Murder most horrid

A sequel to American Psycho? Danny Leigh fears the worst

"Above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry's is a sign, and on the sign in letters that match the drapes' colour are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT."

And so, after nearly 400 pages of mayhem, viscera and exhaustive lists of male grooming products, it ended. American Psycho, the novelist Bret Easton Ellis's reviled saga of serial murder amid the glassy opulence of mid-1980s Manhattan, was over. Which, whether your response to its fusion of deadpan grand guignol and consumer durables had been adulation or disgust, frankly came as a relief.

Equally, when the closing credits rolled on last year's movie adaptation, directed with much panache by Mary Harron, your immediate reaction was not to storm the foyer demanding another ticket. If Ellis's 1991 opus opened a long conversation about both the dark legacy of Reaganism and its author's morality, Harron's film was a bloody full stop. You did not want more.

Yet more is what we're going to get. Lions Gate, producer of Harron's movie, recently announced plans to oversee a hugely unlikely sequel, set in the present and rejoicing in the literal-minded title of American Psycho 2 (thereby missing the chance to use Honey, I Shrunk the Tortured Hooker and the Dead Homeless Guy). The bad news is no mere Hollywood rumour: the project begins shooting next month

Not that Harron, Ellis or any of the original cast will be present - not even Christian Bale, so alarmingly plausible as the carnage-happy anti-hero Patrick Bateman. Lions Gate's concept revolves around a survivor of Bateman's rampage, a female college freshman, who reaches for the axe after developing a campus crush. In lieu of Bale's leering, disconnected cipher, we have snub-nosed starlet Mila Kunis from the sitcom That 70s Show.

In place of Harron, we have Morgan J Freeman (no relation to the better known Morgan "no middle initial" Freeman), arriving fresh from the teen soap opera Dawson's Creek. Instead of a glacially comic take on a seminal (if often unreadable) source, we have what sounds like an artistically bankrupt slash'n'stalk, destined only to collect dust in video shops.

As baffling decisions go, it's a doozy. For one thing, Kunis's character would have been in nappies during Bateman's reign of terror. Then there's the likelihood, explicitly favoured by Harron, that Bateman was simply a fantasist, a Wall Street Walter Mitty whose grisly exploits never took place beyond his own sick-puppy imaginings. And, most pertinently, American Psycho was, however obliquely, a joke at the very culture of vapid thrill-seeking that would later inspire some genius to suggest making a sequel to it. Or sequels. "If we make good movies," Lions Gate president Michael Paseornek remarked optimistically, "we could have a franchise here."

A franchise? Given that Ellis spent much of the 1990s in the stocks for the alleged misogyny, brutality and plain bad writing of his signature novel, you sense the irony won't be lost on him. But, like most apparently demented ideas, there is a logic at work. While American Psycho may not have been a hit, it was dirt cheap by Hollywood standards. And cheap movies, in the eyes of the industry, are good movies.

All of which makes Bateman and his progeny potential gold dust for an ambitious operation such as Lions Gate, which snaffled up the rights not just to Ellis's novel but to his title, lead character and any other spin-offs. Managed correctly, the brand should have no trouble attracting press attention and multiplex kids hungry for generic scares in the vein of Screams 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Lions Gate is arguably simply tapping into a tradition whereby all the best bogeymen - Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddie Krueger et al - routinely return like homicidal Jack-in-the-boxes (or, if they don't come back in person, have their traumatised victims do it for them). But while buying up a brand name and hiring unknowns to keep down the overheads may make economic sense, it doesn't make for great movies.

And American Psycho was, now and again, tantalisingly close to being just that - partly due to Harron's deft way with a slapstick set-piece, but largely because she wisely excised the violent grotesqueries that secured Ellis his professional bad boy reputation (and made his novel such heavy going). Stripping the project of its adolescent fixation with granny-baiting shock tactics, Harron produced a spiteful and genuinely inspired satire on 1980s manhood and rapacious consumption.

The odds are you won't get much of that sort of thing with American Psycho 2. And since the censors won't let Lions Gate show the worst of Bateman's excesses, what will we be left with? A fat, redundant nothing, hollow and context-free, that any right-thinking movie-lover will wish nothing but ill as it begins to slither their way.

You can only hope Ellis is doing something really fun with the money.