Packaging for Garagehouse Pictures’ Trailer Trauma makes the dubious claim that while it’s far from the only coming-attractions compilation on the market, “only [it] contains the ultra-rare titles that you absolutely will not find anywhere else.” And dammit, with the likes of Ironmaster, Dr. Frankenstein on Campus and Smokey and the Hotwire Gang — to name only three — the Garagehouse gang actually makes good on that promise!

Elsewhere on the back cover, the consumer is warned that the 137-minute collection “is going to hurt.” This, too, turns out to be true; in the immortal words of John Mellencamp, it hurts so good. For lovers and mistresses of B-movie advertising, this disc is essential.

Speaking of dubious claims and immortal words, the program overflows with gems of taglines and selling points. In this category fall The Incredible Torture Show (aka Bloodsucking Freaks) as “the show that will make anyone retch”; Grave of the Vampire’s dire warning that “if the sight of an infant child nursing on human blood will make you sick, do not see this gruesomely explicit horror film”; and, best of all, the announcer for Nine Deaths of the Ninja proclaims, “A cat has nine lives … Sho Kosugi has nine deaths!”

Not all of that ballyhoo works as intended, which is half the fun of revisiting trailers of the grindhouse era. For example, Sunn Classics’ Beyond and Back, a 1978 “documentary” about death and the afterlife, presents itself “an exciting experience for the whole family.” Little kids love mortality, right? Meanwhile, Stoner promises “the most dynamic kung fu team ever!” And yet the 1974 actioner pairs that Deadly China Doll Angela Mao with one-time 007 George Lazenby — one of these things is not like the other.

Found among the 65 trailers are early roles for Mr. T (Penitentiary II) and Jean-Claude Van Damme (No Retreat, No Surrender), as well as cinema’s only teaming of Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale and the onscreen comic-book sound effects of TV’s Batman (The Legend of Frenchie King).

Where else can the discriminating viewer find a tribeswoman breast-feeding puppies, Dabney Coleman as a blaxploitation heavy and an ad for Oliver Stone’s Seizure dubbed into French (because, hell, why not), all in a single source? Nowhere, of course! But speaking hypothetically, even if there were, I’d still bet Trailer Trauma bares a higher BPM (breasts per minute). In this realm, that counts for everything. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Albert Zugsmith’s On Her Bed of Roses begins with a wordless, 15-minute prologue that rivals the surrealism of Vincent Price’s drug-fueled dream sequence in Zug’s own Confessions of an Opium Eater from 1962: In his backyard, the handsome, but shy Stephen Long (Ronald Warren) grabs a rose so hard that its thorns pierce his skin. With bloodied fist wrapped around that plucked flower, the totally clothed, totally dazed young man walks into a swimming pool and emerges at the other side, then retrieves an instrument case from the garage and gets behind the wheel of a car. Paying no attention to the rules of the road and still clutching that rose — hey, hands at 10 and 2, son! — he drives willy-nilly until he comes to a hillside, removes a rifle from the case, and picks off a few wrong-time-wrong-place motorists from his perch. When the police arrive, Stephen turns the gun on himself.

Annnnnd scene!

What, pray tell, triggered this college dropout (“I didn’t fit in with the rah-rah boys”) to zonk out and exercise his trigger finger? We learn the answer through flashbacks as Melissa Borden (a breathy Sandra Lynn, Zugsmith’s 1966 Movie Star, American Style or; LSD, I Hate You), tells her shrink. Not only was she Stephen’s nymphomaniac next-door neighbor, but also his kinda-sorta girlfriend. Theirs is the oddest of romances, if Roses can be called that — after all, its alternate title comes from the psychology text from which it is loosely based, Psychopathia Sexualis. That classic 19th-century study on deviant sex was written by Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, here portrayed by actual psychologist Dr. Lee Gladden (who plays himself in 1965’s The Incredible Sex Revolution, also written and directed by Zugsmith), to whom Melissa spills all secrets.

Those include sexual abuse by her father (“A Taste of Honey” songwriter Ric Marlow) and having her mom (Barbara Hines, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules) steal the boys Melissa brings home to bang. Stephen has “mother troubles” of his own, being smothered by his domineering mom (Regina Gleason, Revenge of the Cheerleaders). Melissa tells the doctor it’s her belief that she and Stephen could have saved one another, and the funny thing is, you want to see them do just that. However, going into the film at Stephen’s suicide, we know that’s futile, so we settle for wanting to see how events A and B and C led to the tragic Z.

Now, don’t mistake that engagement for eminence; we’re still talking about a Zugsmith production — one whose narrative halts in the middle to make way for extended scenes of nude dancing just for the sake of nude dancing (similar to his “hot” cut of 1960’s Sex Kittens Go to College). His dialogue, when he gets around to it, remains histrionic and hysterical, such as the lines exchanged between our Cupid-struck teens during their meet-cute:

Melissa: “Do you like peanut butter?”
Stephen: “Gosh, how’d you know? I like it best on apples!”
Melissa: “I like grape jelly on mine!”

That’s true love. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

With dumb host patter supplied by Ozzie & Harriet supporting player Skip Young, TV Turkeys: The World’s Worst Television Shows is an hour-long compilation of moments from purportedly the pits of programming, although many of the segments are not so much “the worst” as they are just dull.

Hank McCune was a big-eared comedian who sounded like Elmer Fudd (because he once was). Or maybe he’s the straight man of the piece. Either way, it’s slapstick at its suckiest. The Buckskin Kid is an all-kid Western, starring children with glued-on facial hair playing with guns and knives, and having their voices dubbed by overacting adults. The ambush scene is great, with Indians “riding” on stick horses. The Motor Sports magazine show interviews amateur road racers, but the only thing fast and furious about it will be you reaching for the FF button.

Penny to a Million is a game show in which all the questions were related to sponsor Raleigh Cigarettes. Up on Cloud Nine follows the daffy misadventures of two stewardesses who humiliate each and every passenger and wrongly inform the cabin that the plane is going to crash. Equally as inappropriate today is The Arnold Stang Show, which relies on footage of a man hitting his wife to the ground for laughs. But that cruelty pales next to The Meanest Man in the World, who pushes down the handicapped, steals clothes from the elderly, knocks glasses of milk from the hands of a little girl and severs a patient’s IV!

The “best” bit among the Turkeys is Suicide Theatre, in which Mr. Lembeck (DeForest Kelley, pre-Dr. Bones on TV’s Star Trek) can’t pay his rent or find a job, so he decides to gas himself to death with the oven. But then he gets a notice in the mail that his gas has been turned off due to nonpayment. He finds this O. Henry turn of events hilarious, laughing to the camera, “Whaddya know? I can’t even afford to die!” At a time when TV couldn’t show a married couple sharing a bed, this was okay?

Most enjoyable are the advertisements, including a disturbingly catchy spot for Belly Bongo, a terribly racist mattress ad and the most suggestive Dole banana commercial I’ve ever seen: “If you feel it, peel it!” —Rod Lott

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Vagrant Video’s Colour Correct My Cock is unlike any trailer compilation on the market … in that I hesitate to utter its title in mixed company. In an insufferable six-minute skit that opens the program, we learn that the name is essentially James Bialkowski and Jacob Windatt’s petty “fuck you” to an unnamed DVD label that declined to release the collection, partly for reasons of image quality.

Yet that company’s perceived negative is actually a positive for the intended viewer: The more “grindhouse” grimy it looks, the more welcome it is. With little exception (i.e., that sour-grapes intro), Colour Correct is indeed welcome; it’s two hours of “trailers hand selected through years of audience testing on drunken Canadian vagrants.” It worked even on this sober American.

If we nicely shove Scorchy and Blackenstein aside, Colour Correct excels at presenting coming attractions of movies you’re unlikely to see represented elsewhere — not even on Synapse Films’ excellent 42nd Street Forever line. Hell, it is doubtful cult diehards will have heard of all the films whose ads bump (and grind) against one another here — flicks like Dagmar’s Hot Pants Inc., The Thunder Kick, The Godmother II, Cracking Up.

Highlights among the lowbrow include:
• A leering, jeering Tony Curtis, ostensibly at the bank to cash in his last batch of Some Like It Hot credibility, in the alleged 1977 comedy Sex on the Run.
• Death on the Run, a 1967 spy thriller that tries to sell itself as a Django sequel, just because they share a director in Sergio Corbucci.
• Disney’s infamous football-playing mule, Gus, of course starring Don Knotts.
• Killer Condom, an eventual Troma pickup stateside, here under its original German title (and denying viewers the money shot, so to speak, of the rubber rascal).
• Tomas Milian and Susan George as, irrespectively, Sonny and Jed, in a comedic Western sold with the very ’72 line, “In the Old West, an outlaw woman stood behind her man … three steps behind!”
• In 1977, Mexico does Jaws — and poorly — in René Cardona Jr.’s Tintorera: Killer Shark.
• The Seven Dwarfs to the Rescue, a 1951 live-action oddity from Italy that promises to be “Brimming with Laughter!” and “Enchanted with a Magic that will live Forever After!” I call bullshit.
• 1970’s Josefine Mutzenbacher, which just proves my theory that German porn is the most disturbing porn. (Lord, may the coin used in this trailer never circulate to these hands.)
• The 1965 Marco Polo epic, Marco the Magnificent, starring Orson Welles, Anthony Quinn and, per the narrator, “Elsa Martinelli as the girl with the whip!”
• Tom Laughlin in his post-Billy Jack Western, 1975’s The Master Gunfighter.
• And lots of women being punches for laughs in the 1976 Lee Marvin vehicle The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday.

Even with that strong lineup, Colour Correct My Cock overflows with a wealth of vintage drive-in ads — pushing everything from the Chilly Dilly to Chuckles — and other bits of interspersed ephemera, including a Wham-O Super Ball commercial, a plea to complete the 1981 Canadian Census, an attack ad against the public scourge known as cable TV, a suggestion to give theater tickets “in gay gift envelopes,” a drunk-driving PSA from the Saskatchewan Department of Health and a pleasant thought courtesy of the California Table Grape Commission: “These summer memories have been brought to you by Grapes.”

While all this may seem random, I believe Bialkowski and Windatt actually were rather calculated in their assembly process. How else to explain ads targeting children and churchgoers being followed immediately by clips from an Asian porno? More subversively, a promo for some ungodly, wiener-based concession called Pronto Pops backs up to a depiction of fellatio so brief that while the seam between the source material may not register, thoughts of Tyler Durden manning the projection booth certainly do. —Rod Lott

What better time than the devil’s birthday to show your kids how racist cartoons used to be? The All Night Halloween Party compilation is ideal viewing for such harsh lessons. Oh, and to celebrate Oct. 31, of course … no matter what day of the year.

The Party collects one hour’s worth of rickety, ancient animated shorts — eight total — with vintage horror trailers sprinkled in between. The latter encompasses creaky Bela Lugosi vehicles such as Spooks Run Wild and third-rate monster movies from Reptilicus to Konga — completely harmless fare. The ‘toons, however … ah, there is the rub.

We start out innocently enough, with Ub Iwerks’ 1935 “Balloon Land,” about a community of anthropomorphic gallons, whose happy-go-lucky existence is threatened only by the needle-tossing Pincushion Man. This villain is creepy, as is the sinister, shifty-eyed spider running Dave Fleischer’s 1936 classic “Cobweb Hotel” for unsuspecting flies.

Only about halfway through this supposed All Night shindig do things veer toward uncomfortable stereotypes, starting with big-lipped black skeletons singing a spiritual in 1931’s “Wot a Night.” Perhaps the most awkward bit arrives in 1942’s “Jasper and the Haunted House,” a short directed by none other than George Pal (7 Faces of Dr. Lao). In this otherwise stellar example of stop-motion animation, an African-American child literally gets his skin color scared out of him during attempts to deliver a gooseberry pie.

These cartoons were the product of their times; it doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyed today — especially when we are talking about the concluding segment, Fleischer’s “Bimbo’s Initation,” a ’31 number climaxing with its dog hero slappin’ ass with Betty Boop. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.