubt this will delight folks of my general age who religiously watched this show before the Olsen twin...

Well, on TV possibly. Deadline is reporting that Paramount Television (apparently undeterred by the failure to transfer Axel Foley to the small screen) is developing a TV series based on everyone’s second favorite Star Trek movie, Galaxy Quest . No other details are readily available but I’m fairly confident in thinking Sir Alan Rickman will not be stooping to broadcast TV to reprise his role of Dr. Lazarus. Best case scenario for this would be a limited production run (on Netflix, because Daredevil is awesome and GO WATCH IT!) that would allow the hilarious space hijinks to continue without a huge time commitment from all of the actors who made the movie what it was. By Grabthar’s Hammer ... let’s do this shit!

Given that at present 27 seasons of The Simpsons have been produced, yet several are not available beyond FXX's constant reruns, countless fans will be disappointed to hear no more DVD sets are coming their way. I've already made the argument why I believe DVDs and other physical forms of media are important but this news courtesy of show producer Al Jean on Twitter introduces a new wrinkle. For dedicated Simpsons fans, in spite of the lackluster quality of many, many of the latter seasons, collecting the newly released (although generally seven to eight seasons behind) DVD box sets just added to the collection. But now? If you have feverishly bought every single set available now, you will have a gap from seasons 17-19 (with the 20th season getting its own out of order bare-bones release) and the rest of the series until it ceases, probably somewhere in the 43rd season. Or when the zombie apocalypse finally happens. Given that all of the box sets previously have con...

Although there's been a smattering a tours and reunions, most folks have been missing Bob Odenkirk and David Cross since 1998. Well, okay, that's not exactly true between Arrested Development for Cross, and Breaking Bad & Better Call Saul for Odenkirk, but Deadline has news that Bob and David are coming back to their proper home: sketch comedy. Netflix has picked up the show with the two acting as executive producers for four half-hour episodes and a 'making-of documentary.' I don't know what any of those words mean because Bob & David are coming back and I'm insane! Yay Netflix! Boo Communism! Words! No word yet on a return for Pit-Pat, the Pansexual Spokes-thing though.

AMC's much touted first look at The Walking Dead spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead was quietly tucked away into an early commercial break of last night's season finale of the parent show. Presumably the reason for this being that this 'teaser' stretches even the very definition of a teaser with just a few shots of sunny Los Angeles as a voice-over talks about a "strange virus going around." Given AMC's dearth of notable shows with Walking Dead now done for the season and Better Call Saul and Mad Men wrapping up, I expect we'll see a lot more. Fear the Walking Dead , which I will admit is a better title than 'Be Cautiously Aware of Those That Appear to be Walking Dead', will fill the gap between Walking Dead seasons premiering this summer, showing the beginning of the outbreak. At the very least, I will be looking forward to this if only because so many zombie tales skip the initial outbreak and are thrust straight into the apocolypse. I...

In this topsy-turvy world of regenerating and repurposing previous brands to milk any intrinsic worth left in them, FOX, among others, is looking towards its past. And in this case, that means MORE X-FILES ! All the principle parties are returning from creator Chris Carter and series stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson with an expected shooting schedule for the limited series beginning this summer. I never ended up seeing the latest film because the general consensus was crap. And given the show's last few seasons and its overwrought mythology, it remains a possibility that this will be crap as well. On the other hand, after a 4 year hiatus, 24 returned last summer to much acclaim and in top-notch form. So, count me optimistic. In fact, maybe I'll go root around my parents' house and try to dig out my old X-Files T-shits for celebration. So, while we continue to complain and bemoan the dearth of new content from both TV networks and movie studios, let us...

Maybe I knew of this at one point. Perhaps I didn't. But the veritable Friday the 13th series is getting a real TV series. Well, kind of? According to Cinema Blend , series producer Sean Cunningham indicates that the show will take a "meta" approach (all the cool kids are doing it nowadays) and be set in a town, not terrorized by the cinematic version of Jason Voorhees (or that fake one from Part 5 either apparently), that 'inspired' the series but with their own mishaps and mysteries surrounding their own murderous local-types which inspired F13. Which ... what? So the series takes place in a fictional town with a fictional killer that inspired a fictional killer in a fictional town in their fictitious universe. Everyone got that? Apparently The CW has shown interest in the series because all the cool kids go to hang out there now too. So, perhaps, not-Jason Jason will be terrorizing not-Crystal Lake on your TV screens in the near future.

Finally! A television adaptation I can get behind!

With AMC’s Breaking Bad ending soon and Mad Men on its elongated final legs, AMC is looking to fill the void with more than just Chris Hardwick talkshows. They say there is no risk-taking in Hollywood these days, and … this announcement  couldn’t further back up that sentiment:

Dexter has come to a close on Showtime. Breaking Bad is close to its final episode. In the current television landscape you no doubt will come across someone who loudly exclaims while covering their mouth with their hands after telling them you haven't seen their favorite TV show. Unless you are an unemployed mouth breather with government handouts at your whim, chances are you are working and being a productive member of society and thus, not able to take advantage of the plethora of ways to consume entertainment these days.

At recent press events, Fox and series creator Kevin Williamson came under fire for the depraved and violent imagery in the new series The Following. While I do not subscribe to the notion of “violent entertainment = violent real actions,” it seems odd that this show would get singled out while other network serial killer/law enforcement drama Criminal Minds is in its eighth season. Perhaps the attention was due to the starring role of Kevin Bacon or the fact that I don’t watch broadcast TV and I still swear I saw about 63 promos for this. It’s like they piped it into my dreams, man.