The Mediatwin Blog

Trailers are the shop windows of movies. They clamour for your attention, teasing you with delights that - probably, hopefully - await you should you step over the threshold. And for most of the time, they have less than two minutes to do it in.

Take DESPERADO. This was writer/director Robert Rodriguez’s first foray in Hollywood, a hybrid remake/sequel to his self-financed EL MARIACHI. The film’s a pretty entertaining blast of Tex-Mex violence, sex, more violence and a cameo appearance from Rodriguez’s BFF, Quentin Tarantino. After seeing the trailer, you know exactly what to expect from the film:

It’s essentially a radically compressed version of the movie with all the talky stuff (and most of the smouldering looks between the leads) taken out. DESPERADO’s trailer gives the viewer a visceral rush that sells the film beautifully.Those rapid cuts timed perfectly to the music. The sheer cojones of packing in all those shots of bullets, bad guys and flying bottles of tequila.

I’ve the DVD of DESPERADO somewhere but to be honest - watching its trailer is a far more exciting proposition, amigo.

Ah, Christmas. The perfect time to break out those seasonal classics - IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, SCROOGE - as well as some more...unusual choices.

For me, this is the best time of year to settle down and watch THE SHINING. The wintry light and chill outside is the perfect accompaniment to director Stanley Kubrick's magnum opus. I'd go so far as to say that, in my opinion, THE SHINING is one of the horror film greats. Not so much for "jump scares" - although it has a couple - but the vice-like grip it holds you in, from opening to closing credits. Even author Stephen King - who wrote the original book and has famously derided the film as a weak adaptation - admits that his first viewing of the film was "dreadfully unsettling." 

For audiences in 1980, the first glimpse of footage from the film was in the trailer:

Even after thirty plus years of viewings, it's still an incredibly powerful image - made all the more eerie by the atonal music playing underneath. It would have been very easy to turn this trailer into a traditional "jump scare"; the "blood flood" could have gushed forth at standard speed, with acompanying loud sound effects as it washes the furniture around the screen. Kubrick's more restrained approach in doing the complete opposite makes for a far more disturbing sequence.

This was the third (and final) take of the "blood from the lift" sequence - Kubrick was concerned on the first two that the liquid "didn't look enough like blood." Due to the logistics of resetting the scene, it took nine days each time to flush the set of the splashed "blood" and clean it up to Kubrick's satisfaction. 

For fans of the film, I'd recommend seeing this promotional film made to advertise More4's 2008 "Stanley Kubrick Season". The breadth and accuracy of detail is astonishing and repays multiple views:

Finally - and on a lighter note - there's this classic fan trailer:

With the COMING ATTRACTIONS feature, I like to showcase the very best in movie trailers past and present.

This time around - well - not so much.

The announcement this week of SKYFALL, the new James Bond film, prompted this rather self-indulgent entry. Now, MOONRAKER isn't often to be found at the top of those "best Bond movies" lists. In fact, it's often cited as the worst 007 film (to which I say - have you never seen A VIEW TO A KILL?). Curiously, it wasn't meant to be the 11th Bond movie. At the end of its credits, its predecessor, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, promised that 007 would return in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. The success of a little film called STAR WARS prompted a rapid change in direction and soon EON Productions was jumping on the cantina band wagon and launching the star of the franchise skyward.

The teaser trailer for MOONRAKER was a neat parody of commercials. For years, it remained frustratingly hard to find but has recently surfaced again on YouTube. The quality isn't great but you'll get the idea:

Immediately prior to the film's release, the official trailer was launched. Clearly, all the imaginative effort was used up on the teaser. This version takes the lazy option: want to see MOONRAKER but only have four minutes to spare? Then just watch this trailer - it's a compression of the film with the talky bits taken out. Hardly a shining example of how to craft a trailer but from the opening shot of a space shuttle scored with Brazilian beats, it's undeniably exciting:

As a 14 year old kid in 1979, this trailer ticked all the boxes for me. OO7? Check. Outer space? Check. Big action setpieces? Check. Good-looking girls in short skirts? Where do I buy my ticket? Thirty-odd years on, I've become more critical and can see the many flaws in MOONRAKER. Then again, I'll argue there's a lot to still enjoy in the movie. There are Ken Adams' brilliantly OTT sets, Derek Meddings' crisp special effects and John Barry's atmospheric score.

And through the refractive haze of nostalgia, I can even forgive MOONRAKER most of its weaknesses. Just not the Shirley Bassey theme song.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho broke new ground in so many ways - its craftsmanship, its defiance of movie taboos, its use of shocking imagery...and also in its marketing. Hitchcock, realising how important it was to carefully prepare an audience, was involved in much of its advertising and particularly, with its unique teaser trailer.

As well as being known as a director of top-notch thrillers, Hitchcock had in recent years become a celebrity in his own right. His eagerly awaited cameo appearances in his own films paved the way to a career on the other side of the camera, in the emerging arena of television . In 1955, he launched Alfred Hitchcock Presents, presenting brief monologues at the start of each weekly episode in his own inimitable dry style.

His mastery of the technique by 1960 can be seen in the specially-made teaser trailer for Psycho. Strolling around the movie's sets, "the fabulous" Mr Hitchcock plays the avuncular host - dispensing cryptic explanations, red herrings and clues as he goes. Unusually for a trailer, which due to time constraints often have to use music from other films, you can hear Bernard Herrmann's actual score playing in the background.

Clocking in at nearly six and a half minutes, this proved to be a highly effective way of introducing the audience to what lay ahead in Psycho. Hitchcock was determined that no actual footage from the film appear in its trailers, so he spent three days towards the end of the film's production on making this classic teaser trailer.

As a piece of trivia, have a closer look at the screaming woman behind the shower curtain. No, it's not Janet Leigh recreating her famous demise - it's Vera Miles in a blonde wig. Another of Hitchcock's jokes at our expense, it usefully hid who in his cast was actually going to fall victim to the knife.

 

After the highs of the '70s and '80s, Sylvester Stallone came down to earth with a bump in the '90s. A glance through the films he made in that decade - STOP OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT, JUDGE DREDD, THE SPECIALIST - is evidence that more often than not, Sly was just after the paycheque.Not in all cases. There's some exceptions - DEMOLITION MAN is an enjoyable "fish out of water" SF movie, whilst Stallone gives arguably his best performance to date in the underrated COP LAND.

Then there's CLIFFHANGER, where Sly battles a team of ruthless thieves high up in the Rocky Mountains. Director Renny Harlin, hot off DIE HARD 2, creates some exciting action setpieces, which neatly draw your attention away from the two-dimensional characters and hackneyed dialogue. I watched it again on Blu-ray recently and - barring a few dated matte shots - it holds up surprisingly well. Stallone's character is the most likeable of his many action heroes and there's a landscape-chewing performance from John Lithgow as the chief bad guy that's to savour.

A hit at the box-office, it certainly helped that they had a classy trailer too:

Rather than go with the more traditional staples of high-octane rock music or pounding synths, this series of key images from the film is neatly matched with Mozart's Requiem "Dies Irae". Not the most obvious choice for marketing a Sylvester Stallone thriller, it complements the Rocky Mountains scenary beautifully and nicely counterpoints the action beats.

One point of interest - the trailer ends with a shot of Stallone making an unfeasibly long leap between cliffs. Audiences who saw this sequence during the film's previews broke into laughter at this point and so the producers made drastic changes to the sequence in the finished film to make it more realistic. 

In a new, occasional, series here on the site, I'm going to feature some of my favourite film trailers and explain why I think they work so well.

Most trailers tend to be hastily-assembled collages of money shots and vaguely-memorable lines of dialogue. How often do you see a film, only to realise that all the best parts you'd already seen in that trailer for it that you saw three months earlier ? However, every so often, a trailer rises above the dross and shows exactly how it should be done.

 

Let's start with not one but two examples. I first read about Alien in Starburst magazine sometime back in '78. The news item was brief - it was an upcoming 20th Century Fox sf film, apparently; the director - some guy called Ridley Scott (never heard of him). There was no synopsis, just a perfunctory group shot of the actors on the set. No picture of the title character, though.

So far, so uninspiring. Then, a few months later - the teaser trailer arrived in the cinemas. And after seeing it, the thought began to dawn on me that maybe - just maybe - this Alien film was going to be something a little bit special:

There's not a scrap of footage from the actual movie in it but as a teaser, it works perfectly. With it's stark imagery, minimalistic sound and bleak tagline, you just know from the trailer that whatever the "alien" of the title is, it's not going to turn out to be cute and cuddly. 

After a few more months - they brought out the extended version:

 

Finally, we get to see clips from the actual film - but they're quick cuts, out of sequence, unexplained. Sure, there's brief shots of the derelict spacecraft, the alien egg and an emerging face-hugger...but you only understand what they are, after you've seen the film. There's no context, no explanation. It's a genuinely unsettling trailer, ratcheted up to unbearable levels by the bizarre sonar 'ping' shrieking on the soundtrack.

A terrific introduction to a horror masterpiece.

 

 

It took 29 years...now, we FINALLY get a sequel to ET. But - uh - it may not be quite what you're expecting...

Let's be honest - the best part of the Ice Age animated films are the teaser trailers with Scrat, the acorn-hunting sabre-toothed squirrel. The teaser for the latest instalment (due this summer) is no exception: