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Both by definition and in practice, there’s nothing special about a ripoff. Aside from their obvious creative shortcomings, movies made to capitalize on the popularity of other movies are also plentiful: The Asylum in particular has built an empire on cheap films with titles that are just different enough from those of far more expensive productions to avoid getting sued. Given the popularity of these copycats, we can therefore assume that, if copyright protections didn’t exist, unscrupulous producers would ditch the maneuvering and cash in on other movies’ success more directly. And in some of the film industry’s more lawless corners, they’ve tried. 

Due to the lawsuit factor, sequels to a hit movie that are made without the permission of the creators — and, more importantly, the studio — are rare. But they’re not unprecedented. They most commonly take the form of a sequel-in-name-only, in which an unrelated script is slapped with the name of a popular film series in order to draw in gullible audiences. The good-bad classic “Troll 2” is an example of this phenomenon, as are the more than 50 horror movies that incorporate the word “Amityville” somewhere in their title. (“Widely publicized events of public interest,” as a judge put it in 1989, are not subject to copyright.) But it’s the Italians that made them an art. 

Taking a pre-existing movie and branding it as a sequel to a totally unrelated Hollywood hit was common practice in Italy from the late 1970s until the mid-’90s. This was the era of cannibal movies and cheap post-apocalyptic knockoffs, a time when, as Howard Hughes writes in his history “Cinema Italiano,” the country’s once-booming film industry “quite literally ate itself.” “Alien,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” “The Evil Dead” (“La Casa” in Italian), “Dirty Harry,” even Italy’s own “Django” movies — no series was safe, as lax copyright laws and a filmmaking culture built around genre cycles combined to create a staggering number of ripoffs and unofficial sequels. 

First came a series of “The Exorcist” clones in the mid-’70s. 1974’s “Beyond the Door,” about a San Francisco woman whose pregnancy is complicated by demonic possession, is among the best of these. That was followed by a watery wave of “Jawsploitation” movies in the wake of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster. This went on for quite some time: “Cruel Jaws”, directed by prolific knockoff artist Bruno Mattei, came out in 1995. As the influence of Hollywood blockbusters on the global film industry became more prominent, the wannabes became bolder, and by 1980 titles like “Alien 2: On Earth” straight-up claimed to be sequels to movies whose producers were far away in Los Angeles, completely unaware of their Italian counterparts. Or so the filmmakers hoped.

Ironically, many of these movies were ripping off James Cameron, who had started his own directing career with an Italian-made sequel, “Piranha II: The Spawning,” in 1982. (Roger Corman, who produced the original “Piranha” and sold the sequel rights, would never have turned down the opportunity to make money on the same movie twice.) 1989’s “Shocking Dark” — which changed its name from “Terminator 2” after “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” came out in 1992 — combines two Cameron ripoffs into one movie, lifting most of its plot from “Aliens” before adding a “Terminator”-style twist in the last 20 minutes. Although ostensibly set in Venice in the year 2000, it mostly takes place in a series of boiler rooms, as a heroic “Mega Force,” which includes a suspiciously Ripley-esque female scientist, fight their way out of an underground network of tunnels full of rubber-suit mutants. The score is pretty good, at least. 

One unauthorized Italian sequel that does hold up is Lucio Fulci’s 1979 gore classic “Zombi 2 “(a.k.a.”Zombie”, a.k.a. “Zombie Flesh Eaters”). Originally called “Island of the Living Dead,” the movie was already in production when producer Ugo Tucci proposed changing the name to “Zombi 2” to piggyback off of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” which was released in Italy under the name “Zombi.” This, in turn, led to legal action, which was struck down when the court decided that “zombie” was a common word and therefore could not be copyrighted. 

But while “Zombi 2” might have benefitted from this confusion at the box office, artistically it’s very much its own thing. Fulci’s films have a singularly hypnotic rhythm, and although his zombies move torturously slowly — one character stands and watches them for a minute or so, screaming, until it’s her turn to be bitten — Fulci fills their advance with a nightmarish inevitability. Combined with the grotesque gore effects and pulsing music, it triggers a primal terror that short-circuits your consciousness until you’re as frozen as the character who watches a gigantic splinter of wood approach her eye, millimeter by millimeter, unable to escape or even scream.

Although Italy was arguably more prolific in this area, the freewheeling attitudes of Hong Kong film studios in that industry’s golden era meant that unofficial sequels were not uncommon there, either. John Woo’s “Hard Boiled” is one hit that got the sequel-in-name-only treatment, as a movie called “The Last Blood by God of Gamblers” director Wong Jing was retitled and re-released as “Hard Boiled II” abroad. And for those who lament that Hong Kong cinema has lost its lawless edge, take heart: As recently as 2015, the completely unrelated “Ouija 4” capitalized on the American “Ouija” movies with a story about a group of software developers creating a mobile app based on the haunted board. 

But the strangest and most fascinating Hong Kong spinoffs have to be the many spawns of “Mr. Vampire.” Director Ricky Lau started the trend in 1985 with his hit horror-comedy, which combined slapstick comedy with obscure folklore and created a craze for movies about jiangshi (geung si in Cantonese), commonly referred to in the West as “hopping vampires.” Sequels, spin-offs, and remakes abounded, many of them starring Lam Ching-ying, who played the Taoist priest in Lau’s original. Over time, it became unclear which of these were officially sanctioned, and which were not — a bonus for those that were not. That being said, there’s no mistaking “Crazy Safari” (1991) — an unofficial sequel to both “Mr. Vampire” and “The Gods Must Be Crazy” that inexplicably relocates ancient Chinese vampires to the African savanna — for the real thing. 

Back in the United States, stricter copyright protections — not to mention greater proximity to major Hollywood studios — have made unauthorized sequels even more rare. But despite Disney’s best efforts, there are still workarounds. The so-called “95-year rule” that has given us all those godawful public-domain horror movies in recent years is one of them. Another is taking a public-domain story that has already been adapted by a bigger, more popular studio and modifying it just enough to make the case that it’s not plagiarism. It’s a “reimagining.” 

One American film company that knew this quite well was Filmation, a Los Angeles-based animation studio that had its heyday in the ‘70s producing Saturday morning cartoons and 

shuttered shortly after releasing the 1989 “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” sequel “Happily Ever After.” In Filmation’s version, Snow White — now a happily married princess — teams up with the Seven Dwarves’ equally diminutive female cousins to defeat the Wicked Queen’s equally wicked brother, whose motivations are close, but not quite the same, as his sister’s. A stacked cast — Irene Cara, Malcom McDowell, Phyllis Diller, Dom DeLuise, and Carol Channing all lent their voices — made a play for commercial appeal. But “Happily Ever After” was met with cynicism and disbelief by both critics and audiences, and is remembered now mostly as a VHS-era curio. 

Disney fought Filmation in court for years over the latter’s “New Classics Collection,” which also included unauthorized “Pinocchio” and “Alice in Wonderland” sequels. But, in classic amoral Hollywood style, the studio had indulged in a similar scheme in 1985 when it released the “Wizard of Oz” sequel “Return to Oz.” (Ironically, 13 years earlier, Filmation had released its own “Wizard of Oz” sequel, “Journey Back to Oz.:) In short, Disney owned the rights to L. Frank Baum’s source novels, but not the character designs from MGM’s 1939 film. And so this darker (Auntie Em sends Dorothy to a sanitarium for shock treatment at the beginning of the movie) and more Freudian (one character calls Dorothy “Mom”) take on the story made some alternations. 

Director and co-screenwriter Walter Murch, who began his career as an editor and sound mixer in the New Hollywood of the ‘70s, was a lifelong fan of Baum’s “Oz” book series, and argued that he was staying close to the source material by replacing the flying monkeys with “Wheelers” who roll around on nightmarishly long forearms and the Tin Man with a copperpot robot named Tik-Tok. But “Return to Oz” was too scary for its target audience of young children, and its failure at the box office ensured that it was Murch’s first and last time directing a feature film. 

Two years earlier, a similar scheme had allowed the semi-legitimate James Bond movie “Never Say Never Again” (1983) to slip through the cracks and into theaters, as permission to use the characters and story of “Thunderball” were split up between writer Kevin McClory and Ion Productions after a protracted court battle. Parceling out the elements of a film among multiple rights holders became a more common practice in the American film industry in general in the ‘80s: Everyone wanted in on the burgeoning home-video market, and B-movie studios like Cannon Films based their business models around pre-selling the rights to their films to various international territories. Combined with litigious creatives fighting over their share of the merch rights, this led to situations like the current state of the “Friday the 13th” franchise, where the character of Jason Voorhees and to his hockey mask are owned by different people.

By the 21st century, unauthorized sequels were mainly the territory of specialists like the previously mentioned The Asylum, which released “Titanic II” in 2010. (You can’t copyright the name of a boat, particularly one involved in one of those all-important “widely publicized events.”) In its place, a new phenomenon has arisen: Fan films, unofficial movies based on well-known properties that aren’t made for money and rely on the benevolence (or complicated siloing) of the original rights holders — and their lack of commercial prospects — to get by. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of them are horror movies: Troll 2, itself a sequel-in-name-only, added another layer to its Russian doll of brazen copycats with a sequel to the sequel called “Under ConTroll” in 2019.

But while ripoffs and dodgy reboots are common in horror, some of the weirdest unauthorized sequels are the result of an obsessed fan self-financing a tribute to their favorite movie. Take Cincinnati lawyer Phil Pitzer, who took advantage of a long and frankly very sad legal quagmire to obtain the sequel rights toEasy Rider in the early 2010s. The resulting passion project, “Easy Rider: The Ride Back” (2012), is just bizarre enough to warrant a mention, if only as a case study in how the counterculture values of the 1960s slowly soured into flag-waving Boomer libertarianism.

But the ultimate example of the unauthorized sequel as a low-rent passion project has to be “Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven” (2011), in which Rena Riffel modifies the plot of Paul Verhoeven’s camp classic “Showgirls” to revolve around her character, Penny, the new girl at Elizabeth Berekeley’s strip club who barely has minute of screen time in the original. Riffel — who also had a small role in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” — wrote, produced, directed, edited, starred in, and self-distributed her continuation of the story on a $30,000 budget, shooting in private residences and black-box theaters throughout Southern California. 

Riffel claimed at the time that Verhoeven had given his blessing to the project. And to her credit, she did pick up a few tricks from him, and from Lynch. But while the camerawork is occasionally above average, the script is a hodgepodge of quotes from the original movie and hardscrabble insights about the nature of sex work and how everybody’s a whore, baby, if the price is right. Many of these come out of the mouth of co-star Shelley Michelle, who takes on the Gina Gershon mentor role and teaches Penny how to dance ballet from her vagina. (Michelle is probably best known as Julia Roberts’ body double in “Pretty Woman.”) 

No matter how quotable or bizarre, however, in the end you can’t deny that this is a movie whose nightclub scenes take place in someone’s living room, complete with a stuffed marlin above the fireplace. In terms of production value, it’s a long way from “Return to Oz” to here. But is it really that far to fall? Unauthorized sequels reveal the extremes of why people make movies in the first place, from purely cynical money grabs to pure — even naive — devotion to characters and their world. Every film, from the most disposable product to the greatest masterpiece, falls somewhere on this spectrum. An unauthorized sequel is just more obvious about its motivations than most.