Independent film distributor Cinedigm is reportedly developing a shared movie universe based on American International Pictures’ legendary library of B-movies, presumably after discovering a cache of dusty film prints in its garage. The rebooted 10-movie series was written by Snakes On A Plane’s Jeff Katz and will be shot back-to-back “with a big recurring cast of antiheroes, monsters and bad girls,” just like God and Roger Corman intended.
The films that inspired the new series reads like a list of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes: Girls In Prison, Viking Women And The Sea Serpent, The Brain Eaters, She-Creature, Teenage Caveman, Reform School Girl, The Undead, War Of The Colossal Beast, The Cool And The Crazy, and The Day the World Ended. (In fact, four of them have already received the MST3K treatment—they’re hyperlinked above.) If they also sound like direct-to-video trash you dimly remember watching one drunken night in 2002, you’re also correct, because Showtime remade a number of them for TV in the ’90s and early ’00s.
But while these movies have been made and remade multiple times already, they haven’t been made specifically to tie in with each other, so that’s something. The project is being led by Lou Arkoff—son of AIP founder Samuel Arkoff—along with Katz and Hotel Rwanda executive producer Hal Sadoff. (Roger Corman, who directed several of the original films, does not appear to be involved.) Although the “shared universe” idea is officially played out at this point, we’re hoping the series will be successful, if only for the possibility that the trio might turn to AIP’s series of ’70s blaxploitation movies to inspire its next project. We’d pay $10 to see Blacula Vs. Foxy Brown—wouldn’t you?