Saturday

There is a great art to the naming of sequels. Only few have mastered it. Seeing so frequently the posters for the terribly named The Hills Have Eyes 2 I thought I should offer a few principles to help. The first is: never use a number. This very rarely succeeds. Also, never call it 2000, or 2.1, or some other way of trying to make the number sound more exciting. Just don't use a number. Worst of all, don't use '2' in place of 'too', as in the awful 2 Fast 2 Furious. That is horrid. So, having eliminated the use of numbers, what should you do? You could go for the colon route, as in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, but I'm not so keen on this. You could use a cleverly placed 'too', as in Look Who's Talking Too, but that's a bit of a cop out. Or you can add a word like 'still', as in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, which I think is very good. The best option, however, is to make a clever, funny, or silly, pun on the original title. What's your favourite? Die Hard With a Vengeance was good; Live Free or Die Hard (coming out soon) is not quite so good. Zulu and Zulu Dawn was original. The Bourne Supremacy and the upcoming The Bourne Ultimatum are interesting, although they do come from book titles I believe. You might want to include the Bond films, but are they sequels? It's uncertain. My favourite, without doubt, is the perfect simplicity of Alien and Aliens. Not only are both of these films excellent, but it's all right there in the title: in one film there is one alien, in the other more than one. Incidentally, Aliens is also the greatest example of how to make a sequel: give the viewer what they liked about the first film, but more. Genius. If you are a great fan of sequels, check out Sequelogue, which contains a list of possible sequels, including my favourite: 300 II.