Jaycee Woods

Recently, I watched “The Boys from Brazil” (1978) starring Gregory Peck, Lawrence Olivier, & James Mason. Given Hollywood’s practice of making sequels, one should be made for this story.

In the original, Mengele created 94 clones of Hitler. In order to mimic life experience, Mengele conspires to murder the clones’ adoptive fathers, so the clones share the same loss of a father while a teen. In the end, Mengele and his assassins are stopped but only after killing some of the adoptive fathers. Broadly the story looks at the ethics of cloning and nature vs. nurture.

In the sequel, one of the clones is running for president; it should be Bobby Wheelock who had killed Mengele in the movie. David Bennett, who was stopped in the movie from tracking down and murdering the 96 clones, knows that Wheelock is a Hitler clone and tries to stop Wheelock despite no one believing him. Tracking down another clone whose father had not been killed, Bennett plots to replace Wheelock with his fellow clone, who does not seem evil. The story can explore the nature vs nurture theme.

Does the seemingly “good” clone get seduced by evil when power is available to him? What types of fates might the other clones have had? What if the sequel was set in contemporary Sweden, UK, Canada, or Germany instead? What if Wheelock has been killing his rival clones so he can be the only one (“Highlander” joke)?

Side point: include Steve Guttenberg in the cast as I was surprised to see him as a young freelance Nazi hunter in the original movie. Maybe he can play Bennett instead of John Rubinstein. Rosemary Harris may be too old to reprise her character, as a clone’s adoptive mother, in a sequel, although she was in something only a few years ago.