Fans of 2008’s Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer have long been awaiting a sequel to the cult DVD hit, but unfortunately there hasn’t been much news on that since the first film dropped. Nevertheless, when I got on the phone with director Jon Knautz today to discuss his upcoming (and very effective) indie horror film The Shrine (releasing July 15th), I thought I’d try to pump him for any information I could. Sadly, it seems the follow-up is stuck in development hell for now.
“We have a story for ‘Jack Brooks 2’ that I absolutely love, said Knautz. “It’s so much fun! We’ve been like playing around with it for…I don’t know, 2 1/2 years now…It’s big, that’s the only thing. I mean, part one ended like, you know, Jack’s going on to become Indiana Jones. So it’s like…it’s epic man. I’m so excited about it. We are developing it, but it’s just sitting in the development world. Unfortunately there’s no trigger on when it’s gonna go, but hopefully soon because we’ve got a hell of a story for it. I think fans are gonna go ape-shit, because it’s like [a] full-blown, in-your-face action movie.”

I mentioned that it sounded like he was going the same route that Sam Raimi did with Army of Darkness.

“You got it!” replied Knautz. “Exactly! It’s the ‘Army of Darkness’ version of ‘Jack Brooks’.”

Outside of that, the director also told me he’s working on a new untitled dark comedy that they’d just wrapped up a table read for a few minutes before I called him.

“What I’m really excited about is we’re doing something very different right now, just to kind of switch genres again,” he said. “We’re doing a sort of dysfunctional family dark comedy that I’m really pumped about. I had a script read this morning, and it’s great. It’s going really, really well. We’re gonna be shooting that pretty soon. Very character-based stuff, really funny, really dark, so I’m pretty excited about that.”

In other words, if Jack Brooks 2 does end up happening at some point, it’ll probably be quite awhile longer before we hear anything.