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Well, the first volume of Trailer Trauma is an entertaining collection of trailers for films I never want to see! After having seen so many from the first volume, I’ve only seen five of the films offered up here. None of those were any good, but at least the trailer for Captain Apache improves on the source by having Lee Van Cleef sing a song about his role in the movie!

While I’m pretty sure I never want to watch any movie represented here (well, maybe Fingers), I did jot down things of interest:

Some of these movies have amazing taglines and narration. My favorites:

“If you see it once, you see it forever!” - Sacrifice (one of the greatest taglines I’ve ever heard)

“Once a lovely young girl, now some blood stains on the wall” - Jack the Ripper

“A film beyond belief, even to the Devil himself” - the Demon Lover

“He was conceived in a grave and weened on human blood” - Grave of the Vampire (Also features a remarkable response from a pregnant mother to being told she needs an abortion)

“Starring Cameron Mitchell as Reinhart Rex, master of the mutants” - Mutant War (An incredible sentence and the world is a better place for it existing)

And there is no shortage of audacity, both real and manufactured. Take the Annihilators, which at first appears to be a racist film about white army dudes cleaning up the ghetto before transitioning to the kidnapping of a schoolbus of children by a machete-brandishing lunatic, this one has something to make everyone uncomfortable! Or the faux “with it”-ness of Kill, which starts with a twelve year old boy talking about his heroin addiction and ends with an embarrassed James Mason looking like he thought he had the Fernando Rey role in a French Connection equal. And Blood Sucking Freaks née the Incredible Torture Show reveals the only thing worse than an HG Lewis film is a fake HG Lewis film!

Strange or notable casting choices abound in these films. From Newhart’s Julia Duffy as a hippie teenager in the ghastly-looking "comedy" Wacko to a bald Ernie Hudson as the villanious rapist in Penitentiary II (which looks about ten years too late on the Blacksploitation market) to poor Stewart Granger as a Nazi (?) in Hell Hunters. Ralph Meeker gets a lot of mileage out of a bizarre reaction shot in the Alpha Incident trailer as well, though he’s overshadowed by another cast member’s inexplicable line, “The only time I stay in one spot this long is when I’m in bed with a chick or I’m sleepin!” My favorite celebrity appearance here though has to be Dabney Coleman as the crooked white cop trying to keep the black man down in Black Fist— love his 100% Dabney Coleman response to being called a pig!

And then there’s the ephemera, like how Beyond and Back appears to tell the story of the afterlife entirely in zoom pull shots, or how Mean Frank and Crazy Tony sets the record for the number of times two character names have been used in a single trailer. And of course Food of the Gods II (how did we all sleep on part one?!) adds yet another rat movie to the list of rat movies. And finally, there’s Homebodies, which in many ways is the perfect encapsulation of the entire trailer experience offered here: an interesting idea (here, old folks go up against gentrification by killing everyone who tries to reclaim their tenement building) executed with no apparent skill or prowess.

domino, I'm sure you already know that Fingers was the film that Jacques Audiard remade in French with 2005's The Beat That My Heart Skipped (reversing the usual trend of English language remakes!). I particularly like that this shows that Harvey Keitel moping around naked in films was a thing long before The Piano and Bad Lieutenant! Plus the trailer has that great moment of Tisa Farrow signifying that she is breaking up with Keitel by snuggling up to a large black man!

I was curious about Goliathon, which is also known as The Mighty Peking Man (a Hong Kong/Japanese co-production between Shaw Brothers and Shochiku to cash in on the Godzilla and King Kong trend, though it had the misfortune to come out the year after the unfortunate 1976 King Kong remake!) and has just been released in the UK by 88 Films.

You've picked out the films that I'm vaguely interested in. Wacko doesn't look great but it does look far funnier than any of the Scary Movie series! (At the very least it has George Kennedy getting custard pied!). Whilst Hysterical looks about as funny as the Scary Movie films. They both have that kind of mania-verging-on-desperation vibe to them though (very much like the later Scary Movie franchise in fact!)

And Homebodies looks intriguing in an 'aren't these murderous old dears lovable really?' kind of way, but if I want the elderly versus callous property developers I'll stick with *Batteries Not Included (or the upcoming Aquarius), thank you very much!

I'm most interested in Sunday In The Country (seemingly a Straw Dogs-style Canadian film with Ernest Borgnine!) and also the above mentioned The Alpha Incident, though that may just be because despite having watched the trailer a few times I still don't really know what the plot of the film is! (Is it a techno-thriller like The Andromeda Strain or Phase IV? Or something more 60s like The Satan Bug? Or something completely different involving a bunch of people bickering in a rural backwoods cabin? I'd be fine with any of those set ups, but it would be nice to know which one it was!). And perhaps Kill! just for the cast, the setting around the Afghanistan drug trade (long before the Traffik TV series) and it being one of only two films that Romain Gary directed.

Beyond and Back looks utterly ridiculous and seemingly very much in the trend of those Faces of Death films, though this one is positing itself as less a viscerally gruelling look at methods of death and decay of the body than, with its G rating and 2001-style flying through tunnel special effects, as some kind of 'uplifting experience for all of the family to witness'! But I might be curious to see it some time as all of those 'case studies' of various people who have had near death experiences come across as pretty amusing in the trailer! People just merrily driving their car off a cliff, or happily minding their own business before suddenly flying their light aircraft directly into the ground (as you do! But this was decades before Harrison Ford popularised doing that kind of thing), and so on! (It also reminded me of The Day Today's take-off on that kind of story too!)

Going back to that 80s Horrorthon third volume for a moment, I'd also really like to see that strange looking sci-fi horror film (that looks a bit like a mix of Saturn 3 and Galaxy of Terror! And anticipating Event Horizon!) Nightflyers, based on a George R.R. Martin story(!) and starring Catherine Mary Stewart (a couple of years after Night of the Comet) and Lisa Blount (the same year she was the female lead in Prince of Darkness).

domino, I understand your reticence about the commentary (I could have done without hearing during the trailer for Bigas Lunas's uncharacteristic Spanish horror film Anguish about Zelda Rubinstein being rather a randy lady and that the commentator would have been more than eager to have had, ahem, carnal relations with her!) but found it pretty fun! There were a couple of interesting titbits that I learnt from the commentary. One was that is seems that everyone else was seemingly just as frustrated by the vague, pointless title of Blue Monkey as you were! And that it is apparently only titled that due to a small aside from one of the child characters, played by a young Sarah Polley(!), that "we'll probably just find a blue monkey or something in there!". But the commentator says that they don't!
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A number of those 1986-88 trailers also reminded me of that 'groups of kid friends having adventures inside a genre film' period (the same period that is getting riffed on these days with Super 8 and Stranger Things), and that while there were more kid friendly entries such as The Goonies (though I remember the element of threat even in that film being pretty intense and exciting as a kid!) and Explorers there were quite a few films that were bridging the gap from the fare more aimed at kids to the more full blooded fare yet still featuring young teen characters, mostly played by actors named Corey! (So arguably Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter belongs in this cycle too! Or at least is heavily influenced by the young teen protagonist aspect). A film like The Monster Squad fits neatly right in the middle (with its goofy fun riff on the Universal monsters, yet with added swearing and violence), whilst The Lost Boys has a pretty gory final act and relegates its group of younger teen friends to the supporting cast while we focus on Jason Patric's older teen falling in with the wrong gang. Even if they are the only ones able to combat the threat at the end!

For my money though The Gate is one of the best of that cycle, intensifying the horror elements whilst still remaining about childhood issues (fears of abandonment, losing your home, your parents turning against you, etc. Ideas that would crop up in a different form in the Child's Play films perhaps). And to go back to the modern cycle of these films, I still think that Joe Dante's The Hole took some cues from it!

Plus, while the trailer isn't on this set, I'd throw 1988's Pulse into that group as well, for its sensitive kids-point of view on the pressures of step parents and killer electricity!
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There is also a nice appreciation of Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark, with a mention of the music video made for the band Bill Paxton performed in (Martini Ranch, "Reach") at around the same time which features Paxton in the title role getting abused by most of the cast from Near Dark (plus Paul Reiser post-Aliens and bizarrely Judge Reinhold!) doing a kind of post-apocalyptic spaghetti western riff! It kind of outdoes Alex Cox's Straight To Hell for spaghetti western wackiness in just seven minutes (and weirdly kind of anticipates the music video for The Killers' All These Things That I've Done!)

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Also I thought I would mention one film from volume 2 of Trailer Trauma that you have upcoming, which is the one film I would possibly recommend for some sort of rediscovery - The Possession of Joel Delaney starring Shirley MacLaine. But I think I understand why it isn't as well known as certain other big starry name headlined horror films from around the same time (though I think its worth mentioning in the same group as Faye Dunaway in Eyes of Laura Mars and Diane Keaton in Looking For Mr Goodbar), as it has a rather gruelling ending of drawn out sexual humiliation in the final scene of:

Spoiler

the 'possessed' title character kidnapping his sister's son and forcing him to strip in front of a crowd of cops and onlookers during the beachhouse climax. I don't remember there being any particular gore but the explicit child nudity in that scene is just as uncomfortably horrific in some ways.

The film probably compares most closely to The Exorcist (though there's a slow burning investigatory quality reminiscent of Rosemary's Baby too, though the MacGuffin here is voodoo rather than witchcraft). There's nothing as obviously violent as in the Friedkin film but the nudity is more graphic and the threat to children more sustained and intense throughout, though especially in that final sequence. Its a pretty gruelling watch. Plus while The Exorcist goes a bit over the top with all of its special effects, which helps to distance it a bit from reality, that final sequence of Joel Delaney is disturbing more for how it is bluntly literalising the far more down to earth theme of the cycle of child abuse that has been slowly building up.

(In some ways I wonder if the child actors in that film went through a more gruelling experience than Linda Blair did in her role! Though of course Linda Blair's 'ordeal' seemed more intense from the fame/notoriety that came after the film, whilst The Possession of Joel Delaney, and therefore its child actors, have stayed a bit more unknown).

Perkins Cobb wrote:This could also go legitimately in the "I've found a lost film" thread, but in any case this label's upcoming release of the regional indie The Dismembered (1962) sounds fascinating.

Mondo Digital.

The fourth volume of Trailer Trauma arrives on 11/6. From the Diabolik pre-order page:

They’ve wreaked havoc at the drive-in… they’ve attacked the all-night horror-thon… now the terror that began with TRAILER TRAUMA will invade homes everywhere! A family settles in for a quiet evening of entertainment when suddenly, flashing across the television screen: scenes of utter cinematic insanity shock, disturb and forever scar! The fourth volume in the TRAILER TRAUMA series is a marathon of madness featuring 268 of the best and rarest TV spots for some of the greatest and most obscure 70s theatrical horror and exploitation films and beyond! Over three hours of demented delirium that will leave you traumatized!

Feature Specifications and Extras:

• Transferred in 4K & digitally mastered in full HD• Sound digitally mastered from the original optical tracks• Audio commentary with FRIGHTFEST GUIDE TO MONSTER MOVIES author Michael Gingold, PAPERBACKS FROM HELL author Grady Hendrix and Temple of Schlock’s Chris Poggiali• Garagehouse Pictures trailers

• All regions

2017 / 181 mins. / Color / Mono / Not Rated

I'm tempted to get these Trailer comps, but I'd be afraid after the initial watch and then again with the commentary I would just be done with it.

Unfortunately despite all of our excited speculation earlier in the thread that the fourth volume of the Trailer Trauma series would focus on horror-themed TV movies, it is going to actually be a collection of TV spots for theatrical releases. I'm happy enough with that, but I thought I should mention it after all my earlier giddy speculations on the contents!

"You'll meet her at night, in a dark place. She's beautiful, and she'll be waiting for you...waiting to love you to death!

"Can the sinister Doctor Who enslave King Kong's fantastic strength?"

I have watched through Trailer Trauma Volume 4: Television Trauma and it features a good mix of out of the blue titles and familiar ones. A number of titles make a reappearance from the earlier volumes (and a few new ones to this series will be familiar to those who watched the 42nd Street Forever and Video Nasties compilations), although in their shorter TV spot versions, which sadly means that we don't get the slightly unfortunate these days "Well, just call me O.J.!" line from the one happy lady who has invaded the football field and stolen the ball just before getting trampled by all of the players in Summer School Teachers! The shorter spot for Human Experiments ruins the rhythm of the voiceover mentioned previously. But Message From Space becomes laugh out loud hilarious in its sped up TV spot version! And the trailer for Torso just involves the title getting shouted at the audience in quick succession! Though they do still manage to throw the "from Carlo Ponti, who brought you Doctor Zhivago!" line in there too! A few films turn up a couple of times in different forms, usually getting an individual trailer and then one where they have been double billed with something else (or Inseminoid turns up under both that title and a retitling as "Horror Planet").

It does make this compilation a lot harder to sift for interesting titles than the previous ones, simply because being so short it is difficult to discern much of a story from them, just a barrage of strange imagery! So I have a few titles that I am interested in, but have no real idea of whether they could be any good or not from what I saw! The main titles of interest to me here were:
- Last Days of Man On Earth, which looks even trippier in this theatrical trailer!
- Private Parts from 1972, which on checking imdb turns out to be the first feature by Paul Bartel
- Great White - a Jaws rip-off, though it seems interesting mostly because I, perhaps naively, want to know how the lady on the lilo manages to fit sideways into the shark's mouth, as depicted in the poster image that ends the TV spot!
- Son of Dracula from 1974 - "The first rock-and-roll Dracula movie!" with Harry Nilsson as "Count Downe" and Ringo Starr as Merlin (!?!?), which appears to have a very high profile soundtrack and lots of songs performed by Nilsson (which is probably the reason why it has not gotten a release as yet) and trailer scored to "Without You"! (Jenny Runacre appears in both this and Last Days of Man on Earth, and this was a few years before she played Bod in Derek Jarman's Jubilee, another unorthodox apocalypse/musical movie! Get the Flipside series onto these titles, stat!) At the very least, that Cinema Snob guy needs to know about the existence of this film for one of his "Musical March in September" episodes!
- The Night Visitor - a Swedish/US co-production starring Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann the same year they were in The Emigrants together! (It looks a bit as if it is influenced by the axe wielding portion of Bergman's then most recent film The Passion of Anna! Albeit seemingly more obviously in the horror genre!) Directed by Laslo Benedeck a long time after his most famous film, The Wild One with Brando!
- If He Hollers...Let Him Go
- A Name For Evil - which looks to be one of the real curios thrown up by this set of trailers. According to imdb it was originally a psychological thriller parodying society, then was shelved by MGM due to running over budget before being bought by Penthouse three years later and released as a horror film!
- Black Rodeo, which is a documentary about, well, black rodeo riders featuring Woody Strode and Muhammed Ali, and a soundtrack with songs by Arethra Franklin et al! (It is also the first film by the guy who would go on to direct Revenge of the Nerds, Troop Beverly Hills and V.I. Warshawski!)
- Also, I might perhaps be curious about End of the World, which looks vaguely intriguing in its weird merging of Christopher Lee with sci-fi doppleganger nuns(!?), though on looking on imdb the few reviews have titles like: "Alien Nuns Destroy The World By Boring It To Death", "If you like watching people do a lot of nothing, this is the film for you" and "The End of this movie is the best thing about it!"

Beyond that there is a short spot for Monte Hellman's Cockfighter, as well as a contemporary US TV spot for Ken Russell's The Devils! There are also a lot of trailers for films released by Criterion (Fantastic Planet, The Brood, Sisters, Equinox, Videodrome, Night of the Living Dead, Don't Look Now).

There are two films that I have seen that I would like to recommend: Autopsy (NSFW), one of the stranger giallo films starring Mimsy Farmer, which I wrote up during the horror project; and Beyond The Door II, which is better known as Shock!, the last film directed by Mario Bava and which features Daria Nicolodi's best role. It is a bit of a shame that this Bava film is one of the few not to have been revisited for a Blu-ray edition as yet.

It is really amazing to see the kind of films getting television spots! (Though I cannot imagine any television channel showing the one for Massage Parlour Hookers! Or the gag inducing one for the first two Mondo Cane films). There are a few films that I can take or leave actually tracking down to watch, but they had some notable elements: The Woman Hunt has an extremely non-PC trailer and seems to be an all female prey version of The Most Dangerous Game; The Cremators has a weird Blob-style monster in the form of a superimposed giant rolling sun-like ball burning people to a crisp (it could potentially be an interesting B-movie though in the vein of The Flesh-Eaters); Sweet Kill has 60s romantic lead Tab Hunter playing a serial killer just prior to his rediscovery as camp icon in John Waters' Polyester (though Sweet Kill was also Curtis Hanson's first film!)

And I'm kind of interested in watching the biker gang-girl on a revenge mission movie Bury Me An Angel, but that might only be because I was amazed by the alliteration going on by the narrator in the trailer:

"A howling hellcat humping a hot steel hog on a roaring rampage of revenge...twisted by torment...a sadistic she-devil leading a pair of perverts on a raging ride through hell"

If that isn't a piece of pure poetry perfection, then I don't know what is!

I was also amused at the way that the 'interviewing the audience outside the theatre' trailer for The Teasers inadvertently ends up advertising The Stud more effectively than its own film! As well as the way that the Night of the Lepus trailer keeps amusingly teasing the terrifying nature of the monsters that it features whilst cheekily skirting around the fact that it is just giant rabbits, the cuddliest monsters of them all! And after watching the brief TV spot for Shame of the Jungle, I had no idea what to make of the film except to wonder if I was now racist for having watched it. I've now looked up the full trailer (NSFW!) and it seems to actually be a sex comedy? It seems to feature humour that may only work if you are French or Belgian though! (And I don't think that we'll be getting a Fantastic Planet-style Criterion special edition of it any time soon!) Speaking of which, I'm not too sure what to make of famed French mime artist Marcel Marceau turning up as a crazed necrophiliac puppeteer in William Castle's Shanks! (that looks to be a film which has to be seen to be believed!)

There are also quite a few Godzilla trailers on there, as well as one for the Hong Kong take on the Japanese tokusatsu genre film Inframan, which left me entirely cold but I guess Power Rangers fans might like it!

Anyway, I did a brief tally whilst watching and there were three different people pretending to be Bruce Lee (including the dead Bruce Lee himself), four food fights, two custard pies to the face, eight people (and/or animals) dived through plate glass windows and four dummies (plus one flaming car) were thrown off of the top of buildings to signify the death of a major villain! There were also more screams, grunts and groans through the run of kung fu trailers in the middle of this volume than in any of the sex or horror films bookending them!

Also, is Russ Meyer really 'the rural Fellini' that one trailer lauds him as?

I must admit that I can't help myself from wanting to buy all of the trailer collections I come across. I can usually stop by reminding myself that basically everything is on Youtube (which is the same problem I have with my Melies set - I'll just turn to Youtube rather than track down which disc its on, turn on the television, etc). But when they have an added commentary - or just the way these things are curated - it adds extra interest. I did come across this fairly outdated blog which lists quite a few of these collections and what films are contained on them.

I do have a few of them - like Troma's Coming Distractions, the Video Nasties sets, some of the 42nd Street Forever sets, and one of my favorites: the Extra Weird Sampler (which despite buying a year or two ago, it came with a coupon for $2 off a Something Weird Video DVD at your neighborhood Borders! But alas, it expired in 2003, which reminds me of this obnoxious video).

I'm just never really sure how to watch these things. Is it best to just hit "play all"? or my usual strategy is to pick and choose several. But then they all sorta run together and I'd rather make notes of what I've watched and whether I want to watch the whole movie later (write down whether I thought the trailer was successful or not). There's also the issue that many of these old trailers are filled with tons of spoilers (it worked back then when you'd forget, but now you can find the movie immediately after watching the trailer). So for those who watch these trailer collections, what strategies would you recommend?

It appears that this collection is missing what is perhaps the best tv spot for a movie: Dracula Has Risen from the Grave

That's a great TV spot, and you are right that sadly they don't include it on this fourth volume.

I know what you mean about everything being available elsewhere and seeming a bit redundant. Especially with this fourth volume all of the longer theatrical trailers I linked to in the previous post give a better impression of the film than the TV spots do! Though I couldn't find anything for a couple of the films, like Son of Dracula outside of some performance footage. Often these trailer compilation sets help in providing the trailer material that people can then upload! But sitting down to watch a programmed selection of trailers does make me more aware of them enough to search for more information on the internet. I don't think I would have known to be curious enough to search out more information on Shanks! or Last Man On Earth on YouTube without having a sense of knowing what I was looking for already!

And yes spoilers are prevalent throughout and cannot really be avoided at all. Something like that Autopsy trailer I posted above pretty much spoils the final reveal of the killer, and their demise! I love watching these compilations but if it is something that I have in my to watch pile and have not yet got to, and really don't want to be spoiled on it, I usually skip past it, such as the Four Flies on Grey Velvet trailer here, or A Bay of Blood on the Video Nasties set. It is also similar to the way that I skip through sections of Scorsese's My Voyage To Italy film still, as I do have plans to sit down with Umberto D one of these days! I will most likely be doing the same thing with the Betrand Tavernier My Voyage Through French Cinema film soon. But then if unfamiliar with a film I usually just watch something and inevitably am going to get spoiled by a trailer, and I have just made peace with it now. If it is a good film it will likely still be worth watching even if I already know the basic outlines of the plot. If the plot twists were all a film had going for it, then it might not be too good a film! (Though I find that the big spoiler for horror films that I usually do not want to know before going in is not finding out what particularly happens, but more having whether the ending is an upbeat or downbeat one revealed too early! That's why it is not recommended to compare any film to The Wicker Man, whether positively or negatively, as it has immediately spoiled the outcome!)

Diabolik have their Exhumed Films: 20 years of Terror trailer compilation on sale for $10 til the end of July, or until 100 copies are sold. No idea if there’s overlap with the Trailer Trauma volumes but it’s a pretty good collection.

I bought it and from memory (don't have it in front of me to check) there is a fair amount of overlap, unfortunately. Still probably worth it at $10 if you're a completist for these things like me.

From their Facebook page:

Ok, so it is official! We are repressing a very limited quantity of our out-of-print trailer comps TRAILER TRAUMA 2 and TRAILER TRAUMA 3. These will be available exclusively through us for the time being. If there are any left they will go to our normal retailers, but we advise you not to wait as these will likely go very quick like the original pressings. These releases have been commanding very high prices on the collector market but are being made available again for the original list price of $25 and $35 respectively. If you haven’t already chimed in that you will take one in our last post announcing the repress, you can message us here to order and we will send you the payment details. If you said that you would take one in the last post, we will be sending you a message directly to place your order. The discs will be available to ship on 2/28.

Good on them, the second-hand prices were getting ridiculous (as in, starting listings at $350+)

...on December 16th.

From their Facebook page:

Announcing the latest installment in the TRAILER TRAUMA series...

They are everywhere, now it is time to stand up and fight... now is the time for revenge... now is the time for TRAILER TRAUMA 5: 70s ACTION ATTACK!

It’s going to be an all-out war on Dec. 16th, when TRAILER TRAUMA 5 hits the streets! Over three hours of movie mayhem served at point blank range from around the world, from the greatest decade in film history, will burst into flames and blazing-hot shrapnel before your scorched retinas!

TRAILER TRAUMA 5 is an unparalleled assortment of trailers from some of our favorite films from the 70s that you will not want to miss!

Featuring an audio commentary with film historians Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson, and new artwork by Stephen Romano.

Pre-order details coming soon!

Trailer Trauma V: 70s Action Attack!, or “The Golden Age of Car Chases” as one of the commentators puts it!

A bit more of a familiar selection of titles this time around, but this edition still manages to throw up a few surprises and as always the commentary is very entertaining to listen to. The disc starts with a Warren Oates double bill with Born To Kill, which is Cockfighter under a different title and the cockfighting elements minimised, and Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia. Then it segues into more Peckinpah with The Getaway (which I still have not seen!). Lots more Peckinpah turns up in the rest of the disc with Convoy, Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner. In terms of the more familiar titles, I think that I may need to re-watch Charley Varrick for the first time in decades now after the praise heaped on it, as I think it went completely over my head on last seeing it in my teenage years. I would also like to check out Siegel’s The Laughing Policeman some time, which gets namechecked though the trailer does not appear. And despite it constantly appearing on UK television I still have not really sat down with High Plains Drifter as yet.

The sections cover blacksploitation (including Three Tough Guys, where it mingles with an Italian director and Lino Ventura also starring), car chase, westerns (including the almost video nasty Cain’s Way, which I still want to track down), biker movies (from motorcycle gangs to Viva Knievel!), girl gang films (such as Hustler Squad and The Hot Box (I love the resigned-disgusted way the trailer narrator says "in Color" at the end of that trailer!), The Great Texas Dynamite Chase), a tribute to Jan Michael Vincent (with Buster and Billie, Vigilante Force, Big Wednesday, The Mechanic and White Line Fever), auteur exploitation (with Fast Company, Sorceror, Gone in Sixty Seconds and The Driver), kung fu, women in prison, dogsploitation (with The Doberman Gang and its sequel), Charles Bronson, Mafia action, and even an Al Adamson trailer which the commentary acknowledges has been chosen because of the future explosion in titles being released on disc with that upcoming Severin set (Black Heat). It all climaxes with the trailer for the brutal Robert Aldrich film Emperor of the North.

Also you could play a drinking game with just how often the Coca-Cola logo appears throughout these trailers!

The list of titles that I want to see from this selection are: Cockfighter (probably never going to see that one!); Bloody Friday which looks amazing (described as an exploitation film influenced by the wave of domestic terrorism and has been re-evaluated in a recent uncut Blu-ray release, apparently restoring footage for the first time); Three Tough Guys; Three The Hard Way; getting a gang together in Hit! (which has a fantastic looking cast featuring Billy Dee Williams, Gwen Welles, Paul Hampton from Shivers and Richard Pryor!); Gordon’s War; Rip Torn in a leading role in Payday (described as a “mind scarrer”!); Buster and Billie (“one of the most depressing films of the early 1970s”!); Joy Ride (with a very young Melanie Griffith, even pre- her horrifying-seeming experience on Roar, but which has a soundtrack full of ELO songs which has caused difficulties releasing it); Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (“a total Freudian masterpiece”); Cain’s Way/Cain’s Cutthroats (with a really rare trailer: “… and Cain’s Cut-throats The 1870 Rat-pack that make today’s Angels seem like little boys on kiddie cars!”); Shelley Winters chewing the scenery in Cleopatra Jones; A Small Town In Texas; The Gravy Train (script by Terrence Malick!); Peter Collinson’s Open Season with Peter Fonda which looks like a mix of Deliverance and Straw Dogs; Cops and Robbers (with a score by Michel Legrande!); Corky (with Charlotte Rampling!); The Steel Edge of Revenge (aka Goyokin directed by Hideo Gosha and starring Tatsuya Nakadai); The Silent Partner (with Elliott Gould and a remake of a Danish film that is apparently quite different in its last act); and Prime Cut.

And maybe the comic looking Crime Busters (with the double-act of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer) and the Alain Delon starring Zorro!

I think I can safely miss Bruce Lee-sploitation film The Young Dragon (“oh dear”) though! It is not on this set but I note that the same director made lots of these films and have a kind of morbid curiosity about the astonishing looking The Clones of Bruce Lee as capping off this trend by combining all of his previous Bruce Lee imitators together in one film as a super fighting force! Kind of the Avengers Assemble mega-mix film of its day, I suppose!

Clones of Bruce Lee is a great premise but a rather dull movie after a funky first half.

2 for $20 sale on Twitter until 6/14

And posted on Facebook:





Edit: the 2 low-stock titles are now sold out.

From FB:

Our latest movie preview compilation, TRAILER TRAUMA 5: 70’s ACTION ATTACK, is selling very quickly during our “2 for $20” sale (although it isn’t half priced like the rest of the sale titles — it’s discounted at $20), and we have limited supplies remaining! Be sure to get yours now and get in on the sale while you’re at it, as it may not be available after the sale is over on 6/14....Due to the good sales we’ve decided to stick it out for a few more at least, including another TRAILER TRAUMA volume (they will survive for another onslaught!), which will be announced soon.

What are the odds that Trailer Trauma 5 gets a general release? I’d like to buy direct but the shipping is a bit prohibitive.

Amazon carries it, but it's $27.99. I see Deep Discount has the first four volumes (all at only 10% off though), but not the 5th.

Thanks, Amazon.com’s shipping to Canada is even crazier now though, I went with them direct.

"Men - you're worse than wolves. At least they kill to eat"

With thanks to Grand Wazoo for tracking down and sharing a copy of the film I finally managed to get a chance to see Cain's Cutthroats. I can see why it was quite inflammatory and the only western to get close to being classed as a 'Video Nasty' now! This feels quite Peckinpah-styled, especially in the 'end of an era' for a gang being like The Wild Bunch and the use of a rag-tag group of ne'er do wells from the Confederate army that reminded me a little of the Confederate prisoners being pressed into service in Major Dundee.

We get introduced to a gang of scruffy ex-Confederate soldiers, now mercenary criminals grousing at each other whilst waiting for the arrival of a Yankee wagon containing thousands of dollars in bank notes (quite a contrast to the restrained and mostly self-contained opening of the gang waiting for the train in Once Upon A Time In The West). They massacre the Yankees in particularly brutal fashion and after killing off one of their wounded members the de facto leader of the gang, the one-eyed Amison, gets them to set off to find their old Captain Cain, present him with their spoils and get him to lead them again to build up a new Confederate army in the face of the South's defeat. But when they reach Cain's homestead, complete with wife and young son, he bluntly refuses to join them and after accidentally insulting one of the gang in pressing them to leave things escalate into the wife being raped and beaten to death and Cain and his son being shot and left for dead as their home is torched. Cain survives with help of a preacher-slash-bounty hunter and vows to kill the entire gang in revenge.

As an ex-Confederate Captain trying to make a new life for himself away from the war, especially now that the South has been defeated, Cain himself is a very interestingly ambivalent main character. He begins as a somewhat noble, almost Randolph Scott, kind of mild-mannered quiet-voiced homestead figure, such that one could not ever have imagined him leading the gang of scruffy unshaven criminals that descend on his farm. But after his family is brutally assaulted and murdered Cain himself starts to change (change back?) into a figure who is not only driven by a desire for revenge but is actually taking pleasure in mercilessly killing those who have wronged him. Cain becomes more prone to explosive bouts of violent anger too, and even goes from shaven to scruffy and unshaven himself as if he is becoming more and more a member of the group that he has tried to turn his back on. This all is suggesting a bigger message of someone trying to escape from their past and their allegiances (maybe even the atrocities they committed) in war to become a peaceful civilian, but finding that the past always comes back to haunt them. Does Cain even deserve to have his revenge? He is certainly not a noble, wronged figure of pure vengeance here, but a troubled, angry man lashing out in response to the cruelty inflicted on him.

The most interesting thing is that it is a rape-revenge western that feels just as ambivalent about those doing the revenging as it does about those who committed the crimes. There's a cynicism to the way the events are shown, though it seems a justifiable cynicism about the world that gets presented. Though perhaps it is more of a heartbreakingly brutal kind of pragmatism, perhaps most shown in the figures of the women - the murdered wife in the homestead (the subject of Cain's most painful revelation later in the film) and one of the member of the gang's prostitute girlfriend who after he is unceremoniously killed in mid coitus by Cain then hitches a ride with him and becomes his love interest instead.

The prostitute herself is a fascinating figure as a quick substitute figure for any number of previously lost women in Cain's life. She is a dab hand with a shotgun and quick to flirtatiously nude bathe in front of her companions, but she also tries to turn Cain away from pursuing his revenge. But women cannot save him anymore, although Cain does end up revealing to her, and the audience, more of his back story that we had not seen up to then - namely that the mixed race woman raped and killed at the homestead was not the mother of his son, but a woman he had met after his first wife had been murdered by Yankees whilst he was away at war. Which completely recontextualises the racialised rape scene early in the film where the woman is denigrated as she is assaulted, and Cain is attacked for having had relations and a son with her. So the gang's killing of the son initially seems like they are preventing miscegenation in the most horrible manner possible (though it also plays as an accident that they shot the boy too), but if so intended it ends up backfiring on them.

Similarly religion cannot save Cain either, with the preacher here making his living as a traveling bounty hunter and also on the trail of the gang (which is probably why he was so quick on the scene of the massacre of Cain's family), but only to collect the bounty on them by removing the heads of the corpses and storing them in a barrel of brine to preserve them on his way back with them! What black comedy there is in this bleak film mostly takes place in the moments of the only thing the preacher caring about being that the heads are left pristine and recognisable, whilst Cain is going about blasting people dead center in the head with his shotgun! (I got reminded a lot of the slightly more successfully pragmatic Christoph Waltz character in Django Unchained by this more obviously mercenary character, for all of the allegorical preaching he does!)

Strangely even Amison and his gang, despite being the biggest monsters of the film, become somewhat sympathetic. They have raped and murdered without conscience but in their constant backbiting and sniping at each other (literally so, as they are constantly firing off weapons to emphasise their points, heedless of any harm that might occur!) they are showing how much they cannot stand each other even when apparently trying to work together. The absence of the strong guiding figure of Captain Cain to lead them (as Amison probably knew at the beginning of the film), just leaves Amison and his gang at a loose end, cavorting and carousing. Probably they would have ended up killing each other off anyway, as shown by almost doing so in the very first waiting around scene of the film and then the youngest member of the gang being shot in the raid of the wagon and then mercilessly killed as a liability before they move on. This only underlines how Amison's plan to get money and Captain Cain and keep the Conferderate rebellion single-handedly going against the North was a pipe dream even before Cain refused to join up. Kind of like the delusion of people trying to single handedly continue the Second World War on long after the peace treaties have been signed. I find that aspect of the film really interesting, because it is getting into the idea that for some people the war that so defined them never ends. In the fascinatingly complicated final scene after Cain has massacred every other member of the gang and is coming for Amison, he kind of manages to escape the personalised revenge of a wronged husband and father by instead getting captured by the Yankees (who are otherwise mostly portrayed as useless!) and executed by firing squad instead. So Amison dies unrepentant as a Confederate prisoner at the hands of his enemy rather than as a thief, rapist and murderer getting his just desserts. Cain, despite running in at the last moment to shoot the already dead Amison in the head, is left slumped in despair in front of the standing straight body of Amison (because of being lashed to a stake, the climax of the religious allegory running through the film, as a kind of astonishing obscene parody of the crucifixion), his personal revenge stolen from him. Its a perfect, ironic, devastating ending, as good as the "You took him from me!" climax to Witchfinder General at least.

It is a spiky, difficult and hard to like film, especially with its main trio of characters being rather deeply damaged whilst its antagonists feel like overgrown children looking for a father figure to give them a direction in life but being rebuffed by the nearest equivalent that they can find (maybe that's another reason why they killed the wife and son, because they were jealous of them getting all of the attention that their ex-Captain used to give them? Amison of course being the spurned brother-in-arms figure equivalent of Abel to Cain's um... Cain). I can certainly understand why it repulsed people at the time enough to push it close to the video nasty list, with its displays of offal wounds and vicious rape scene with the 'n' word thrown around (though it is interesting that the term is only really used by the gang to rile up others in that scene and by Amison in the later stand off scene, and then again when he is tied to the stake, rather than just coming up in the character's casual conversation outside of that. Which suggests a more targeted form of cruelty, deploying the word as a weapon, rather than as a general unthinking and ignorant form of racism), but I think it is certainly a film that deserves some sort of rediscovery sooner rather than later.