Iron Man opens this week, and thus the summer movie season has officially arrived. I love a good summer movie as much a the next guy, but this morning I found myself looking back at some of the little films that cropped up during the summer; some of them managed to get a "summer" feel on a much lower budget and without all the advertisement and hype. My absolute favorite summer art house movie has to be Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1999). I saw it three times that summer, and each time I clutched my seat, my heart pounding. I was amazed at how brilliantly Tywker had mapped out his three possible storylines and how lovely the small, quiet interludes were. I loved Franka Potente, and I loved his throbbing score, which practically entered into your bloodstream and pumped up your adrenaline by hand. Every color, movement and cut was designed for maximum effect (I've always been puzzled how Tykwer's movies since have seemed so long and sluggish.)

Also that same summer, John Sayles delivered his baffling adventure/suspense film Limbo, which had several people trapped on an island awaiting rescue and stalked by bad guys. The ending had everybody in an uproar and caused the film to die a quick death. The summer before that one, Darren Aronofsky's debut feature Pi gave me a good dose of sci-fi thrills, as well as a few head-scratching puzzles (which were actually real). 2000 was a particularly bad summer, but John Waters' Cecil B. DeMented provided a mischievous little oasis in the middle of it all. In that film, renegade filmmakers kidnap a Hollywood starlet and force her to be in their indie production; each team member has a tattoo of a maverick filmmaker's name. (I've often wondered which filmmaker's name I would pick for a tattoo? Maybe David Cronenberg...)

The first time I watched Open Water, I had nightmares for a week. Mainly because, when I'm on vacation, the wife and I are those two people who go on the same type of diving excursions. Plus, I never like to stay with the crowd -- I always venture off to find my own space, away from all the awkward vacationers and their seven disposable, underwater cameras. So when I saw the flick, I said to myself: "Crap, that could most definitely be me in another year." Heck, I'm all for swimming with sharks, but there needs to be a boat around in case, ya know, them sharks want to eat me. It's been four years since director Chris Kentis and producer Laura Lau scared the crap out of us with Open Water, and according to Variety, the two have finally decided on their follow-up project. Yup, and it once again has to do with sharks -- but not the kind that takes your limbs, I'm talking the kind that takes your money.

Kentis wrote and will direct the currently untitled legal thriller for Paramount Vantage, with Lau back onboard as producer. The story sounds pretty intriguing; essentially, it revolves around a woman who is arrested for a crime she didn't commit, but then gets "plunged into a state of confusion and psychological terror as she defends herself." See, defending yourself is always a bad move -- but if you don't got the cash, I guess it's the way to go. Apart from this, Kentis will also helm (while Lau produces) a project for Warner Bros. based on the WWII sinking of the USS Indianapolis. If you weren't previously aware of this story, you might have learned more about it recently during the Discovery Channel's very awesome Shark Week. I know they aired a two-hour docudrama about the incident, in which a crew of 900 were left stranded in the water for five days with a slew of blood-thirsty sharks. Variety says the legal thriller is eying a 2008 start, and there's currently no word on when Warners plans to kickoff the USS Indianapolis flick.

And you thought he was done with all those sharks. Chris Kentis, who helmed Open Water (but not the stupid sequel) and subsequently convinced some people never to go scuba diving ever again, has signed on to direct Indianapolis, an adaptation of Douglas Stanton's book In Harm's Way. Kentis will once again be teaming up with Open Water producer Laura Lau to finally bring the horrific real-life story to the big screen.

Some of you might remember the Indianapolis story from Jaws -- back in WWII, the U.S.S. Indianapolis sunk due to an attack from a Japanese sub. Of the 900 men on board, most of whom floated at sea for five grueling days, only 317 were found -- while the rest, well, there's a reason why they call them shark-infested waters. Warner Bros. has been dying (no pun intended) to get this project off the ground; at one point Mel Gibson was going to star, with Barry Levinson directing. Unlike Open Water (which had us right next to those two for almost the entire film while they desperately searched for a way to survive), Indianapolis will focus more on backstory, why no one answered the distress call and how the stranded military men were eventually found ... by accident. However, I'm sure they'll come a point where someone gets eaten by a shark -- I mean, that's the fun part, right?

An interesting note on Kentis: He was vacationing in Thailand when the Tsunami hit in 2004, and somehow managed to escape along with this wife and child. Does this dude attract danger or what?

Here's what happens when you sell not only your movie, but your title: A distributor can take some completely unrelated flick and decide to slap that title in front of it and voila, you get a previously-reported, curious-looking direct-to-video title called Open Water 2: Adrift, which was actually known as simply Adrift before someone at Lionsgate realized, hey, both movies deal with shark attacks -- and of course there'll never be a "true" sequel to Open Water (for painfully obvious reasons) -- so why not snatch the flick up and release it stateside as a sequel!?!?!? Americans LOVE sequels!

Ah, and both movies are based on actual events. Here's what goes down in the sequel: A group of reunion-ing high-school pals decide to leap off the side of a yacht ... but nobody remembered to lower that silly ladder! Which means they can't get back on the boat ... at all! And if that's not weirdly tragic enough, one of the ill-fated bathers left a baby on board the boat! Alone! (Y'know, actually, this sounds like a pretty cool movie...)

Be that as it may, it's hardly an actual sequel to Open Water, although given the similarities, I guess I can't blame Lionsgate for the canny marketing move. Although it was released theatrically overseas, Open Water 2: Adrift debuts in North American video stores on February 20.

[Thanks to DavisDVD for the tip and the pic.]