Straight-To-DVD Music Sequels Soon To Come

​If you're a struggling writer, musician or filmmaker trying to work up the nerve to kill yourself, have we ever got good news for you! Your morale may have been damaged or even crippled by seeing bad music, bad movies and bad stories dominating the upper echelons of their respective fields, but Rocks Off has a new brand of crapfest designed to shit directly into your soul.

You know those godawful straight-to-DVD sequels the movie studios have been churning out for the last few years? You see them languishing, unrented, on the shelves of the few remaining Blockbusters that haven't buckled under DVRs and Netflix. Someone realized that some moderately successful films' intellectual properties were owned by the studios, so they quite brilliantly slapped familiar titles on bargain-bin movies made without the participation of the principal cast, or the director or writers from the first film.

This led to cheap, shabby sequels to Wild Things, American Psycho, Cruel Intentions, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Road House, Inspector Gadget, Home Alone, Cabin Fever, Road Trip, Donnie Darko, The Butterfly Effect, Dr. Doolittle, and Legally Blonde -= slipshod, money-driven, poorly crafted and ridiculously exploitive movies every one. This isn't even touching on the legions of horrendous sequels to beloved Disney films with which Walt's old company has decided to dilute its brand name.

​Well, they've cobbled together a straight-to-DVD sequel to Pure Country, a decent 1992 George Strait vehicle about a country singer getting back in touch with his roots. Pure Country 2: The Gift coldly manipulates mainstream country music's traditionally Christian audience by involving three angels in this film's storyline.

There were no such supernatural trappings in the original, but it doesn't matter. Nothing about this film mattered at any point in the production, not the writing, the direction, or the acting, as long as they wound up with something they could slap the words "Pure Country" on so it would make back its meager budget plus a couple thousand bucks. They even managed to get George Strait involved in what we imagine is a cameo, since he's only billed as "Country Music Star."

The cast features an unknown pretty blonde who sort of looks like the casting director compromised between "poor man's Taylor Swift" and "poor man's Reese Witherspoon," plus Bronson Pinchot, Cheech Marin and Michael McKean blithely collecting paychecks. It's directed by Dean Cain, based on a screenplay written by he and his brother. Yes, the guy who played maybe the worst Superman of all time.

So now that they've tapped the under-exploited music-film genre, you might be wondering which straight-to-DVD sequels can we expect to see in the next few years. Oh, you may wish you hadn't wondered that.