Garagehouse Pictures

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L.A.
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Garagehouse Pictures

#1 Post by L.A. » Mon Sep 26, 2016 9:26 am

Zoltan G. Spencer's lost horror film The Satanist (1968) gets a Blu-ray release paired with Sisters in Leather (1969) in October.

From their Facebook page:
Garagehouse Pictures wrote:The fourth release by Garagehouse Pictures is Zoltan G. Spencer's THE SATANIST (1968). Lost for over 40 years, this obscure sexploitation horror film can now be seen on home video for the very first time anywhere. Transferred in 4K from the only known 35mm print, and completely restored, THE SATANIST will be available on Blu-ray on 10/31. The release will also include a bonus feature, Zoltan G. Spencer's SISTERS IN LEATHER (1969), audio commentary by Chris (Temple of Schlock) Poggiali and Ashley (The Rialto Report) West, liner notes by Chris Poggiali, new artwork by Stephen Romano, and trailers for other Garagehouse Pictures releases. THE SATANIST is now available for pre-order through DiabolikDVD.com. Order now for arrival by Halloween!

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#2 Post by JamesF » Mon Sep 26, 2016 11:14 am

I have their two Trailer Trauma trailer compilation Blu-Rays, which are a lot of fun if (like me) you enjoy that kind of thing and both throw up some really rare nuggets not available anywhere else.

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#3 Post by L.A. » Tue Nov 01, 2016 7:44 am


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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#4 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Apr 02, 2017 12:03 pm

I've gone through the first two Trailer Trauma Blu-rays and agree with JamesF. They're quite interesting and rather eclectic in that they showcase a wide range of genres beyond the 42nd Street Forever 'grindhouse' ones. However a lot of these trailers are re-titled ones from the names that they are more commonly known by too, so I'd be slightly wary of suggesting these sets as being particularly suitable for newcomers, especially the second one which is full of what I'd classify as a 'more advanced degree in exploitation' set of trailers. But that is also where a lot of the fun comes from in identifying the film hidden behind the different title! (Luckily though the second volume has a commentary in which they identify a couple of the more familiar titles hiding behind pseudonyms. For example they note that the film Bloodsuckers with Peter Cushing and Patrick Macnee is a rare UK/Greek co-production which is also known under the much more evocative title of Incense For The Damned (I had previously thought that the commentators had not mentioned this, but on a re-listen to the commentary they had namechecked it)

And on the second volume there is a great rare trailer for Eyes Without A Face when it was re-titled The Horror Chamber of Dr Faustus and released in a double-bill with the ridiculous (but fun) looking The Manster!

I'd also never really realised that there was a small subgenre of 'Smokey And The Bandit-sploitation' films that came out in the wake of that film! (In the first set's trailers for Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws, and Smokey and the Hot Wire Gang!)

EDIT: It was also great in this current Kong: Skull Island climate to see the trailer for John Landis's first film Schlock! (aka Banana Monster!) on the second volume. And that what would become the "See You Next Wednesday" running gag was present and correct even back then!
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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#5 Post by Perkins Cobb » Mon Apr 10, 2017 6:58 pm

This could also go legitimately in the "I've found a lost film" thread, but in any case this label's upcoming release of the regional indie The Dismembered (1962) sounds fascinating.

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#6 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Apr 21, 2017 4:00 pm

After saying previously that volume 2 of this series is the 'more advanced degree course' in exploitation trailers, the third volume, 80s Horrorthon, is the opposite extreme and is probably the best place for anyone wanting a potted history of an entire decade of genre cinema to go to! It takes a year-by-year approach to the material, going A-Z through 1980, then 1981 and so on. Though 1980 and 1981 get an entire Blu-ray to themselves, and feature the most trailers (though 1986 is a close second!), as if to suggest their importance to the tail end of a particular kind of exploitation cinema that was soon to get taken up by major studios (Universal, Paramount, arguably New Line being the ultimate studio built on a horror franchise success) and producers trying to play the major studios at their own game (Jerry Gross, the Cannon Group, Dino de Laurentiis, Charles Band's Empire Pictures, and so on!).

For general audiences there are a lot of familiar, high profile titles here: loads of John Carpenter but particularly The Thing, all the Friday The 13ths of the decade (i.e. up to VIII), The Lost Boys, The Shining, the first two Hellraisers, Jaws 3D and Jaws: The Revenge, The Entity, Paul Schrader's Cat People remake, Manhunter, Angel Heart, Tony Scott's The Hunger, Michael Mann's The Keep, every Cronenberg, all three Poltergeists, etc. And then in amongst that there are the titles familiar to fans, and even beyond that brief forays into really obscure stuff (like the trailer representative of the shot on video trend, 1982's Boarding House, or the amazing looking Eyes of Fire). So you get a nice combination of the comfortably familiar, the fan favourites, and the leftfield surprises.

Its really interesting watching these trailers all in a row to see how trends rise and fall in films, and how certain plot cycles keep cropping up too. The actual sequels are the prime examples of the way that the look and feel of films even in the same series can radically change from year to year (which is why I'm fine with all of the Friday The 13th trailers being here, as they're the ultimate example to illustrate the changing times from '80 thru '89). And you can also see films badly sequelised (The Fly to The Fly II, say. Or the two Critters trailers here. Unfortunately the best Critters film, Critters 3 (with Leonardo di Caprio!) falls outside the cutoff date!), or sequelised/remade decades later (Boggy Creek II, The Blob, The Fly again(!) and of course Psycho II) to varying degrees of success.

But then you have 1981 being the unofficial 'year of the werewolf' with An American Werewolf In London, The Howling and Wolfen (and then see it arguably tail off with films later in the decade like The Beast Within, The Company of Wolves and Silver Bullet). Then there's the slightly icky 1980-2 'rape period' of Don't Answer The Phone, Maniac, Ms 45, Inseminoid, The Entity, The Incubus. Or the 'evil child' run around Children of the Corn that arguably climaxes with Child's Play. The omniprescence of Stephen King. The irrepressible college kids waiting to fall victim to some crazed maniac or other. Or the way that slasher films move from relatively straight forward and even grubby madman with a knife or chainsaw films (so many ladies in skimpy towels pressed up against flimsy doors that the killer smashes through Shining-style) into supernatural phantasmagorical special effect laden shockers, which probably revolved around the success of Nightmare on Elm Street. Or the films still warning about the dangers of rural America in the wake of Texas Chain Saw Massacre (of course the cartoony 1986 sequel's trailer is on here!). Or the way that seemingly every up and coming/aging veteran British director has a horror film in this period lurking in their filmography! (Ken Russell with the wonderful Altered States, Mike Newell with the rather dull mummy movie The Awakening (which is a more upscale obviously post-Omen influenced remake of Hammer's Blood From The Mummy's Tomb starring Charlton Heston and Susannah York!), J. Lee Thompson with Happy Birthday To Me, Ken Hughes with Night School, Michael Anderson with the shocking looking Murder By Phone; Franc Roddam with The Bride. Peter Medak might be Hungarian not British, but he did a lot of British films and still ended up doing a ghost film in the US with George C. Scott, the wonderful The Changeling!)

There's even a trailer for a film about horror films of an older era! (1984's Terror In The Aisles)

Just personally speaking, I was really glad to see the trailer for Moon Trap on there too, as I fondly remember renting that out as a kid and getting freaked out by it. Though only a few years later I bet it would have seemed tame to my LifeForce-opened eyes! And yes they do have the trailer for the hilariously silly Canadian adaptation of a James Herbert book, Deadly Eyes!

And then added to that there is a nice relay race-style commentary from a number of different participants from critics to film directors (the Fangoria guys from the 42nd Street Forever Volume 3 & 5, and Blu-ray commentaries make appearances), which adds a nice extra perspective to things. They're often dealing with one year each and then pass things along to the next commentator, a bit like Criterion's Seven Samurai commentary did.

Anyway, I came away with a number of new films that I had previously not been aware of but would love to see some time: Eyes of Fire, Death Valley (which seems to anticipate The Hitcher but with a young Peter Billingsley in the cast, a couple of years before he was in the major role in Bob Clark's A Christmas Story. It is from the director of the excellent western The Culpepper Cattle Company, and the commentary says that this is sort of western-styled horror), The Boogens, Just Before Dawn, Nomads (with a shirt-ripping performance by Pierce Brosnan!) and maybe Fear No Evil, but I think that's purely down to a murderous punk rock villain killing people to a Sex Pistols soundtrack in the trailer! And it reminded me about The Slayer (described as 'an arthouse slasher' on the commentary!), previously shown on the Video Nasties compilation set.
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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#7 Post by domino harvey » Fri Apr 21, 2017 4:07 pm

I got my copy of that one in the other day, looking forward to relaxing with its hours of content soon! As for your To Watch list, well, here's my earlier comments (none of them positive) from elsewhere on the ones I've seen:
Fear No Evil (Frank LaLoggia 1981) A film so inexplicably awful that any description of it makes it sound like at least an interesting failure. It's not. Really it's not. The AntiChrist is born to a pair of farmers and three of Heaven's ArchAngels take human form as two elderly folks and a teenage girl so they can confront the devilspawn… eventually? Along the way there's a bevy of inexplicable scenes like when one kid getting killed via dodgeball or how the Jesus in an Easter Passion Play spouts a spontaneous stigmata gusher. And then there's one of the most bizarrely homoerotic sequences I've ever witnessed, wherein the school bully makes fun of the antichrist for being such a fag by... asking him out on a date and then making out with him in front of all his friends-- oh, and this is all happening while all of these teenage boys are completely nude on-screen. What in the world compelled anyone involved into thinking this was a good idea? The DVD case brags about the soundtrack containing Sex Pistols and the Ramones and Talking Heads but they should have spent the money devoted to licensing music on making the film even one smidgen better than it is. Because it's complete shit. So, it could've at least been just shit.
Nomads (John McTiernan 1986) A very eighties conservative film that explains away those troublesome punk kids by revealing that they are, in fact, ancient Eskimo spirits who wander the earth in the titular fashion. Of course. French anthropologist Pierce Brosnan stumbles upon the local LA faction and stalks them with his camera before they start stalking him with something more intimidating. As if all this wasn't bad enough, the film chops everything up into memories that Brosnan transfers to Leslie-Anne Down's doc on duty. Poor Down relives everything Brosnan saw in his last few days, sometimes from his POV, sometimes from his wife's, sometimes from an unseen spectator, sometimes from the villainous Sex Pistol wannabees-- boldness of premise may be the film's sole virtue, but consistency in vision sure ain't.
Just Before Dawn (Jeff Lieberman 1981) One of the few prominent slashers left unseen by me, this was most decidedly not worth the wait. It, like just about every other backwoods slasher I've endured, weirdly underuses what should be a goldmine setting-- the wild outdoors-- and falls back on the tried and true backwoods hillbillies with little to no motivation or reason for their chaos. That said, there is one moment of inspired violence near the end that is so weird that I'm guessing most of this film's over-inflated reputation comes from it and not the rest of the picture. Well, at least I hope! I will spoiler it for those of you who have no intention of ever bothering with this (ie most all of you):
SpoilerShow
In the big showdown between the final girl and the backwoods hick, she gets the upperhand, literally, by balling up her fist and shoving it through his open mouth, choking him to death as she punches his throat closed from within. And yes, it plays out just as bizarrely as it sounds, especially given that this is an otherwise rote slasher without much imagination.

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#8 Post by domino harvey » Fri Apr 21, 2017 4:21 pm

Also, Colin, I know you think you made it through them all but Garagehouse just announced a fourth volume, "Television Trauma," though it's unknown if it will be TV commercials or trailers for TV movies

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#9 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Apr 21, 2017 4:35 pm

I hate to say it but even those resounding pans make the films sound great! Nomads sounds as if it could be the missing link between Altered States and The Serpent and the Rainbow! I forgot another one I'd like to check out (and another film by a British director: the first by Roger Christian who would go on to *cough* Battlefield: Earth): the obviously Scanners-influenced The Sender. It's got an excellent trailer (a single shot moving up and over a desk with various creepy things projected onto it, from rats to cockroaches, to fire) that might be making me too interested in it though!

One of the interesting things about this set is realising that I have never seen the trailers for some of the films I know really well. Something like the brief teaser for The Fog or Maximum Overdrive, or Jaws 3D. That's mostly because I've watched and rewatched them on VHS rather than upgrading so far, so never got the trailers as part of any DVD extras!

I'm very curious about what they'll do with the fourth volume, Television Trauma, as teased in the extra features menu. There would seem to be an untapped resource of TV movies and feature length pilots for shows that disappeared into obscurity. Just speculating but I would bet that we'll see some of the big titles from the 1970s such as The Night Stalker/The Night Strangler, Trilogy of Terror or John Carpenter's Someone's Watching Me (with Adrienne Barbeau!). Maybe Spielberg's Something Evil (let alone the borderline horror of Duel). And probably loads of Stephen King miniseries trailers! Or at the very least IT!

However I think the early 90s have a few interesting titles too, such as A Child For Satan (which is a story involving a pregnant single mother relocating to a rural small town and finding it run by a Rosemary's Baby-style satanic cult. It ends with an escape from the town and seemingly a set up for a series that never was involving moving Fugitive-style from town to town ont he run from the cult in each week's episode!), or the two interesting adaptations of Dean Koontz novels The Face of Fear (with Pam Dawber from Mork and Mindy!) and The Servants of Twilight. But in particular it would be great to see if the 'trapped in an office building overnight with a serial killer' film Trapped could get some long overdue attention. Coming a couple of years after Die Hard (and Poltergeist III!), it feels a little influenced by that film in the way is utilises the resources of the entire building for its action. Albeit its not quite on the same scale!

(EDIT: Darn it, you mentioned it as I was posting! That's my fault for being too slow in writing! :D )

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#10 Post by domino harvey » Fri Apr 21, 2017 4:43 pm

Hey, that one's actually pretty good!
the Sender (Richard Christian 1982) Zeljko Ivanek, in his debut, has a nasty habit of sending his dreams (and his emotions/thoughts?) to people in his periphery, including his doctor Kathryn Harrold. The film never becomes as silly as it rightfully should, and the ordeal is played out in subdued tones. The shock scenes are quite effective and well-done, and the idea of living dreams predates Wes Craven's more populist approach two years later.

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#11 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Apr 21, 2017 4:48 pm

The main thing I learnt from this decade long odyssey is that for the first four years or so hillbillies and aliens (or hillbilly aliens) were the main threat, then it was those darn punk kids raising the dead (or worse becoming sexy vampire-demons) with their uncouth music and behaviour! Of course Near Dark is one of the key transitional films in this!

(EDIT 1st May): It was also nice to see the trailer for Disney's Something Wicked This Way Comes on there! Though it was a shame that there was not a trailer for 1982's The Watcher In The Woods! But it is nice to see Disney's 'bleak horror' period represented here (even if 1979's The Black Hole falls just outside this compendium, these live action horrors were not quite as bad as the bleakness of The Black Cauldron!)

By the way I was trying to think of films that had long gestating sequels in the vein of the 23 years between Psycho and Psycho II and could only really think of Disney films, like the straight to video sequel to 1958's Sleeping Beauty say. Or the 28 years between Tron and Tron: Legacy.
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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#12 Post by domino harvey » Fri Apr 21, 2017 4:49 pm

Speaking of anti-punk 80s horror flicks, did they include a trailer for the subversive preppies vs punx shot-on-video slasher Venus Flytrap?

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#13 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Apr 21, 2017 4:51 pm

Sadly not. Boarding House is the only shot on video trailer here, though the commentary namechecks things like Sledgehammer and a couple of other 'key titles'!

But they do have the UK/Kenyan co-production killer baboon movie In The Shadow of Kilimanjaro on there! (That's yet another title I'd not known about)

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#14 Post by domino harvey » Fri Apr 21, 2017 4:56 pm

Sledgehammer and especially Boarding House are beyond bad, but Venus Flytrap rises above its limitations and turns out to be in the Paul Bartel mode of social commentary. Another key punk Horror flick from this era is the mean-spirited Sean S Cunningham followup to Friday the 13th, the New Kids, which follows my well-researched Lori Loughlin Principle of her appearing in the most fascinatingly wrong-headed films of the 80s

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#15 Post by domino harvey » Sun Apr 23, 2017 12:32 am

Well Colin, you inspired me to dive in on the third Trailer Trauma collection, and I’m glad I did! Sets like this and the 42nd Street Forever discs are good battery-rechargers, and I had such a good time that I just ordered the previous two sets as well. Even though this is a decade and genre in which I’ve seen a lot of the titles one would expect to be represented, I was surprised at how many new-to-me movies were included. Some general thoughts from the 7+ hours of horror trailers:

+ Pretty much don’t need to hear anyone screaming or shrieking in terror for a while. This trend was taken to the worst possible extreme in the trailer for Mind Warp, which has to be the shrillest, most obnoxious trailer of all time— I feel like I got half of the screaming present in the entire set from that one trailer alone!

+ The editors of some of these trailers are brilliant at tricking unsuspecting viewers into expecting a much better film than they’ll deliver. This is now the second time in a trailer comp I’ve thought “Wow, the Grim Reaper looks good— why haven’t I watched this one yet?” before realizing at the end when they're crawling into the attic that I have and it’s fucking Antropophagus, one of the worst films I’ve ever seen! I can’t remember all the lousy films with good trailers, but I do recall Night School being cleverly edited to appear far more intense than it is (at the expense of not even showing the main characters!). I wouldn’t blame anyone wanting to see that film, but it doesn’t exist!

But ingenuity is present for good or flawed but interesting films too. I thought Wolfen’s trailer was the best one here— visually striking and revealing absolutely nothing of the film itself (unlike a lot of these trailers that want to show you E V E R Y T H I N G, sometimes twice!)

+ It’s surprising how bad most of the trailers for the franchises are— Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Poltergeist all have consistently terrible trailers. Though I chuckled at the continued promise that each subsequent Friday the 13th entry was “the one you’ve been waiting for”! The Psycho sequels were lame too, but of some interest for how they wholly coasted by on Anthony Perkins being in a film with the word “Psycho” in it and nothing more

+ So many Stephen King adaptations, and seemingly every trailer found a new descriptor for qualifying the Master of Horror (I take umbrage to whichever trailer it was that called him the “master of suspense,” though, no matter how many years Hithcock’s works were out of circulation!). Hard to believe his on-screen claim that Maximum Overdrive would scare anyone save the studio’s accountant, though!

+ There are plentiful memorable announcers to choose from across most of these trailers, but two stand out: Whichever cop movie had a bemused Burt Young halfheartedly delivering the narration in 100% Burt Young fashion, and the narrator for one of the Fulci films who just sounds fucking pissed at having to read whatever he was saying and comes across as unduly angry at the audience!

+ Pro-tip for making a horror movie trailer in the 80s: Repeat the title. Repeat the title. Repeat the title. Some funny taglines throughout the decade too, though I actually paused the disc to write down this brilliant bit of nonsense from the Oracle: “The Oracle provides the answers to a nightmare of the soul”— I can’t contest that, since I have no earthly idea what it means!

+ I liked it when they included the release dates. No prizes for guessing when the Jason and Michael Meyers movies came out, but I was tickled by the February 14th release date for TerrorVision. I’m guessing this was counter-programming, though I think anyone who wanted to have a romantic dinner and a movie date at that one was a keeper!

+ I will never learn my lesson. Here are unseen titles that piqued my interest, though full confession, some of these look “interesting” rather than “good”:

Blue Monkey (Mostly to learn why anyone would call a movie not about a blue monkey Blue Monkey), the Bride (I do remember this used to come on HBO all the time, where was I then?), Dead Heat, Deadly Eyes, DeepStar Six (Though I was already traumatized as a child by staying up to watch this on cable at like age six and seeing someone’s head explode in an improperly decompressed suit, an image that's haunted me for life!), Destroyer, the Entity (This one was already on my radar, so it might be cheating), Eyes of Fire (This Puritan-era period horror flick looks incredible, where is Arrow to rescue this?), Fright Night II (I never realized til seeing this trailer that the original cast was involved), the Hearse (Conveniently coming from Vinegar Syndrome next month I see), Heaven Becomes Hell, the Hidden, Human Experiments (If the film isn’t just someone saying the title over and over, I’ll be so disappointed), Humanoids from the Deep, Igor and the Lunatics (Impossible to not do the voice from the trailer while seeing the second part of the title), the Keep, the Kindred, the Kiss (It appears the film transposes how hard it is to get someone to wear sunglasses from They Live to getting your niece to kiss you), the Ladies Club (This looks wonderfully audacious— career women goad rapists into getting castrated in their spare time!), Lisa, Murder by Phone (the stupidest title and premise here, but like Sack Lunch, I want to know more), Mutant, My Demon Lover (Most of the “comedies” included looked awful [though I laughed at Paula Prentiss in Saturday the 14th’s trailer responding to an attic full of bats with “We’ve got owls”], but this seems novel in premise and approach), Nightflyers, Of Unknown Origin (There are more rat films on my to-watch list than I anticipated, in that there are any rat films on my to-watch list), the Oracle (Couldn’t possibly be worse than the Sentinel), Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge (A remarkably bad title that makes me laugh every time I see it. The sheer number of times "Eric" was ominously uttered in the trailer, as though it could ever be an intimidating or scary name, was also great), Raiders of the Living Dead (I remain unconvinced this was actually a movie and not a YouTube prank snuck in as an easter egg), Relentless, Scared to Death, Scream for Help (Hitchcock meets 80s teen schlock), Stripped to Kill II (But will I need to see Stripped to Kill I first…), the Terror Within, Warlock (Does Julian Sands have “the face of an angel,” though?), Wavelength, Witchboard (My mom wouldn't let me have a Ouija board because of this movie, which I'd forgotten all about til seeing the trailer-- based on what we see here, I'm not sure why the threat of Tawny Kitaen hanging around was worth banning the board), the Wraith

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#16 Post by DarkImbecile » Sun Apr 23, 2017 4:04 am

domino harvey wrote:DeepStar Six (Though I was already traumatized as a child by staying up to watch this on cable at like age six and seeing someone’s head explode in an improperly decompressed suit, an image that's haunted me for life!)
YES... this movie has two images that really stuck with me from a viewing at age nine (and even then I knew it wasn't very good): that one (Miguel Ferrer!... though he wasn't in a suit, which makes me think you might be thinking of the very similar Leviathan, released the same year as this and The Abyss for some reason), and the bitten-in-half diving suit that earned a spot on the poster.

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#17 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Apr 23, 2017 7:17 am

I'm glad to agree with you on all points domino!
domino harvey wrote:+ The editors of some of these trailers are brilliant at tricking unsuspecting viewers into expecting a much better film than they’ll deliver. This is now the second time in a trailer comp I’ve thought “Wow, the Grim Reaper looks good— why haven’t I watched this one yet?” before realizing at the end when they're crawling into the attic that I have and it’s fucking Antropophagus, one of the worst films I’ve ever seen! I can’t remember all the lousy films with good trailers, but I do recall Night School being cleverly edited to appear far more intense than it is (at the expense of not even showing the main characters!). I wouldn’t blame anyone wanting to see that film, but it doesn’t exist!
It could be worse, I actually bought the film on DVD from a PoundSaver-style cheap and cheerful shop under The Grim Reaper title back in the early 2000s without realising it was Anthropophagous! Of course it was a heavily edited UK version too with its more notorious scenes removed, so not much good at all! (Though on the other hand I did pick up Mario Bava's Shock, being sold under its ridiculous Beyond The Door II title, so I felt as if I balanced things out karmically there!)
But ingenuity is present for good or flawed but interesting films too. I thought Wolfen’s trailer was the best one here— visually striking and revealing absolutely nothing of the film itself (unlike a lot of these trailers that want to show you E V E R Y T H I N G, sometimes twice!)
I think I would have been annoyed at the time if I just wanted to see some footage from the movie to judge if I wanted to see it or not but with this set I found myself much more excited at all those trailers doing something different with their material to draw audiences in. I guess times really have changed in the sense that here the trailer makers are either throwing all the plot and gory highlights at the audience to draw them in, knowing that this will be the one opportunity and probably assuming that audiences won't remember that they saw everything in the trailer when they come back to see the film (or that at this point it will be too late). Or they're hiding (sometimes pretty good!) films behind title cards (sometimes different titles!) or little short films that don't feature any footage from the film in question. Probably these trailers only being shown theatrically and the audience having no way of 'fact checking', and only accepting what they are being shown at face value plays its part. I also love that Wolfen trailer, especially now that I can see other footage from the film just a click away on YouTube, but if I'd been looking for actual details about the film (rather than just being left with an evocative mood. Lots of these trailers feel as if they are trying to be more mood pieces than 'representative' of their material!), I'd have been grumpy!
+ So many Stephen King adaptations, and seemingly every trailer found a new descriptor for qualifying the Master of Horror (I take umbrage to whichever trailer it was that called him the “master of suspense,” though, no matter how many years Hithcock’s works were out of circulation!). Hard to believe his on-screen claim that Maximum Overdrive would scare anyone save the studio’s accountant, though!
I always giggle a little at King's cross-eyed crazed look in that trailer!
+ There are plentiful memorable announcers to choose from across most of these trailers, but two stand out: Whichever cop movie had a bemused Burt Young halfheartedly delivering the narration in 100% Burt Young fashion, and the narrator for one of the Fulci films who just sounds fucking pissed at having to read whatever he was saying and comes across as unduly angry at the audience!
That's the notoriously silly Blood Beach, which as the commentary mentions is newly created dialogue for the trailer! As if its a little short interviewing one of the characters after the film!
+ Pro-tip for making a horror movie trailer in the 80s: Repeat the title. Repeat the title. Repeat the title.
I wonder if this is the continuing hangover from Last House On The Left's "It's only a movie...only a movie...only a movie" gimmick in its trailer! I also really like that Human Experiments trailer for what it does with that repetitive thing ("Somewhere between medicine and witchcraft. Somewhere between justice and vengeance. Somewhere between progress and the unthinkable. Someone...is performing...human...experiments...human...experiments...someone...is performing...[title card]"), though I'm not entirely sure the film itself will live up to the hype! That's also my favourite narrator guy too, with his clipped diction adding an extra sense of brutality (he also does the Dressed To Kill trailer, and lots of others).
+ I will never learn my lesson. Here are unseen titles that piqued my interest, though full confession, some of these look “interesting” rather than “good”:

Blue Monkey (Mostly to learn why anyone would call a movie not about a blue monkey Blue Monkey)...
We could also ask that question of 1998's B. Monkey - a crime thriller starring Asia Argento!

The Keep is great, especially its Tangerine Dream soundtrack. We're living in an amazing time in the UK right now where Film4 keeps showing The Keep late nights. There was about twenty years when it never turned up and now it has been on television about eight times in the last three years! Probably the most shown Michael Mann film on UK television at the moment, even beating out Heat!

The Entity is rather brutal but very interesting. It all gets a bit sci-fi meta in the last act too, as the paranormal researchers recreate an eerie facsimile of the heroine's house on a stage set for her to lure the ghost into assaulting her inside, and the familiar structure of the home falls apart during the rattling climax! David Lynch would be impressed by that idea, I'd imagine!

I also think The Hearse looks good. Fright Night II as well. (As a weird aside during my childhood I saw a lot of the original films in series - Child's Play, Fright Night, Critters, Creepshow - but never had the opportunity to see the second films in the series. I got to Child's Play 2 and 3 about ten years ago, but have never seen Fright Night II or Creepshow 2 and 3. Critters is the weirdest one, where I've seen the first, third and fourth as they regularly show up on UK TV, but Critters 2: The Main Course has never seem to have been shown on television, so I've never seen it! I do remember wanting to as a kid though, as I had the scene of the guy in the Easter Bunny costume that turns up in the trailer described to me in detail in the playground! As well as a scene involving one of the Critters underneath a child's bed and trying to nip at their feet, which apparently had traumatised the other kid I was talking to!). The Ladies Club sounds amazing too in a bad taste way, along with Murder By Phone (maybe Murder By Phone anticipates that Stephen King Cell film from decades later?!)

Of Unknown Origin sounds interesting too, but I get the impression that this is another trailer where the film might be entirely different to how it is being presented! And The Bride has perhaps one of the weirdest casts in film history (perhaps only rivalled by The Concorde: Airport '79!): Sting, Jennifer Beals, Timothy Spall and Quentin Crisp!

I am rather curious about Stripped To Kill II, but it looks rather shockingly grubby and sleazy, even for someone as jaded as me!

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#18 Post by domino harvey » Sun Apr 23, 2017 12:57 pm

DarkImbecile, I definitely am not thinking of Leviathan, though my mom was at the time-- she let me stay up to watch DeepStar Six because she thought it was that one! I still remember her reaction to me losing my shit: "Well, what do you expect?" It's likely my trauma remembered a head exploding and messed up the finer details in its wake!

Colin, great thoughts as always! Stripped to Kill II indeed looked rather skeevy, but I thought it was another of the best trailers included, a feverish MTV-ready music video with ample nudity and someone attacking innocents by holding razor blades between their teeth-- the images are so fleetingly arranged that with incessant narration it could pass as a Malick trailer!

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#19 Post by Rayon Vert » Sun Apr 23, 2017 2:26 pm

Those comps sound like terrific fun. I'm kind of cursing myself for not having kept viewing notes for many of those films I've seen, usually in a context of hanging out with a friend and trying to find the most ridiculous and/or vile horror films produced. I do remember Humanoids from the Deep from not too long ago: mild silly fun, but a bit disappointed with expectations from its reputation as a good late Roger Corman production.

Being 12-14 in 1980-82 and having started to get into horror, I do remember some of those trends back then, like the werewolves in '81. I wasn't aware there was a specific "rape period" in those years - though I've since seen Maniac and Ms. 45. Never heard of Inseminoid - sounds hilarious! I gather those comps mostly/only cover American films? Because I was recently pleasantly surprised with Ruggero Deodato's (of Cannibal Holocaust fame) 1980 The House on the Edge of the Park. Definitely an exploitative rape-and-revenge film, but a lot better than most of the entries in that morally dubious subgenre.

The Entity was a film I saw back then and remember as fairly good and definitely disturbing. It's based on a real case covered by a parapsychologist in the 70s.

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#20 Post by domino harvey » Sun Apr 23, 2017 2:34 pm

They cover foreign films dubbed into English (several Fulcis and Inferno are on the 80s Horror comp, along with the aforementioned Antropophagus), but yes, mostly American (though many of the trailers appeared to be British due to the spelling of "theatre"). Rape revenge was pretty prominent in late 70s / early 80s post-Lipstick (still the best version of this kind of narrative, with its unforgettable finale), though Maniac is more just "rape" without the revenge component (though still fascinating when seen as a slasher with an unusually specific target audience of city-dwelling women)

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#21 Post by kidc85 » Sun Apr 23, 2017 5:06 pm

Rayon Vert wrote:I do remember Humanoids from the Deep from not too long ago: mild silly fun, but a bit disappointed with expectations from its reputation as a good late Roger Corman production.
Might be worth mentioning that multiple people involved in the production, not least director Barbara Peeters, consider the film anything but "mild silly fun". After Peeters had finished shooting, Corman saw the results and was unhappy with it. Corman wanted it to be more salacious so brought in another director to film more explicit rape scenes and get some additional nudity in there. Peeters tried to get her name removed from the film but failed, and other actors complained that they wouldn't have taken part in the film if they had realised how exploitative it would turn out to be.

The only thing that really sticks out about the film is the really daft ending where the humanoids lumber around the fun fair, although it's certainly not as daft as the ending to The Entity. If it was played in a meta-like way as Colin suggests, I think it could have really worked, but, like you said, it's supposedly based on a 'true' story so they play it completely seriously and try to pass it off as sincere. The only thing that could surpass it is if the Warner Bros lawyers have to argue in court that the Conjuring series is factually accurate.

The Entity also provides the fodder for Peter Tscherassky's actually-meta Outer Space.

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#22 Post by Dr Amicus » Mon Apr 24, 2017 5:20 am

DeepStar Six I paid good money to see this at the cinema when it was released in the UK, in what is surely the smallest cinema I've ever seen - screen 5 of the (now gone) Cannon Oxford Street, must have been about 20 seats or so. I remember enjoying it much more than Leviathan (which I saw at the Odeon Marble Arch - a MUCH larger screen!) and did watch it again as part of an all night Video-thon.

Assuming The Hidden is the Kyle McLachlan film, again its a long time since I've seen it - but my memory tells me it was great fun. I saw it a couple of times - it might even have been shown on our University cinema - and it would be an ideal Arrow Blu. IIRC, Empire (specifically Kim Newman) gave it a great review. By comparison, my memory of The Hearse is that it was OK but nothing much more than that.

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#23 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Apr 24, 2017 6:38 pm

Yes, but Leviathan does have Peter Weller's troubled-middle manager punching out Meg Foster's callous company figurehead at the very end of the film, so there's that going for it!

A lot of those 88-89 films (Moon Trap, Leviathan, Deepstar Six, The Hidden. Plus others like Larry Cohen's The Ambulance, which falls just outside this set's cut off date but I bet would be firmly in any 1990 roundup! Along with Richard Stanley's Hardware) remind me of trips to my local smalltown shop with its little aisle of rentable videotapes. Where stuff like Waxworks and The Fly II would intermingle with Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Where the 'big hitters' like Batman, Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves or Who Framed Roger Rabbit? were always tantalisingly prominently displayed but with big 'out on loan' stickers on them, while UHF, The Couch Trip and Funny Farm were always firmly available!

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#24 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Apr 27, 2017 2:56 pm

By the way, did you all know that both Waxworks and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark both got videogame adaptations?

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Re: Garagehouse Pictures

#25 Post by domino harvey » Thu Apr 27, 2017 3:16 pm

He Knows You're Alone is another lousy film with a great misrepresentational trailer on this compilation, to add to my initial post. I listened to about an hour and a half of the commentary but I think I'm tapping out-- everyone is so uncritical and fawning of even the worst titles, it's like listening to one of any number of amateur movie podcasts. Anyway, onward and upward as I just got the other two volumes in, looking forward to exploring those!

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