VHS DELIRIUM (2018) ***

 

VHS Delirium is a feature-length bonus feature on Drive-In Delirium:  The New Batch.  It’s a ninety-minute collection of trailers ripped from ‘80s VHS releases.  Since there are more VHS Delirium compilations on other Drive-In Delirium Blu-Rays, I figured I would review them separately as their own entity. 

This initial offering includes Christiane F., Live a Little Steal a Lot, Sisters, Starflight One, Fake Out, High Road to China, They Call Me Bruce, Fritz the Cat, Hostage, Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday, Yellowbeard, Jaguar Lives, Survive!, The Lonely Lady, Split Image, Zulu Dawn, Kill and Kill Again, The Last Hunter, Flesh for Frankenstein, Blood for Dracula, House by the Cemetery, Get Crazy, Threshold, Brainwaves, Never Say Never Again, 21 Hours at Munich, Count Yorga Vampire, Chrome and Hot Leather, High Ballin’, Stone Cold Dead, The Cold Room, Empire of the Ants, The Return, Young Doctors in Love, Melvin Son of Alvin, Scanners, The Philadelphia Experiment, Defiance, The Fifth Floor, Jennifer, Secrets of the Phantom Caverns, Kill Squad, Savage Islands, Battletruck, Cannonball, Cannonball Run 2, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Rutles, Cloud Dancer, Hysterical, Roadhouse 66, 1984, Lassiter, Losin’ It, The Key, Bedside Headmaster, Julia, Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, Condorman, Scarred, Seven, and Flight 90.  The best part is the last few trailers, all of which are accompanied by a little picture of the video box and the price tag for each video.  So, if you always wanted to know what a videocassette of Angel, Dominque, The Day After, Exterminators of the Year 3000, or Cross Country would cost back in the day, here’s your answer.

Another neat touch is that nearly all the trailers have little intros by a suave-voiced Australian announcer accompanied by a cheesy onscreen title.  While some trailers are full length, many are severely truncated versions, about the length of a TV spot.  I kind of wish there had been a little more curation involved as there’s no real rhyme or reason to how the trailers are presented (although we do get a pair of Larry Cohen movies, Full Moon High and Q the Winged Serpent presented back to back), but then again, that’s how they usually appeared on those old VHS tapes, so it kind of makes sense.

Some of my favorites are for Breathless, Yor the Hunter from the Future, Caligula (“Is it art, or is it PORNOGRAPHY?”), An American Werewolf in London (which is much better than the ho-hum trailer featured on The New Batch), Alligator, Cujo (another trailer that’s better than the one found elsewhere on the disc), Inseminoid, Insatiable, When a Stranger Calls (which contains footage of audience reactions in the theater), and the Brooke Shields pinball movie, Tilt.  While I enjoyed this quite a bit, it’s easy to see why it was presented as a bonus feature and not given a separate release as it’s kind of all over the place, genre-wise.  Still, being the sucker for trailer compilations that I am, I had a lot of fun with it, and I look forward to checking out future VHS Delirium releases.