John Rambo no longer has monster problem

Like the shooting of JFK and the lunar landings, everyone can remember where they were and what they were doing the moment they heard that Rambo 5 was going to see the sexagenarian soldier trading blows with a genetically-modified sci-fi nasty. Well, today delivers just such another epochal moment, as we learn that the evergreen Sylvester Stallone has now nixed this idea.

Back in September, Sly described a fourth Rambo sequel to Ain't It Cool which would have seen beloved Reagan-era icon John Rambo and his disposable Black Ops sidekicks being called in to save the day when a military lab-created, ultimate killer goes on the rampage. The movie would have been set in the Pacific Northwest, with the essential storyline taken from James Byron Higgins' 1998 novel Hunter, to which Stallone holds the rights. With the above poster to gorge our peepers on, the global populace was promptly left drunk with excitement over this prospect of Stallone stepping into Predator territory.

But alas! Cruel Mistress of the Fates! Stallone has since been in contact with StalloneZone (exactly what it sounds like and, now you know it's there, don't even try to tell me you won't be bookmarking it), to explain that while this Savage Hunt plot will still be utilised in a film, it sadly won't be one featuring the headband-rocking Vietnam vet. It instead sounds as if the big lug's next adventure will find him deployed in more conventional action circumstances, with Stallone remarking;

'Rambo himself will be heading over the border to a violent city where many young women have vanished.'

This would seem to tie in with previously mooted Rambo 5 story concepts, in which he was to carry out a Taken-style rescue of a young woman held by drug traffickers in Mexico. But although of the new Rambo film Stallone promises 'there will be blood', nothing can surely assuage the global disappointment that there won't be any experimental, mutant killing machines. Unless Sly makes a new Rocky film. Rocky Vs. Godzilla in Space. Maybe then the world could turn again.