Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Anchor Bay Trailer Park Week*

Like many cinemaphiles, I am a huge fan of movie trailers. In fact, I consider the Hollywood trailer to be the pinnacle of quality, big-budget editing. Even though they often resort to formulaic clichés (much like the movies themselves) the zippy, thoughtful editing can induce incredible waves of pure excitement. Is it not a truism by now that the previews are more entertaining than the films they advertise?

I would willingly sit through an entire of evening of trailers if the opportunity presented itself (even fake ones, as Grindhouse
proved), so as long as they aren't unskippable bastards at the front of a disc that I purchased with my hard earned moolah, I always welcome coming attractions.

Side Rant: Seriously guys, if you put the trailers on the disc as an added bonus, I will watch them, enjoy myself, and thank you for the experience. Put them at the beginning of the disc and I will be cool with it provided it isn't something I will watch repeatedly. (TV shows, Blade Runner, etc.) Put them in the front and make them unskippable, and you just made Pirate Bay look all the more appealing. Jerks.

Anchor Bay Entertainment, who I will never fully forgive for the aspect ratio issues on their Evil Dead 2 VHS release, has the semi-enjoyable tendency to slap trailers for their more obscure genre offerings onto classics like Cemetery Man. Aside from unfortunate side effects like seeing the Bad Dreams trailer at least a half dozen times, or the time I got tricked into watching the awful
Bill S. Preston, Esq. vehicle Freaked, they are a gold mine of forgotten late '80s/early '90s awfulness.

How can you expect someone like me to resist a trailer such as this?

Sure it's a mediocre "airport fiction" thriller staring the dude from Law & Order, but just look at it. I am so incredibly scared of biohazard symbols right now.

In honor of the weird, cinematic stream-of-consciousness style of discovering films, I'm going to work my way backwards through the Anchor Bay discs I ended up watching thanks to their trailers on a previous AB release. Check back here in a couple days for magic, electric, serial killer flick,
Ghost in the Machine, followed by Betty Davis as the world's biggest bitch in The Anniversary, and wrapped up with a mini-review double feature of Warning Sign and Visiting Hours. Eventually they all trace back to Cemetary Man, but you should just rent that one instead of reading about it here; it's a legitimately good film wrapped in a nutty, EuroSchlock coating and filled with delicious nougat.

*As mentioned in Killer Mutant Mammals Week, Video Updates has a very broad definition of the word "week".

Update (6/10): Really fucking broad definition. I suck.

4 comments:

  1. Yaphet Kotto AND Richard Dysart?

    Be still my heart!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Don't forget G.W. Bailey, the superstar from such films as Police Academy and Police Academy 2.

    ReplyDelete
  3. He's also the bad guy from Short Circuit.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I am trying to figure out what Anchor Bay dvd has the trailer for Silent Night Deadly Night on it aside from the actual releasing.
    Any clue?

    ReplyDelete