‘Grindhouse Trailer Classics 4’ DVD Review
Don’t you just love Grindhouse trailers? After Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez made them popular again with the inclusion of some fake ones with their Grindhouse movie it reminded people just how silly they were, and how badly made they could be. Now with Grindhouse Trailer Classics 4 we have another collection of trailers for movies you can hardly even believe existed, some interesting and some really bad, and even some that deserved better this fourth collection brings more forgotten trailers to the screen for our enjoyment.
With around two hours’ worth of trailers on the DVD I did find that watching Grindhouse Trailer Classics 4 did start to feel a bit of a chore. You can only sit through so many trailers about white slavery, mobsters, sexploitation, Blaxploitation, gore and murder before you start to realise that there were a lot of movies that were very similar and the trailers were probably created by the same team; with only one thing in mind and that is to shock. Taken in small chunks, or at least by taking a break in viewing, it does get easier to make it through them all. The fun nature of seeing some truly obscure trailers keeps you coming back for more, even though some of the subject matter is very questionable.
I won’t go through all the names for the film trailers because that would be unfair, the fun is actually sitting through them yourself and discovering some you may have even seen. There are a few of interest like Mark of the Devil 2 where the editing of the trailer is obviously designed to make the film seem more controversial than it was, though it’s hard to hide the fact that the movie is just bad. Another oddity is Curtains, another horror which featuring a masked killer offering nothing really unique, other than a strange film name. With some trailers you do feel (or hope) that the movies are better than the controversy they are trying to cling on to, but I doubt it.
When looking at the trailers included on Grindhouse Trailer Classics 4 and the three other volumes these movies were made on a low-budget and were looking for the latest public scares that they could use to gain some cheap publicity. With trailers featuring ‘white slavery’, nudity, gore or just good old violence there is that tabloid-esque message to them that you have to watch these movies to know what could be going on just down the street from you, in fact some of the trailers even state that what you see on the screen is waiting for you once you step out of the movie theatre …
Grindhouse Trailer Classics 4 is a fun release, especially when you realise that these films actually existed. Now that it is in its fourth volume though there is a feel that the best trailers have been found now and with any more releases we’ll see the just plain boring trailers. A lot of what you see do tend to get samey, and there are only so many times you can see nudity and misogyny before it starts to get a little much. Grindhouse trailers look back to a time when a lot of these movies weren’t exactly forward thinking with the way women were treated on the screen no matter how “feisty” the “wild” females you see are portrayed to be. Taken in the form of trailers though it’s better to look back at these movies and be glad they are somewhat forgotten, rather than sit through the whole thing.
Grindhouse Trailer Classics 4 is released on DVD on Monday June 16th.
