BUY IT AT AMAZON: MSRP: $19.98
RATED: NR
RUNNING TIME: 300 min
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Fangoria Weekend featurette
• Alternative Cinema order information & catalogue
The Pitch
If we call it "Trailer Trash", doesn’t that make it critic proof?
The Humans
Misty Mundae
After his unfortunate brush with the Ark, Arnold Toht spent several years "finding himself" while following the Grateful Dead.
The Nutshell
Trailer Trash features over five hours of gory, silly, poorly made trailers from studios like Camp Motion Pictures, Bloody Earth, and Shock-O-Rama. Featured trailers include Cannibal Campout, Slime City, DRANIAC!, Splatter Beach, Lord of the G-Strings, Zombie Bloodbath, 5 Bloody Graves, and dozens more.
The Lowdown
According to Trailer Trash’s packaging, "All types of movies, from grade A to grade Z, all stand equal when stripped down to their trailer." While it’s true that many great films have shitty trailers and many shitty films have great trailers (I’m looking in your direction, Roland Emmerich!), I wouldn’t ever say that "Z" grade trailers stand equal to your average Warner Brothers or Universal promo. A trailer for a direct-to-DVD steamer has the potential to be really funny, but it’s usually because either the trailer is brutally self-deprecating or unintentionally amusing.
Trailer Trash is a 2-Disc smorgasbord of trailers that can be both gleefully fun and woefully inane. It certainly won’t work for everyone, especially the dreadful second disc, which is a mish-mash of awful, mostly modern trailers for Cinemax After Dark!-style movies. Thankfully, the first disc elevates the collection by having a handful of great horror trailers, and won’t disappoint those looking for cheap entertainment. It’s a Camp Motion Pictures production, so LARGE SWATHS of it are promotional materials for Camp’s DVD catalogue; however, there are enough brilliant gems buried beneath the numerous piles of dung that might make this a worthwhile purchase for fans of low budget 80’s horror.
Ron’s pet Kielbasas usually brought an abrupt end to first dates.
One great thing about Trailer Trash is that it’s relentlessly and often hilariously disgusting. The trailers are so far beyond red band that I can’t imagine any of them ever playing in a theater, as most of them feature both disembowelment and decapitation. While there are only a few trailers in this collections for movies that I’d actually like to see, enjoyment of Trailer Trash isn’t really dependent on genuine interest in the feature-length films.
Trailer Trash gets a full two points for including the trailer for Slime City. If Muro’s Street Trash ate Henenlotter’s Brain Damage, the resulting feces would be Slime City. It’s about a student who moves into an urban apartment building, and, upon digesting some kind of tainted yogurt, becomes a oozing, festering monster with a mouth for a stomach. It looks fantastic, and I can’t wait to see it. There’s also the confusing-yet-mesmerizing trailer for DRANIAC!, which features a house with haunted plumbing. The bathtubs spawn mutant ghost spiders! Other great trailers include Ghoul School, 5 Bloody Graves (David Carradine!), Zombie Bloodbath, American Punks, Psycho Kickboxer, and A Feast of Flesh.
In stark contrast with the proud Griffin, noble Centaur, and fearsome Chimera, the Moose-headed Crab was one of the most bullied and taunted monsters from Greek mythology.
While there’s fun to be had, Trash can also be a chore. For starters, there isn’t a "play all trailers" function. This is important, since it would be great to set this thing to loop through all trailers while you’re hosting a barbeque. Also, while there are a handful of unique and glorious trailers in the collection, the vast majority are forgettable, seemingly homemade crap like Cannibal Campout. Since I’m dangerously close to age thirty, my ability to harvest ironic enjoyment from worthless media is asymptotically approaching zero (thirty seems to be the cutoff for that sort of thing). Also, since I have no need for lousy softcore HBO late night nonsense, the second disc is pretty much worthless.
That said, if you’re a fan of cheap 80’s horror or Herschell Gordon Lewis, you’ll probably get a kick out of Trash‘s first disc. It’s definitely targeted toward a niche market, so you’ll probably never see this on the shelf at Best Buy or Circuit City (BUY IT HERE!). If I were still in college, I’d probably have this thing playing on a loop at all hours, but as it stands now, I can’t imagine ever revisiting it. I’ll probably hand it off to my younger brother- he’s at the right age to really appreciate this kind of nonsense the way it was meant to be appreciated.
Also, while it says FEATURING B-MOVIE SUPERSTAR MISTY MUNDAE on the cover, don’t expect anything special. She appears in a bunch of the featured trailers, but there’s no "host" or anything like that- you can play trailers by studio, but there’s no linking footage or overarching substance to the presentation.
Besides being excessively flatulent, Mike’s main talent was that he could hear a can of Black Label opening from over 300 yards away.
The Package
Other than the trailers themselves, which are organized by studio from the title menu, there’s not much by the way of extras. There’s catalogue and order information on the off chance that you’re interested in purchasing any of the advertised films, but besides that, it’s barren, save for a short Fangoria Weekend featurette.
The cover art is great. It isn’t anything you’d want any respectable person seeing in your DVD collection, which is exactly the point.
The audio’s unimpressive, as it’s a vanilla Dolby 2/0, but it doesn’t detract anything from the experience. The video’s uniformly awful, but it matches the trailers very well.
ATONEMENT!!!
6.5 out of 10