FORMAT: BLU-RAY
The good folks at AGFA bring us another wild and wooly collection of drive-in movie trailers, oddball commercials, and pop culture ephemera. This one kicks off with an assortment of theater ads, concession stand shorts, and dated futuristic looking commercials. (There’s also an intermission about halfway through containing similar ads.) Then, we get a rather good assemblage of trailers spanning many genres and decades.
Included here are previews for Asian action and horror flicks (Robotrix, Sex Beyond the Grave, Angel Terminator, Versus, Black Magic, and Bewitched), weird kids movies (C.H.O.M.P.S., The Peanut Butter Solution, The Secret of Magic Island, Pinocchio’s Birthday Party, and Starchaser: The Legend of Orin in 3-D), documentaries (The Decline of Western Civilization 2: The Metal Years, The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival, and The Mysterious Monsters), certified cult classics (Meet the Feebles, Brain Damage, Forbidden Zone, Death Race 2000, Escape from New York, Blood Diner, and Frankenhooker), total crap (Birds 2: Land’s End, Slapstick of Another Kind, Tentacles, and Meatballs 4), '80s time capsules (Body Rock, Rad, Foxes, Times Square, Tuff Turf, and Munchies), Manson movies (The Other Side of Madness and The Manson Family), as well as Various oddities (Sins of Rachel, Another Son of Sam, and an unidentified Mexican action movie).
Sometimes the whiplash in tone from trailer to trailer provides the biggest laughs, like going from Cocaine Wars to Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer or from Tough Beauty and the Sloppy Slop to Eraserhead. As with most of AGFA’s “mixtapes”, the editing is often mischievous. Remember when the Gremlins took over the projection booth? It’s kind of like that as some scenes are repeated (like Cocaine Wars) or altered for comedic effect. Some are shortened or abbreviated for pacing purposes. However, if you want to watch the uncut trailers, they are also included on the disc for posterity along with some funny shorts using some of the same kind of editing techniques. (My favorite was “Rated R”, a collection of gravelly voiced narrators gravely stating movie titles.)
I will say it was odd for me seeing newer movies included here. Yes, I know they are twenty to thirty years old, but they still feel new to me. Such titles include The Doom Generation, Strangers with Candy, Psycho Beach Party, Suture, and Accion Mutante. Your mileage (and age) will probably vary though. That in no way takes away from the fun.
i think Birds 2 and Tentacles are actually pretty decent films.
ReplyDelete