42ND STREET FOREVER: THE DEUCE

A blood-curdling, banshee-screaming, gun-jamming good time, 42nd Street Forever: The Deuce reminds us of why we love the horror and exploitation genres -- and, in many cases, is more enjoyable than some the movies advertised! These trailers are wonderful, convenient trips into insanity, delivering the mood, premise, and imagery of a complete production with a minimum of fuss. Better yet, you needn't suffer those long moments of awkward silence or padding that several of these so-bad-they're-good movies specialize in. Rather like a date where you can skip dinner and get right into bed, trailers are the bread and butter of exploitative filmmaking, a complex if often ignored art form. For in the theatrical trailer is the bug -- the biting moment -- that either grabs our attention or spells doom for a movie. Enticing with promises of thrills, seducing us with depths of terror or heights of sexual ecstasy, the trailers compiled on this follow up to the original Synapse and Ban 1 Production are a walk down memory lane, trash style!

A home entertainment salute to the gory-glory days of exploitation and thrillers, 42nd Street Forever: The Deuce makes one long for the days of youth (or those days he can only hear about from seasoned genre fanatics). Synapse and Ban 1 have done us a favor by assembling this collection of gyrating thighs and bug-eyed beasties, promising freaks and creeps with the loud, brash promises of 'carnival barker' producers screaming over fantastic imagery. Included are: Ms. 45/Born Losers/Rolling Thunder/Dixie Dynamite/Hells Angels On Wheels/The Hellcats/Dragstrip Riot/Stingray/Van Nuys Blvd./Burnout/Dirt/Savage!/Kenner/Tick… Tick… Tick…/Take A Hard Ride/Black Samson/The Guy From Harlem, When Women Had Tails/I, A Woman/The Curious Female/The Babysitter/Street Girls/College Girls/The Pom Pom Girls/Helga/Initiation To Ruin/The Pick-Up/Delinquent Schoolgirls/Savage Sisters/ Gigantis The Fire Monster/Female Jungle/The Giant Gila Monster/The Hideous Sun Demon/The Monster Of Piedras Blancas/Murders In The Rue Morgue/The Woman Eater/The Dark/The Evil/The Evictors/Deadly Blessing/The Texas Chainsaw Massacre/ Rabid/The Clones/Mission Mars/Mr. Billion/Spy In Your Eye/The Last Of The Secret Agents?/Trunk To Cairo/Kiss The Girls And Make Them Die/ and many others. With around fifty trailers in total, this diverse catalogue of goodies is sure to appeal to just about every taste, from the traditional monster fan to the lover of revenge epics. From biker pal flicks to tough gals serving hard time, from seventies splatter to an example of the wonderful Baby Cart films, this may well be the ideal party tape.

Focusing on trailers from various genres, ages, and quality, 42nd Forever is both fun to watch and educational, allowing glimpses into the filmic/publicity machine. As enjoyable as all this skin and sin, monsters and madmen are -- and as much as we all love women in various stages of undress -- the psychological and emotional underpinning of the ads, and both their intent and visuals, also suggest much about the audience towards which they are aimed. Trailers are more about selling a product than honesty. How often does a trailer justly represent the story, theme, or quality of the story it is advertising? Hardly ever! Yet instead of anger we find ourselves more often embracing this crazy medium, enjoying the 'commercial' far more than the limpid features themselves. On the other hand of the spectrum, and displayed here with vigour, are those trailers that serve as a bleeding badge of honor for the faithful few, biding us together in our quest for thrills. Blood, breasts, and beasts are shown with equal fervour in these babies, with the horror and fantasy genres well represented but not dominating the contents. Black exploitation, sexploitation, nudies, softcore erotica, crime and sword-and-sandal films share the stage with the supernatural. There is no special category to be found here, nor is one needed. The only requirement is thrills and cheese, both of which are dished up in Grindhouse style. If you wish to lend some order to the proceedings, and prefer a distinction be made between your bug-eyed monsters and sexpots, than the trailers are arranged loosely by theme.

This uproarious hoedown of B-movie madness is featured in 1.78.1 (anamorphic enhanced) sets, and while various spots suffer from their own special visual flaws, the overall quality is impressive for such a compilation. Sound is also uniformly professional, lending a sense of continuity despite the fact that each title has its own limitations. For the most part, the Dolby Digital Mono audio works well. Grab the popcorn, sprinkle on some blood-colored oil, and return to a time when cars were fast, women faster, and bullets sprayed the air in blood!

Review by William P. Simmons