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The Best of Trailers from Hell!: Volume One (2010)

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With that credo that “Any movie can be great at 2 1/2 minutes,” director Joe Dante’s Trailers from Hell website makes the leap to DVD with The Best of Trailers from Hell!: Volume One. Dante and pals John Landis, Eli Roth and Edgar Wright all take turns providing commentary for the coming attractions to their favorite genre pictures — not Mystery Science Theater 3000-style, but purely informational. It’s like the coolest film class in the history of ever.

B-movie fans will come away from the hourlong free-for-all with two frames of mind:
1. “Man, that reminded me a lot of stuff I really need to see again.”
2. “Man, that reminded me a lot of stuff I really need to check out.”

For me, that latter camp includes the proto-slasher Horrors of the Black Museum, Paul Bartel’s giallo-influenced Private Parts, David Cronenberg’s biological horror of Rabid, Roger Vadim’s lesbian-vampire outing Blood and Roses, and the possession picture The Sentinel. Of the four hosts, Roth is the most enjoyable, simply for how infectious his spirit is, whether the clip is for a grindhouse cheapie like Three on a Meathook or Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Birds.

To provide bang for your buck, the disc also includes a full-length feature — well, 67 minutes, anyway — of the Lionel Atwill/Fay Wray cheapie The Vampire Bat, plus two vintage cartoons from the 1930s — including Ub Iwerks’ “The Headless Horseman” — that my 5-year-old went ape-shit over. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Trailers from Hell!

Western

Ghost Rock (2003)

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Despite its title, Ghost Rock is not a spook-filled musical. It’s a kung-fu western! Hey, great idea … when it was Jackie Chan’s Shanghai Noon. But starring Gary Busey? Not so much.

Perpetually carrying that kicked-by-a-horse look and what looks like a bellyful of sausage patties, Busey plays the corrupt mayor of Ghost Rock, a dusty old backlot, er, town run by crooks and outlaws. Michael Worth (Acapulco H.E.A.T.) and lovely Jenya Lano (Stealing Candy) return there after being absent for many years to settle an old score.

Adrienne Barbeau is the madam of the local whorehouse, Jeff Fahey makes a cameo and … I’m not making this sound any more inviting, am I? Some of Busey’s set-ups are shot in an entirely different film stock, so they don’t match other shot within the same scene.

Amateurish and inept, Ghost Rock has as many clichés as it does bullets fired, with all the predictability of a staged theme-park gunfight (Guy falls from second-story railing? Check!), acted with local theater types who think they’re making art. They aren’t. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Thriller

Track Down (2000)

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Despite Miramax’s best efforts to make you think otherwise (i.e. never releasing it in theaters, waiting five years to dump it on video, giving Skeet Ulrich a lead role), Track Down isn’t as bad as you’d expect.

It’s the true story of Kevin Mitnick, the hacker who evaded the FBI for two years after breaking into computer networks and stealing software and data that could have been highly damaging, had he chosen to do so.

Mitnick is played by Ulrich, who no longer looks like Johnny Depp, but Kevin Federline. As he attempts to live off the grid, he’s chased not only by federal agents, but computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura (Russell Wong), whose hard drive Mitnick wiped clean and whose super-secret virus-worm-thingie he swiped.

Track Down has an interesting dilemma: How do you make hacking visually exciting? Well, other than having Angelina Jolie strip down in a pool, you can’t. So it has to rely on your standard cat-and-mouse setup to generate any thrills. But in doing so, Track Down forgets to dumb down the technology aspect to make it easily acceptable. It assumes you already know a lot about hacking, from the lingo to the how-to.

I obviously don’t know as much as I should have, because after watching the film, I have no idea what exactly Mitnick did or who Shimomura is. But I do know that Halloween 6 director Joe Chappelle so obviously used this flashy piece as a calling card to get his CSI: Miami gig.

Jeremy Sisto, Master P and Amanda Peet are thrown into the cast just to piss me off. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Comedy

Da’ Booty Shop (2009)

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As much as you may love movies, you’re human and only have so much time. Some movies are simply going to fall by the wayside, never to be seen by your eyes. That’s okay. You’re not a bad person. Unless you’re Rod Lott (the creator of this site) and that movie is Da’ Booty Shop. In that case, you’re going to suffer eternal torment in Hades for what you did.

See, a while back, someone sent a DVD copy of that film to Rod to review and he decided he could live the whole rest of his life without doing so. I mocked him for his refusal and suggested he was a coward. In retaliation, he sent it to me and dared me to watch and review it. And I did, first in video form (see below) and now here in print. Does this make me a better person than him? Yes. Yes it does.

An “urban comedy” (that means it’s about black people), Da’ Booty Shop recounts the adventures of a stripper named Yolanda (Trina McGee), who reluctantly inherits the responsibilities of an “urban” hair salon (that means it’s for black people) after her brother (Marcello Thedford) is sent to jail for undisclosed reasons. Yolanda is an idiot and is no way prepared to deal with the mess her brother has left for her to deal with. For some reason, she decides to hire her stripper friends to work at the salon, and it all ends happily.

The plot is unimportant. All that matters is that Da’ Booty Shop really sucks and I was man enough to watch it and someone else wasn’t. Remember that. I know I will. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

Horror

The Ghost (1963)

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If you like horror movies and are familiar with the films of Barbara Steele and don’t like them, go to your room right now. You’re in time out until I tell you it’s okay to rejoin the human race.

The Ghost was her fifth spook show and a sequel of sorts to the previous year’s The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock, also directed by Riccardo Freda. In this one, Elio Jotta co-stars as the paralyzed and dying Dr. H. His wife and her lover, Dr. Livingstone (Peter Baldwin), decide to bump him off so she can inherit his fortune and they can spend it.

But the not-so-good Dr. Hitchcock is no sooner in his tomb than he is out of it again, seemly haunting the couple, especially his wife. Such a waste of good poison, too.

Freda — who deserves to be remembered with Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci — creates suspense with nothing more than sound, things you think you see, outstanding production design, Steele’s gorgeous face, and a budget of about $17. But come on, all you really need is Steele’s face.

If you don’t know her work, shame on you, but you can catch up with some of her early pictures, all easily available on DVD. Look for Black Sunday (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and Castle of Blood (1964). No scream queen was ever better at facially registering a variety of emotions at once. Hell, no scream queen was ever better, period. —Doug Bentin

Buy it at Amazon.

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