TRAILERS #26: HORROR/SCI-FI (1992) ***

You know, once you get to the twenty-sixth installment in your long-running compilation series of horror and science fiction trailers, you tend to start scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to selection.  Fortunately for Something Weird’s Trailers #26:  Horror/Sci-Fi, I a bottom-of-the-barrel kind of guy.  The first half-hour or so of this collection contains a great grouping of obscure, awful, or just plain weird trailers.  Some of the highlights include:  Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, Pyro, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, and Island of the Doomed.  Your mileage might vary of course, but for a guy like me, that’s a great way to kick things off.

The trailers tend to get a little more respectable as it goes along, but not too much.  It’s particularly fun seeing previews for H.G. Lewis movies (Something Weird and The Gruesome Twosome) hobnobbing with the likes of Hammer films (Scars of Dracula and Horror of Frankenstein).  Down the homestretch there are a lot of mainstream ads.  We get trailers for everything from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Jaws to even Star Wars, but not before a few side jaunts into the world of Sunn Classics (The Outer Space Connection), William Castle (Bug), and Ilsa (both She Wolf of the SS and Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks are shown).  That’s the kind of variety I enjoy from a trailer compilation.

Of course, there are a lot of recycled trailers from previous collections.  (You can’t get to your twenty-sixth installment if you don’t pad these things out with repeats.)  The familiar likes of Dr. Phibes Rises Again, The Legend of Hell House, and Beyond the Door are all trotted out once again.  The good news is that at eighty minutes, Trailers #26:  Horror/Sci-Fi is a good forty minutes shorter than a lot of these things (and the pace is a lot brisker), which makes for a perfect night of drive-in fun.

The complete collection of trailers is as follows:  Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, Pyro, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, Munster, Go Home!, Castle of Evil, The Projected Man, One Million Years B.C., She Freak, Island of the Doomed, The Gruesome Twosome, Something Weird, Torture Garden, Destroy All Monsters, a double feature of Scars of Dracula and Horror of Frankenstein, Lust for a Vampire, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, The Legend of Hell House, Tales That Witness Madness, Andy Warhol's Dracula, The Outer Space Connection, The Land That Time Forgot, Death Race 2000, The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula, Jaws, Rollerball, Beyond the Door, The Devil's Rain, Bug, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, Logan's Run, The Omen, Star Wars, and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.