42nd Street Forever vol. 1 and Hatchet

I get alot of my obscure Netflix suggestions through Aint It Cool News. They ran an article around the time that Grindhouse was coming out on DVD about this collection of trailers from the 70's and 80's called 42nd. Street Forever. I'm assuming that this is referring to some kind of old movie theater. At least that is what is on the cover.

What it really is about is 2 hours of trailers for all kinds of movies. They are loosely grouped together by genre and just go one after the other. There is sexploitation comedies, slasher horror, racial exploitation, euro sleeze, and old west genres that are explored here. Watching this many trailers back to back, about 30 in all, I started to feel a bit burnt out by the end, but damn were there some doozys packed in there.

What most impressed me were the tactics that the horror movies used to draw audiences in. There were many trailers that warned the viewer not to go to the movies alone, or that the filmmakers would pay a $2000 insurance policy to the family of anyone that dropped dead from fright during their movie. I would watch every single horror movie they featured on this collection. They appeal to my most base of entertainment values. And I think that the modern age of movies is missing the showmanship that these trailers put forth. I defiantly feel that I grew up in the wrong age when it comes to trash horror flicks.

There are two more of these collections to watch, but I'm going to space them out so I don't get burned out.

In the same vein as trash horror, I purchased a movie called Hatchet a while back when it was on sale. I had read some reviews of this on AICN and they said it was a modern slasher that featured every characteristic of the by gone cheesy horror that I loved. It didn't hurt that it also featured an all star cast of horror movies. Freddy, Candyman, one of the Jason's, and one of the guys from The Blair Witch were all in there.

We watched this with Adie, Ian, myself, and Katie. We were not disappointed as there were some extremely gruesome and over the top deaths within the first five minutes, some boobs following shortly after that, and then once the rest of the killing started up, it never stopped until the end. Everyone but Katie seemed to be enjoying the awesome gross fest that was unfolding on the screen. Repeatedly Ian and I were forced to High 5 after some particularly new and awesome way of killing people off. Katie was just confused and seemed a bit worried to be hanging out with such degenerates.

The thing that draws me to these kinds of scary movies is that while they are bloody and violent, they are usually so over the top with the violence and gore, it isn't believable. While I can enjoy movies like Hostel or Saw, it is much more cringe inducing as they strive to portray realistic and brutal deaths.

I rank Hatchet well up there on movies I have enjoyed this year. I'm still carrying a really hefty batting average for movies that I have seen in the theater this year. The bottom of the list would probably have to be Be Kind, Rewind or Step up 2:The Streets. And I really enjoyed both of those films. I'm really going to have to go out and see some shit films to bring the average down a bit. And for the record, I'm up to 25 movies for the year. A bit over the average I need to hit the magic 120. But I anticipate that number to grow mightily in the next few weeks.