A sequel to a prequel to a spin-off of Air Bud: 10 unlikely, convoluted direct-to-video franchises

Prolific schlockmeister Uwe Boll was a popular Internet whipping boy in the mid-2000s, thanks to a string of aggressively shitty video-game adaptations that combined a blatant disregard for their source material with a pronounced disinterest in craft and competence. In those pre-Wiseau, pre- days, bad-movie aficionados were quick to dub Boll the new Ed Wood, but the truth is Boll’s movies were too impersonal to develop much of a following; what separated his films from the true cult items—besides the presence of slumming stars and several million dollars’ worth of German financing—was a lack of oblivious earnestness. It was only once Boll’s work stopped getting theatrically released that it started to become genuinely weird, and his obsessions—genocide, mass shootings, his own bad-boy image—came to the fore. The direct-to-video sequels to Boll’s bargain-bin fantasy epic introduced time-travel into the plot, sending modern-day mercenaries into increasingly cheaper looking medieval settings. The second direct-to-video sequel to Boll’s , titled , turned out to be too small to contain all of Boll’s obsessions, and he ended up using its sets, props, and characters to make two additional features: Auschwitz, a kind of repository for the heavy-handed Holocaust imagery that is Boll’s forte, and Blubberella, a fat-joke remake of The Third Reich.

Guillermo Del Toro’s sophomore feature found the filmmaker learning the importance of final cut—the contractually stipulated right to have the last say on how a movie is edited—the hard way. While Del Toro, soured by the experience, shifted his attention from Hollywood to a long-gestating project set during the Spanish Civil War, his former producers at Miramax—who’d lost millions on Mimic—decided to have another go at the premise. Mimic 2, which played like a low-rent remake of the original, hit home video just as was beginning to play at North American festivals. A second direct-to-video sequel followed a few years later: Mimic: Sentinel, a resourceful Rear Window riff, only tangentially related to Del Toro’s movie, that was written and directed by Splinter Cell scripter J.T. Petty. Low-budget sequels are responsible for some of the weirdest (and worst) filmmaking in the direct-to-video industry, but they’re also home to some of the best; reduced expectations often equal reduced oversight.

Nominally based on Walter Hill’s largely forgotten 2002 prison boxing flick, Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing and Undisputed 3: Redemption are the gold standards of the unlikely direct-to-video sequel genre. Though Undisputed 2 shares a protagonist, “Iceman” Chambers (Michael Jai White, filling in for Ving Rhames), with Hill’s movie, its plot—which finds the heavyweight champ behind bars once again, though this time in Russia—is little more than a pretext for direct-to-video specialist Isaac Florentine to showcase his kinetic, no-frills brand of action filmmaking. The movie helped cement Florentine’s reputation as the king of and made a cult icon out of Scott Adkins, whose heavy, Yuri Boyka, took center stage in the superior follow-up Undisputed 3.

Roland Emmerich’s Hollywood debut, Universal Soldier, was an obvious candidate for direct-to-video franchising; what’s surprising is the abrupt left turn the series took with its fifth entry, John Hyams’ Universal Soldier: Regeneration. Distinguished by its superb action sequences and surprising gravitas, Regneration disregarded the (admittedly inconsistent) continuity of the previous films; it was less a sequel to Universal Soldier than an attempt at using the blockbuster’s stars and imagery to explore memory, mortality, and aging bodies. Hyams’ Scott Adkins-led follow-up, Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning, was even more out there, drawing on diverse non-action-movie influences (Lost Highway, Videodrome, and Apocalypse Now, to name a few) to create a twisty, shadowy commentary on the nature of identity—with plenty of brutal fight scenes.