Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; Truck Turner isn’t just what we call Brian when Tacos-On-Wheels runs out of Baja sauce. Welcome back suckas, to the Internet’s freshest bad movie column; this month featuring a funky twist. This is Blaxploitation History Month: Sequel Edition. Every week in February, we’ll be rolling out another super bad blaxploitation sequel that’s so whack we can’t help but dig it. We’ll lay down some cold-blooded mockery on said film, going upside its head with its own numerous faults, but then will jump back, kiss ourselves, and get hip to all the reasons we think these movies are dy-no-mite. To top it off, we’ll serve you with a badass, and bad for you, snack food item themed to the movie. Today’s jive turkey: The Human Tornado.

The Devil Inside is the talk of the town for two reasons: number one, it made around $35 million in its opening weekend, which is big no matter what qualifier you tack on, but when that qualifier is a reported $1 million acquisition cost, it’s gigantic. Number two (heheh), it sucks. It sucks bad. That’s nothing new, really, as everything about The Devil Inside screams shitty movie. First of all, it’s from the team that brought you Stay Alive. Second, it’s found footage. Third, it’s an exorcism movie. I’m surprised that people went to see it, because you list those three qualities and I am about as far from interested as possible. But rather than just throw another voice on the “what the fuck” bonfire, I wanted to take a few minutes and examine what we can learn from this situation.

While writing F6st and the Furious, director Justin Lin, screenwriter Chris Morgan and star/producer Vin Diesel just couldn’t jam in all the story and character development they needed. Nay, that the story itself demanded. According to Diesel (via THR), they’ve decided to add a seventh movie into the franchise. “We have to pay off this story, we have to service all of these character relationships, and when we started mapping all that out it just went beyond 110 pages,” said Diesel. “The studio said, ‘You can’t fit all that story in one damn movie!’” Well, what were they expecting? The movies in this franchise have always been primarily about character arcs, emotional evolution, and providing audiences with a keyhole look into the soul of humanity. Plus, it’s helpful that Fast Five has made $626m worldwide so far. It seems crazy, but it’s wonderful to see such a dialogue-based, mature story being such a smash blockbuster commercially. Let’s all raise a glass to the intellectually nuanced F7st 7nd F7r777s! That is, if you can hear yourself thinking over the crunching of popcorn and revving engines.

After getting my hair blown back by all the awesome old man violence in the first Taken, I’ve been following the development of the sequel pretty closely. The idea of making a sequel to a film where a guy’s daughter gets kidnapped is a tricky one. What do you do, have her get kidnapped again? Have somebody else in the family get kidnapped? It’s pretty easy with a concept like this to get into ridiculous, “how does the same thing happen to the same guy twice” territory. But as long as they don’t dwell on the improbabilities and instead just focus on Liam Neeson brutally exacting his vengeance on bad guys, I don’t really mind. When Neeson first started talking about a sequel to Taken, I cheered. When it was announced that the film had found itself a director, I was cautiously optimistic. And now that word has come down the pipe that shooting will start soon, I’m officially getting excited. Producer Luc Besson had a chat with Coming Soon, and revealed that new director Olivier Megaton had been spending some time on a recent trip to LA to begin scouting for the film, that shooting would most likely begin in October, and that the entire cast of the first film would be back for the sequel. Wait. didn’t Liam Neeson kill everyone in the first movie? No, apparently Famke Janssen played his wife and she’ll be returning. I must have missed that while I was concentrating on all the [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

It’s been a pretty hard life for John Rambo ever since he signed up to go overseas and serve his country in Vietnam. He was turned into an expert in guerrilla warfare. Made the best with guns, with knives, with his bare hands. He was trained to ignore pain, ignore weather, to live off the land. To eat things that would make a billy goat puke. In Vietnam his job was to dispose of enemy personnel, to kill, period. Win by attrition. And after a rough patch where the guy just couldn’t adjust to life after Nam, we sent him back there to slaughter hundreds more and get our POWs. Then we sent him to Afghanistan, where he killed about a thousand more people. I thought that was it for the guy, but then he ended up having to do the same in Burma. Isn’t it about time we let this guy live out his final years in peace? No. You just don’t turn it off. There’s a segment of the population out there who think that First Blood is a decent movie, but the subsequent Rambo sequels are cheesy and exploitative and lame. Those people are ridiculous. The Rambo sequels are cheesy and exploitative and awesome. Even 2008’s Rambo, where we get Rambo as an old man, is completely amazing. He tears out throats with his bare hand and explodes guys by hitting them with close range high caliber machine gun fire. What more do you want? Well, I [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

It didn’t take long after the character of Wolverine got added to the X-Men back in 1975’s “Giant Size X-Men #1” for him to take the pop culture world by storm and become one of the most beloved and prolific characters in comic book history. By the time 1982 rolled around, the character was so big that he was ready for his first solo title, and so a Chris Claremont-penned Frank Miller-penciled four issue mini-series was released seeing the character travel to Japan, get engaged to a woman named Mariko, and battle some modern day samurai. That first Wolverine in Japan storyline showed the most human side of the character we had seen yet, and over time it has become pretty seminal. That’s why the upcoming sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, adapted to the screen by The Usual Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie and simply titled The Wolverine, will be drawing on it heavily for inspiration. But we’ve known all of that for a while. What is the new news on the development of this project? The Wolverine used to be a highly anticipated upcoming film back when Darren Aronofsky was attached to direct, but once he dropped off the hype machine died down quite a bit. The last we heard about it, 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold was most likely to be stepping into Aronofsky’s shoes, and shooting would most likely begin in fall. That news was met with a collective “meh” from the online world, so we haven’t [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The Trip was a Michael Winterbottom-directed independent comedy that recently opened in the US to pretty decent critical buzz. It featured comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as less than happy bedfellows traveling the countryside of northern England and eating at fancy restaurants. The story was that they were writing reviews for a magazine, but really the plot was just an excuse to get Coogan and Brydon together to riff on comedy bits, duel with Michael Caine impressions, and get on each other’s nerves. The results were rather humorous, and it’s looking like there is going to be a sequel. Or, at least, there will be a sequel to the BBC series. You see, The Trip actually started as a six part series on BBC2. In a kind of strange move, the six episodes were edited down to one feature length release for US theaters. In a Q&A at this week’s Latitude Festival, producer Andrew Eaton revealed that Winterbottom was going to send Coogan and Brydon on another trip, this time to Italy. This guarantees that the original fans of the series in the UK will be getting more odd couple action from the duo, and points to the fact that we might be getting another movie here in the US as well. If the content is there, and all you have to do is pay someone to make an alternate edit, why not give it another go in the US? Or maybe they’ll strike a deal to get the [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Not only has director Paul Feig’s latest film Bridesmaids been both a critical and financial success, it has also started a lot of talk about women’s place in the film world and how their potential to bring in big box office dollars hasn’t ever been fully exploited. Now that Bridesmaids has pulled in $189 million worldwide, will it mark the beginning of a huge trend where movies aimed at women are given the chance to be released with big budgets and huge marketing campaigns on par with the latest things-blow-up-real-loud movies? Only if Hollywood plays it right and chooses the perfect projects to put out as Bridesmaids follow-ups. And right now they’re playing the situation exactly the same way they always do; by taking a new thing and trying to shoe horn it into something they already know. What does that mean in concrete terms? It means that they are looking for a new film to aim at women, so instead of looking for original scripts that might appeal to women they’re trying to rekindle success from the past. It means they’re going to make a new Bridget Jones movie. And they’re even trying to get Paul Feig to direct it. Do you see the logic here? Bridget Jones’ Diary made a lot of money with women, Paul Feig made a lot of money with women, put them together and you get double money! Do you ever get the feeling that you could be a Hollywood executive, no problem? I [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

It was in early May that we reported Disney was ready to get another Pirates of the Caribbean film off the ground, but that the series’ star Johnny Depp wanted them to hold off a little bit. He seemed to want a chance to do other things, but also intimated that he would come back for a Pirates 5 only if the right director and script were in place. Well, just two months later, On Strange Tides has made one billion dollars at the box office and The Wrap is reporting that Depp is already in negotiations to appear in a fifth film. It’s amazing how fast a billion dollars can move things along. The Wrap seems to be talking to sources close to the production (their cousin knows this guy who knows a guy) and apparently a rough draft for Pirates 5 has already been written, and Jerry Bruckheimer and his team of chained up screenwriters are meeting 3 to 4 times a week to get it up to snuff and make sure that it passes muster with Captain Jack. Perhaps that’s a bit of overkill on Bruckheimer’s part. The fact that the last two had terrible scripts didn’t seem to deter anybody from making these movies or going to see them in droves. Screw Pirates 5, I’m already getting excited for Pirates 17. I just hope they can get Depp back for it.

The Thor franchise may have hit a snag when it lost Kenneth Branagh, the director of the first film in the series, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to let one little setback get it down. Heck no! As a matter of fact, right on the heels of that disappointing news springs forth hope for a new day. Thor 2 may not yet have a director, but it does already have a screenwriter. So we can rest assured that the film set for July 2013 is well on its way to being delivered on time. Who did they get to write the continued adventures of our favorite hammer-wielding maniac, you might ask? A guy named Don Payne. There’s some good news and some bad news about Payne doing the scripting for Thor 2. The good news is that he’s had plenty of experience writing in the super hero genre before. The bad news is that said experience was for writing movies like My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer. I’d try to bring up the fact that he was a Simpsons writer to sugar-coat things, but it was for later years Simpsons, so that’s a no-go. Hey, wait! He wrote an episode of The Brian Benben Show! How about that? Okay, okay, let’s all just try to keep an open mind. [Deadline Chesterton]

We’ve known for a while that since Zack Snyder is directing Man of Steel, somebody else will have to come on board to direct the sequel to 300 and that it probably won’t end up being called Xerxes, like Frank Miller’s graphic novel sequel was. Things seem to be progressing on both those fronts. We now have word of what that new title is going to be and that the suits have narrowed the candidates to direct down to two choices.

Most of the toy-to-film talk that goes on this week will probably be about the new Transformers movie tearing things up at the box office, but the guys over at that other 80s franchise G.I. Joe aren’t taking the matter lying down. In the midst of Bay-mania they have done a whole host of casting for their second film, and the guys they’ve got to join their elite team include a grappler, a rapper, and… some white dude. Star of the recent Fast Five, Dwayne Johnson, or The Rock if you will, has become quite the source of news over the past few months. First he knew about the death of Osama bin Laden before everyone else, and now he managed to scoop the world with the announcement of his own casting in G.I. Joe. On his website Johnson posted a mockup picture of himself beside the Joe Logo and added the caption, “It’s official: Call the Pentagon, get me my big ass gun – Rocks a JOE!” Johnson had been previously rumored as playing the character of Roadblock, the rhyme talking, gourmet cooking, Joe who carries around a gigantic gun, so these comments seem to help confirm that suspicion. Word has also leaked, this time from The Hollywood Reporter and not Dwayne Johnson, that famed rapper the RZA will also be joining the cast. RZA may be best known for his position in the legendary rap troupe The Wu-Tang Clan, but he’s also dipped his toe into acting by [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

I can’t say that I had any fondness for the original Hellboy film that director Guillermo del Toro made, but I thought he picked things up quite a bit for Hellboy II: The Golden Army. It came off a lot less as a studio driven project and showed more of the imagination and scope of something like del Toro’s masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth. It was enough to make me a fan of the series, and ever since, like a lot of people I’m sure, I’ve been waiting for word about del Toro doing a third. But, we film fans have grown accustomed to waiting for things when it comes to del Toro’s next project. Originally he was scheduled to be the director of The Hobbit, but then scheduling issues took him off of that film. Then we all got excited about him doing monster movie At the Mountains of Madness, but Universal decided they didn’t want to fund the project. Instead, they wanted him to do Pacific Rim, another monster movie about a creature coming out of the Pacific Ocean. But even that project got thrown into question once the horrific earthquakes took place in Japan. It’s beginning to feel like Guillermo del Toro might never direct another film. And now, just in case we were wondering, there’s confirmation of another project that the director will definitely not be doing. Hellboy creator Mike Mignola had some more than discouraging words to say about a possible Hellboy 3 when talking on a [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

After watching your third hour of golf (that Mcllroy sure can play!) and giving your father the same tie from last year, enjoy this special Sunday edition of Junkfood Cinema in honor of all of the fathers that didn’t try to murder us and move on to the next family. Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; your mother and I are very disappointed in you. Kids, fetch me my slippers and my flagon of Scotch because it’s time for me to tell you about another fantastically bad movie. Stop that whining and sit still while I breakdown the birds and the bees of what exactly makes this movie so bad. Then, if you finish all your chores and refrain from soiling yourselves for once, I will tell you all about what makes me love that same movie so much. Finally, I will whip up an appropriately themed snack food item to ensure your wild, sugar-induced frenzy just as you are supposed to be getting ready for bed. As today is Father’s Day, this week’s very special treat is The Stepfather 2.

Despite the fact that this series is all about characters from Mount Olympus, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters is looking to Thor for direction. Close enough, I guess it’s all mythology. When I first heard that a series about a boy with magic powers who discovers that he has a very interesting ancestry, which was once helmed by Chris Columbus, was going to continue with another sequel I got confused. Wasn’t Harry Potter supposed to be over? Okay, obvious joke, but it was pretty pathetic how closely Columbus and the marketing people on the first Percy Jackson tried to tie this already derivative sequel to the Harry Potter franchise aesthetically. Hopefully, with a new director on, this second film can go in a new direction. But seeing as how Thor Freudenthal’s previous work on films like Hotel for Dogs and Diary of a Wimpy Kid doesn’t share much with these tween fantasy series, it’s kind of hard to tell if he’s the right man to give this series its own sense of identity. I guess the best we can hope is that he has some mode other than “movie you would see on the Disney Channel on a Sunday afternoon,” which is all I’ve seen from him so far. What we do know about this new film is that Logan Lerman is once again signed to star as Percy, and the story follows the pursuits of Percy and a group of his friends as they seek [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The huge box office and critical success of the original Iron Man came as a bit of a surprise to everyone. Iron Man, while having a long publishing history, has never been one of those mainstream, iconic super heroes like a Batman or a Spider-Man. Despite that, director Jon Favreau and star Robert Downey Jr. absolutely nailed the character so perfectly that everyone fell in love with the film. And now that ol’ shellhead has had a feature film that was such a mainstream success, perhaps the argument could start to be made that he is a character on par with the Batmans and Spider-Mans of the world. So, a lot of people were understandably upset when it was announced that Favreau, a guy who did so much for the character, wouldn’t be returning to the director’s chair of Iron Man 3. The guy they got to replace him, however, has a pretty great pedigree, and it turns out that he’s already helped out on this series before. In a Q&A at the Hero Complex Film Festival, Downey tells a story about how he and Favreau went to the new director, Shane Black, when they had reached a stumbling point on one of the past Iron Man films: “I said, ‘We should talk to Shane.’ And I was like, ‘Shane, we can’t really pay.’ And he was like, ‘Bring me some salmon and some blueberries.’ And we went to Yoda’s house in Miracle Mile and it wound up coming in [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Seeing as comedian/actor Zach Galifianakis is pretty much the closest modern equivalent we have to a mythical trickster, the things that he says should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Especially things he says in interviews, which he seems to hate doing. So, grain of salt firmly in place, in a cover story for Rolling Stone magazine Galifianakis has said that the plot of Hangover Part III would be about his character, Alan, getting locked up in a mental institution and the rest of the crew having to come together and break him out. Personally, I think that this sounds like a whole lot of nonsense that Galifianakis is pulling out of nowhere, but there is one quote in the article that rings very true. When initially talking about the possibility of a third Hangover, Galifianakis said, “They want to do a Hangover III. I’m getting fricking phone calls already.” The film already has a plot, and one of the leads is leaking it before the second one is even out of theaters? That’s not so believable. Execs are champing at the bit to get all of the main actors signed on to do a third film already? That’s something I very much believe. Despite the fact that The Hangover Part II debuted to a lukewarm critical reception, fans of the first film still came out in droves to get some more drunken obscenity. There is no way that the people in charge of writing and cashing the [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Anybody who was a fan of the G.I. Joe toy line or cartoon series from the 80s could easily tell you who Roadblock was. He was a big, bald, mustachioed, black dude who carried around gigantic guns and had a snazzy way of speaking in rhyme. He was basically the closest cartoon equivalent that you could get to Mr. T other than when Mr. T himself got his own cartoon where he coached a mystery solving gymnastics team. Let’s call him Mr. T Lite. As you can imagine he was a popular character, so when putting together a sequel to 2009’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra it makes sense that you would include him in the film. And if you need to find an actor to translate a cartoon character like Roadblock into live action, it makes sense that you would find a gigantic, fast-talking, ex-pro wrestler to get the job done; especially when that ex-pro wrestler is as big a personality and as talented an actor as Dwayne Johnson. And the fact that he just starred in the ludicrously successful Fast Five, which went a long way in reviving that once stale looking franchise, is just the icing on the cake. Yes, getting Dwayne Johnson to star in your G.I. Joe sequel as Roadblock makes all the sense in the world, so the fact that Paramount is courting him to join G.I. Joe: Cobra Strikes comes as no surprise. But what I’m still trying to figure out is [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

I recently read a figure somewhere that said 2011 would have more sequels, prequels, reboots, and remakes of pre-existing films than any other year in history. Even if that isn’t true, it certainly feels true, so it doesn’t come as a shock to me that when he was recently questioned about future plans, Jim Carrey said that he would probably be working on some sequels of past hits. In an upcoming interview with Coming Soon, Carrey said of his possible next projects, “We’re talking about maybe returning to some old characters that everyone has been asking about. There’s Bruce Almighty and we’re talking about maybe another Dumb and Dumber.” Okay, so it sounds like his next move is more likely to be a revisiting of his Godly character from Bruce Almighty, but I’m not going to focus on that because I can’t imagine there’s anybody out there who’s really clamoring for another go around on the Almighty train (though I’m certain if that person exists they’re going to find me in the comments section). What I believe would be more interesting to more people is the possibility of Carrey and Jeff Daniels getting back together to make another Dumb and Dumber. Seventeen years after that film’s release there is still one guy in every crowd who will yell out, “kick his ass, Sea Bass” every time it looks like a fight is going to break out. People remember that movie very fondly. Of course, there was already the prequel film [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The future of J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek sequel has been a mystery for a while now. The movie industry has turned into a brand name driven environment where as soon as a film makes ten bucks over its budget, a release date gets set for the sequel. And it’s usually a date that’s closer than the filmmakers would like. So what’s been going on with Star Trek? Are we going to get a sequel? And if not, why not? Who does J.J. Abrams think he is? Recently a clue surfaced in the ongoing mystery when co-writer/producer Roberto Orci said that while a script wasn’t finished, they had a big ol’ outline done, and they were just waiting for Abrams to get done with his current projects before they pushed production into high gear. And now a second clue has come to light. While talking to Cinema Blend, Abrams himself confirmed that Star Trek 2 would in fact be his next project; and he even talked a bit about its release date and whether or not he’s looking to make it in 3D. He started off by saying, “The next thing we’re working on, and hopefully we’ll be able to pass information out sooner or later, is the next Star Trek.” When asked about the too close for comfort release date that Paramount has the film penciled in for, June 29th 2012, Abrams was less than committal. “I care much more that it be good than it be ready,” he said, “I’m, obviously [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]