Oh Say, Can You Sequel?

This summer has yielded a bumper crop of sequels. Audiences have wallowed in the scatological chit-chat of Clerks II, been troubled by the awkward punctuation of M: i: III and Goal! II: Living the Dream, and cowered before a shaggy blue Kelsey Grammer in X-Men: The Last Stand.

Next summer will certainly bring more sequels (I wish I were kidding when I say keep your eyes peeled for Halloween 9), but for now, let us savor the autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, and pause to take stock - nah, I'd rather not take stock. I'd rather invent some sequels I'd actually like to see next year.

Any discussion of serialized movies must, by law, include Sylvester Stallone, so here goes. The actor/sweat enthusiast who brought us the specious sequence of First Blood, then Rambo: First Blood II, then Rambo III, will present the ultimate synergistic sequel, Rocky VI: First Blood IV, in which Stallone plays the dual role of over-the-hill boxer and superannuated Vietnam vet. The story begins when Rocky agrees to help Rambo fight some swarthy foreigners if Rambo will help Rocky train for one last fight against novelty boxer Butterbean. RVI:FBIV features an inspirational training sequence in which Rambo improves Rocky's hand-speed by having him block machine-gun fire with his fists.

An adorable prequel to Catwoman, Kittengirl stars moppet du jour Dakota Fanning as a tomboy who lives a carefree life until those darn Johnson boys (Haley Joel Osment playing a rare triple role) push her out of their tree house and she transforms into the vicious (and highly allergenic) title character. Tagline: Hell hath no furry like a kitten scorned.

In The Shining 2: Shine Harder, we meet up with former boy-psychic Danny Torrance twenty years after the events that spawned Kubrick's original. The trauma of being chased through a hedge maze by his axe-wielding father has turned Danny into a mentally unbalanced piano virtuoso whose career is threatened by the ultimate nemesis...his own talking index finger!

No matter what your take on his tempestuous personal life, I think we can all agree that Charlie Sheen is the clown prince of sequels, having appeared in three Hotshots! movies and three innings of Major League. Though his two new sequels are bound to sell enough to keep him and his family in high-class call-girls for seven generations, he won't do much for his reputation with Hot League and Major Shots, about which I refuse to say more in a "family" magazine.

In the straight-to-video quickie An Inconvenient Truth II, savvy studio marketers pander to the public's insatiable lust for documentaries about slideshows. Finding that Al Gore's warning about global warming has "serious third-act problems," Armageddon director Michael Bay rewrites the story so that the earth is miraculously cooled by the breezy sarcasm of multiple-sequel veteran Steve Gutenberg. After taking over for Gore and showing slides from the sets of Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol; Cocoon: The Return;and 3 Men and a Little Lady, Guttenberg provides a summer-movie finish by using a single paper match to blow up a helicopter.

Just as excavated caves will always be delivering new books of the Bible (look for Deuteronomy II in Summer 2008), there will always be sequels to the anagram rally known as The Da Vinci Code. In keeping with the universal approach of humanizing the messiah, Grandpa Jesus shows Our Savior as a henpecked Pa living in a suburb of Galilee with his ungrateful son Leviticus, Leviticus' loving wife Esther and their scrappy children Ezra and Malachai, who just won't stop smiting each other.

Using the first movie's beloved last line as a jumping-off point, Casablanca II: Electric Boogaloo finds Rick Blaine and Captain Louis Renault living their "beautiful friendship" as domestic partners who run a disco in 1970s Berlin. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Rick and Heath Ledger as Louis, with a CGI version of Peter Lorre as their loopy houseboy.

Yes, the last X-Men sequel was called The Last Stand, but it made such a mountain of money that the marketplace demands additional stands. I propose an alphabet soup of sequels, including XXX-Men, starring Vin Diesel as a human-SUV hybrid (no makeup required, thanks); XL-Men, about an elite squad of wisecracking sumo wrestlers who fight select, slow-moving crimes; and, from the writers of He's Just Not That Into You, the mutant romantic comedy, Y-Men?