Coming Distractions

Rating:
Summary: The Good, The Bad and the Sub-par
Review: Call me a sucker, but I couldn't pass up a DVD with 71 Troma trailers. Granted, I've seen most of these a million times, and I usually skip past them when I'm watching a Troma movie at home. But I thought it would be a great thing to have around since I'm a huge Troma fan. And for the most part I was right. This DVD is lots of fun. I get to skip past the trailers I've seen before while getting acquainted with the movies I've never heard of. The trailers themselves are little miracles. They make some really awful movies seem downright phenomenal. I don't know how I've lived without owning Fatty Drives the Bus!
Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems with this DVD. For some reason, there is no "Play All" feature, so you have to manually select each and every trailer that you want to play. After the selected trailer has played, the DVD returns to the menu, and instead of selecting the next trailer, it keeps the trailer you just watched highlighted. I know that is a small detail, but when you want to have these trailers on in the background at a party, or you're drunk and don't feel like thinking, you too will be perturbed that they didn't make this DVD user friendly.
The trailers are divided into 5 categories. There are the Troma Top 10, which frankly I'm glad are segregated from the rest of the trailers because if I ever see the Sgt. Kabukiman trailer again, I'll go nuts. The other categories are horror, comedy, action, and documentary. There is little rhyme or reason in these categories, as Redneck Zombies is filed under horror but Bugged is under comedy. Either movie can fall into both categories, and Troma has made very few straight horror movies, so the classification makes little sense. They should also have a soft-core porn category. Eve's Beach Fantasy is thrown in with the comedies. Having seen this movie, I can tell you it isn't at all funny, though I did have a smile on my face the whole way through, if ya know what I mean. There is no reason to have a documentary category, other than to let the really dumb Troma fans know that these movies are real and the ones with the radioactive mutants aren't. Seriously, there are about five documentary trailers, and two of the trailers are for "making-of" shorts for the Toxic Avenger IV and Terror Firmer, so they aren't even real movies. Personally, since Troma is making a big deal about their 30th anniversary this year, I think the trailers should have been arranged chronologically so the fans can see how far they've come in 30 years.
The extra features are okay. Anyone who has three or more Troma DVDs knows that the bonus material tends to repeat itself on every disc. Yet the people at Troma added some marginally interesting stuff, including an interview with the unbelievably gorgeous Tromette Tiffany Shepis, and a couple music videos. Overall, if you're a long time Troma fan, then you've seen 90% of this before. Still, it's kinda nice to have all of this on one little disc.