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Release by: Synapse Films
Released on: May 8, 2012.
Director: N/A
Cast: N/A
Year: N/A
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The Feature:
A fantastic compilation of trailers for all things 'trash film', the 42nd Street Forever trailer compilation line originally started by Ban 1 Productions and then continued through Synapse Films finally makes its highly anticipated Blu-ray debut with this 42nd Street Forever - Blu-ray Edition release. A 'best of' collection of trailers originally included on the first two Synapse entries with a few new additions thrown in for good measure, this disc offers up three hours and forty-six minutes of vintage coming attractions all presented in high definition in their proper aspect ratios.
So what's on it?
Kung fu? Horror? Exploitation? Vintage adult cinema? Roughies? Rape/revenge movies? 3-D smut? Mondo? Action? Sci-fi? Monsters? Satan? Blaxploitation? It's all here and then some! Ideal for group settings or as background material for your next home based movie shindig, this is an impressive collection of mind numbing, hard selling, fast moving, gritty, dirt, grimy movie madness. It didn't matter how accurately the movies these trailers were selling were represented, what mattered was that they were made to get your attention and pretty much each and every one of the selected advertisements contained on this disc do just that.
Very welcome are the trailers for mondo films like Shocking Asia and Secret Africa - a compilation of mondo and Faces of Death style trailers would be a fascinating project as it's really quite interesting how these shockumentaries, many of which are extremely exploitative and gratuitous, were marketed through trailers, pressbooks and advertisements. Equally welcome are the holy trinity of Christina Lindberg trailers - Depraved, They Call Her One Eye, and the fantastic Maid In Sweden. The queen of seventies Swedish skinema has a fantastic presence in all of her work and these three trailers show off her considerable skill at getting naked fast and handling a slow motion shotgun in quite a bit of detail.
You want more smut? You got it. The trailer for Hard Candy is great as are the spots included for The Italian Stallion (which really does a good job of getting you psyched to see Stallone in the buff and interestingly enough plays up on its female director!), and The Centerfold Girls - good sleazy fun all the way around, with a fantastic psychotic performance from the great Andrew Prine. There's plenty of creepy and gory material in here too, from the I Dismember Mama/Blood Spattered Bride double feature played out as one of the most ridiculous newscasts you've ever seen or the spot for The Undertaker And His Pals. One biggie missing here is the trailer for Corruption which completely sells you on this truly nasty looking Peter Cushing vehicle - but this is a 'best of' not a complete repackage of the first two discs. For more on that, see below. The trailer for The Crippled Master that has made the rounds over the years has been carried over, and for good reason as it really is jaw droppingly good in its amazingly poor taste, and the trailer for Star Crash is good for a laugh.
Nuff said? Nope. Highlights carried over from Volume Two include Highlights here include Ms. 45 and Rolling Thunder. Revenge was never better than in the seventies and early eighties and these two really have stood the test of time as superlative examples of what can be done with the genre. The dragstrip/car/racing trailers aren't quite as hot but Van Nuys Blvd. has a fantastic promo spot. The blaxploitation trailers are fun, particularly Savage! in which James Inglehart, under the assured direction or Cirio H. Santiago shoots a lot of bad guys and talks a lot of smack. Black Samson looks sufficiently groovy and stupid enough to maybe be the best movie ever. And what about The Guy From Harlem? If you haven't seen that, this trailer will give you the itch and once you scratch it, there's no going back - truly one of the most amazing blaxploitation movies ever made! Watch it over and over again while you chow down on a well done steak and wash it down with some J&B and marvel at the fight choreography and shoot outs! The Sugar Hill spot is fantastic as well. By the time we hit sexploitation and bad girl territory things are really starting to look up, particularly in the trailer for The Babysitter which contains a shot that really reminds one of a certain episode of The Simpsons where Homer gets in trouble after driving the sitter home. Delinquent Schoolgirls looks like a lot of trashy fun as the amazing Sharon Kelly pops up here - keep your eyes peeled and how great is Michael Pataki in this film?
New trailers include blaxploitation efforts Kenner and Honky, the mighty Linda Blair vehicle, Chained Heat, one of the finest American WIP movies ever made, and a great looking Eurosex movie called The Teasers Go To Paris that looks like something Erwin C. Deitrich should have been involved with. Sexploitation films The Teacher, The Tale Of The Dean's Wife, The Minx, The Sun The Place And The Girls and Fairytales are all worth watching, especially the later film which just looks completely absurd. The great trailer for Flesh Gordon is here as is the promo for John Carpenter's Dark Star, British sci-fi film They Came From Beyond Space, the horror films Eye Of The Cat, Mark Of The Witch, The Grim Reaper and Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon (released by Mondo Macabro as Mansion Of Madness). 'Documentaries' like Pornography In Denmark and Taboos Of The World (with narration from Vincent Price) get some love, as does Passolini with the trailer for Salo: 120 Days Of Sodom (in German with English subtitles), a Chinese superhero/martial arts movie SuperMan Chu (Bond! Fly! Shaft! Movie over! He's super cool, super quick and super deadly!) and last but not least, the biker film Devil's Angels - a nice selection of new additions to the line, each one as entertaining and/or bizarre as the next.
The complete list of trailers on the disc is as follows:
Black Samson / Savage! / Kenner / The Guy From Harlem / Welcome Home, Brother Charles / Boss Nigger / Honky / Sugar Hill / Rolling Thunder / Act Of Vengeance / Ms. 45 / They Call Her One Eye / Ginger / Savage Sisters / Chained Heat / Delinquent Schoolgirls / The Pom Pom Girls / The Teasers Go To Paris / The Teacher / College Girls / Street Girls / The Babysitter / Teenage Mother / I, A Woman / When Women Had Tails / The Curious Female / The Tale Of The Dean's Wife / The Minx / The Centerfold Girls / The Depraved / Invitation To Ruin / Helga / The Sun, The Place And The Girls / Fairytales / Flesh Gordon / Starcrash / Dark Star / The Raiders Of Atlantis / Matango / The Green Slime / They Came From Beyond Space / The Deadly Spawn / The Dark / The Evil / The Evictors / The Undertaker And His Pals / The Devil's Nightmare / Deadly Blessing / Rabid / Eye Of The Cat / Mark Of The Witch / I Dismember Mama And The Blood Spattered Bride / Women And The Bloody Terror And Night Of Bloody Horror / Dr. Butcher M.D. / The Grim Reaper / Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon / Wicked Wicked / The Flesh And Blood Show / The Three Dimensions Of Greta / Hard Candy / Panorama Blue / Italian Stallion / Maid In Sweden / Pornography In Denmark / Secret Africa / Shocking Asia / Taboos Of The World / Chappaqua / Salo: 120 Days Of Sodom / The 44 Specialist / The Bullet Machine / Death Drive / Spy In Your Eye / Kiss The Girls And Make Them Die / The Last Of The Secret Agents / The Crippled Master / Shogun Assassin / SuperMan Chu / Born Losers / Hell's Angels On Wheels / Devil's Angels / The Pink Angels / Werewolves On Wheels / Dixie Dynamite / Mr. Billion / Super Fuzz / Sunset Cove / Van Nuys Blvd. / Skatetown U.S.A.
Trailers that were included on the first two DVDs in the series that are not included on this release are:
Corruption / The Butcher Of Binbrook / Creampuffs / Charlie And The Hooker / Destroy All Monsters / Behind Convent Walls / The Legend Of Nigger Charlie / Confessions Of A Summer Camp Counselor / Sunset Cove / Death Will Have Your Eyes / Death Has Blue Eyes / A Black Veil For Lisa / Ironmaster / The Rape Of The Sabines / The Hellcats / Dragstrip Riot / Stingray / Burnout / Dirt / Tick…Tick…Tick… / Take A Hard Ride / Pickup / The Female Jungle / Gigantis The Fire Monster / The Giant Gila Monster / Hideous Sun Demon / The Monster Of The Piedras Blancas / Murders In The Rue Morgue / The Woman Eater / The Texas Chainsaw Massacre / The Clones / Trunk To Cairo / Amazons Of Rome / Samson And The Slave Queen / Revolt Of The Slaves / The Revenge Of The Gladiators
Hopefully there's a second Blu-ray volume in the works sooner or later that includes these missing trailers.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Synapse crams almost four hours of trailers onto a BD50, each in its own aspect ratio, in a series of AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfers that look about as good as the source material is going to allow. Expect scratches and print damage throughout but honestly, would you want these to look pristine? No, probably not - it just wouldn't be the same. The disc is well authored, there are no obvious compression issues to note despite the long running time of the disc, nor are there any traces of noise reduction or edge enhancement here. These trailers look like the marginally beaten up film sourced promo spots that they are, but you'll still notice quite a bit more detail and texture here than you will on the DVD issues. Quality varies from one spot to the next but overall, yeah, this stuff looks really good on Blu-ray, very film like and appropriately gritty and grainy.
Audio chores are handled by a DTS-HD 2.0 Mono track that is on par with the video - it's not quite pristine, but it sounds good for what it is. The various narrators (some of whom get a lot of replay in this set - try and figure out who narrated what and note the voices that appear multiple times for extra fun!) are always nice and clear and the levels are properly balanced. If there's a bit of hiss here and there and the odd pop in the mix, that's okay.
Outside of the animated menus and chapter selection (choose your trailer from the menu or kill an afternoon with the 'play all' feature!) the only extra is a commentary from AV Maniacs' Edwin Samuelson, Fangoria's Mike Gingold and Temple Of Schlock's Chris Poggiali - it's quite a solid track. If you've heard the other commentaries that these three have provided for the 42nd Street Forever series from Synapse then you know what to expect: a whole lot of information crammed into a series of mini commentaries, one for each trailer. The three do a good job here, offering up a lot of interesting trivia about each and every piece showcased here, and sometimes adding interesting little anecdotes about their own experiences with these movies (Poggiali notes the time he took a picture of a couple of Japanese tourists posing with one of the Deadly Spawn monsters outside a theater when he saw it play on its original run). They note the controversies surrounding the mondo films covered here, discussing how the success of Faces Of Death inspired a sort of mondo revival in the grindhouse theaters, and how Vincent Price got coaxed into narrating Taboos Of The World for AIP. If you've seen some of these trailers before (and fans of the series will have seen quite a few of them at this point), this commentary is a good way to 'get more' out of the disc and to uncover some interesting facts about the movies that these trailers were originally created to advertise.
The Final Word:
Is there are a lot of crossover here from the first two releases in the series? Yep. Are there trailers missing from those first two releases? Yep, and it would have been nice to have them all. That didn't happen but we do get quite a bit of new material here which is a nice touch and the addition of the commentary is definitely a big plus. Overall though, 42nd Street Forever - Blu-ray Edition kicks all kinds of ass, and it's pretty much impossible not to have a complete blast with this disc and it comes absolutely recommended to any readers of this website!
