No war is to be fought with Trailer War. We all win.
After all, it begins with “a death wish at 120 decibels” and ends with a woman’s disembodied head being chased by a fleet of radio-controlled helicopters. Anyone who chalks up such cathode-ray shenanigans as a loss shouldn’t be watching anyway.
Curated by Lars Nilsen and Zack Carlson of the venerable Alamo Drafthouse (and Carlson of the seminal yet criminally out-of-print Destroy All Movies!!! tome), Trailer War could be nothing more than a feature-length assemblage/assault of vintage coming attractions, if “nothing more” didn’t carry a connotation of being substandard. Containing zero overlap with 2009’s Drafthouse-branded fifth volume in Synapse Films’ 42nd Street Forever trailer-compilation series, this War is waged only against the same ol’ clips you’ve seen dozens of times before. More often than not, if the films represented aren’t obscurities, their previews are. Who else is going to run the promo for Maniac Cop 2 … in French?
Among the goods are such bads and uglies as:
• “that big man” Joe Don Baker, sweating through the kung-fu adventure of 1974’s Golden Needles;
• Argoman the Fantastic Superman, a 1967 superhero acid trip more slam-bang entertaining than any entry in the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe;
• 1976’s Shoot, a killer-hunter thriller presented per the narrator as being “in the great tradition of American violence”;
• Mr. No Legs, a 1979 fight flick that looks kind of like Walking Tall if the hero couldn’t, y’know, walk tall, small or at all.
• 1973’s The Mad Adventures of “Rabbi” Jacob, apparently a Jewsploitation slice of slapstick from France;
• 1972’s giallo-esque Amuck, for which sapphic sex becomes the not-MPAA-approved selling point; and
• Ryan O’Neal and John Hurt as Partners, Paramount Pictures’ homophobic mainstream comedy from 1982. The trailer even uses the F-word, and I don’t mean “fuck.”
From Voyage of the Rock Aliens to Nudes on Tiger Reef, this party-ready Trailer War is a start-to-finish victory for aficionados of drive-in, grindhouse, outré and/or VHS fare — in other words, you, prized Flick Attack reader. I could watch such hyperbolic treasures for hours upon hours; here, we have to “settle” for two. —Rod Lott