Trailer Trash V!

The next installment of Trailer Trash will be like no other! That's because this round of Trailer Trash will be exclusivly VHS content! We scoured our expansive VHS collection and captured the best of the worst, and on April 9th you can bask in the VHS trailer glory. (If you're curious about what we'll be screening, we'll be serving up a taste on March 26th before the super secret Tape Freaks movie!)
Trailer Trash Vhs, Theaters @ MOA, April 9th, 7:30pm, $7.

Genre Mashing: Detention

Detention (2012) seems to be a love it or hate it movie. We love it, but it didn't start that way. We watched this with a friend one Halloween, and it got to the point that we all wanted to stop watching, but none of us wanted to ruin the movie for anyone else who might be enjoying it so we kept our mouths shut. Lucky we did because by the time it was over, we all wanted to watch it again!

Detention is a genre mash-up with no peers. There are subtle homages to just about every teen movie you can think of, but not many are so obvious that you can even place why they're familiar. And the sub-genres they cover are amazing: freaky-friday style body switch, time travel, coming of age, save the dance, misfits come together as friends, underdog saves the day, avant-garde, and slasher horror.

Main plot unfolds something like this: Riley Jones has awoken to yet another awful day in her high school life. Little does she know that this awful day will be punctuated by a copy cat serial killer who's basing their crime spree on a popular slasher film. Will Riley and her band of misfit friends be able to figure out what's going on and save their school before the big dance? And what's with that friggin' bear?

You might appreciate Detention if you ever liked any of the following (or just elements from the following): Rubber, Crank, Freaky Friday, Venture Bros., Breakfast Club, Saw, Back to the Future II, Better Off Dead, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Can't Hardly Wait, Heathers, Scream, or The Fly.

Things to watch for: Josh Hutcherson before The Hunger Games, breakneck twists and turns, more absurdity than you can shake a stick at (while remaining a movie with a heart and plot), a shockingly amazing score from Brain Mantia and Melissa Reese, and some top notch performances from the entire cast.

Other things directer Joseph Kahn has done lately: That amazing Power Rangers homage!

This is one of our favorite movies, so we are totally biased, but if any of that sounded interesting to you, check this one out! You might like it as much as we do...

Clue number two!

Clue two: our pick for March is a mash-up of no less than five different movie genres.

Our super secret movie will be screening on March 26th at Theatres at Mall of America, check back for one more clue leading up to the screening!

Genere Mashing: Housebound

If you've ever enjoyed a horror-comedy, haunting, or coming of age movie, Housebound will not let you down. Full of original ideas, fleshed out characters, and amazing twists and turns, this has quickly become one of our favorite movies to introduce to new viewers first hand.

The plot unfolds something like this: Kylie Bucknell has gotten herself arrested botching an ATM burglary and is sentenced to house arrest. While enduring her annoying mother and her "cabbage in a sweater" stepdad, she stumbles onto a decade old murder mystery that seemingly only she can solve.

Trope it is not: Though this movie draws on a classic set up, there is nothing classic about the execution.

Hollywood, Remake City: The remake is already in the works, but don't bother waiting for the US to ruin it for you, see the New Zealand version.

Reasons to watch: Amazing insults and reactions from every cast member, fantastic balance between creepy and funny, and amazing comedic timing.

Clue number one!

Your first clue: Jim Wynorski had an uncredited hand in editing our pick for March.

Our super secret movie for March will be screening on the 26th, keep checking back for more clues about what we'll be showing!

Genre Mashing: Robo Vampire

A gem from the box art alone ----------------------------------------------------->

 The sleeve and credits said one “Joe Livingstone” directed this masterpiece, but a quick look on the IMDB told us it was actually Godfrey Ho, director of a-hundred-and-nineteen surely wonderful movies including gems like Ninja Terminator, Robo-Kickboxer, Clash of the Ninjas and a few more we own but haven't gotten around to watching yet.

Plot unfolds something like this: Some crafty drug smugglers have decided to train vampires to guard their drugs during transport. During an altercation with said vampires, a narcotics agent gets himself killed and then brought right back to life –by some questionable lab coated folks– to become a robot-cop hell bent on defeating the drug lords and their vampires.

And if that isn't amazing enough: There's a sub-plot that culminates in the wedding of a ghost and a vampire.

Things to watch for: Basement-sale budgets for everything, over the top run-on-sentence-exposition overdubbing, and a robot costume that seems like it was a very generous gift from a high school theater troup.

What we learned: This time we learned an actual thing! This movie is what we'd always called a “hopping vampire movie”, which we have now learned are called Jiang-shi. Behaving more like zombies than vampires, Jiang-shi hop as their mode of transportation due to rigamortis setting into their rotting corpses, they feed on qi (our life-force) rather than blood, and can be stopped by everything from the blood of a black dog to spilled rice.

Things you shouldn't care about: Every single actor in this movie (as well as almost all of the crew) never worked on a single other film, with two exceptions: Ernst Mausser (36 films) and Sorapong Chatree (57 films). Neither of those actors were even given credits in the original film!

Genre Mashing: Botched

This is one of those movies that's hard to talk about if you've not seen it. It's one best watched with no prior knowledge whatsoever. So, if you trust us, and you should, stop reading this and watch Botched right now! But if you need some further prodding, read on, but know even without spoilers, there are spoilers...

Plot starts out like this: Ritchie (Stephen Dorff) is having a string of bad luck. He's got one last chance to pay off a family debt to Russian mobsters by pulling a heist for them in a highrise in Moscow. The heist goes belly up when building security stops the elevator the thieves are riding on a floor of the building that's under renovation. And then shit gets seriously weird.

What to watch for: Plot twists you couldn't predict if you tried, fantastic casting, and loads of blood.

What we will tell you: This is the best heist-gone-wrong movie ever made.