Color, 2016, 203m.
Garagehouse Pictures (B lu-ray) (US R0 HD) / WS (1.78:1) (16:9)

Trailer TraumaTrailer TraumaIt goes without saying that Garagehouse's mammoth first edition of Trailer Trauma was a gift from the movie gods, but that turned out to be just the tip of this bloodstained iceberg. Trailer Trauma 2: Drive-In Monsterama focuses exclusively on horror (and horror adjacent) titles, mostly confined to films from the '60s and '70s with a huge helping of goodies never seen on home video (and, in fact, unseen by most human eyes for decades).

Here we get a whopping 96 trailers running way, way longer than the first volume, covering pretty much every horror base you can imagine. First up is "GMRX," an early MPAA guide to the new rating system before it was tweaked a bit later in the '70s, followed by "Monsters Do Have Their Place," a cute anti-pay TV spot using monster paintings to encourage people to sign a petition to keep television free. (We all know how that turned out.) Then it's off to the races with Superbeast / Daughters of Satan, a double bill of Filipino horror from United Artists (with the former still popping up on MGM HD from time to time, amazingly enough). Weirdly, there's no actual footage from Daughters (or Tom Selleck) anywhere in here. Then it's the much-loved drive-in favorite, The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, with Kerwin Matthews and George Gaynes in a monster romp only recently given its first home video release ever from Scream Factory. Then it's bikers and furry fangs galore with Werewolves on Wheels, the American edition of Christopher Lee's final, graphic Dracula Hammer Trailer Traumaouting with Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (better known now as The Satanic Rites of Dracula, promoted here as "The King of the Undead Meets the Queen of the Zombies!"), and a super rare, delirious trailer for the Paul Naschy vampire saga Dracula's Great Love. Then we shift gears to Japan with the the giant rubber monster antics of The War of the Trailer TraumaGargantuas with Russ Tamblyn talking on a phone and running through the woods and the perilous space exploration of Latitude Zero, then switching back to Spain again for a much earlier Naschy monster mash, Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, featuring an absolutely incredible narrator. The Vampire-Beast Craves Blood is a more obscure G-rated(!) retitling of the '70s British outing The Blood Beast Terror (great to finally see this title popping up on video), while the pairing of Bloodsuckers / Blood Thirst has been a staple since the Something Weird days but seen here in far better condition. Cannibalism is on the menu next with the endearing macabre horror comedy The Folks at Red Wolf Inn will make you even more frustrated we don't have a decent uncut release in any format, and another Something Weird perennial pops up with the hilariously dubbed Victor Buono serial killer cannibal film, The Mad Butcher.

Carnivorous is a retitling of the great Ruggero Deodato survival epic Jungle Holocaust (complete with a terrific, long opening disclaimer), and Island of the Damned is, of course, the now elusive AIP reworking of the superb Spanish shocker, Who Can Kill a Child? You'll get a bit of whiplash next with a German-language trailer for Sergio Martino's Island of the Fishmen, doing its best to pass this off as a horror film almost as outrageously as the American version, Screamers. It wouldn't be a complete monster collection without some Jerry Warren, so you'll get a dose with his last film, the zero budget charmer Frankenstein Island -- followed of course by the last Hammer Frankenstein film, the great Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, with its Paramount trailer Trailer Traumathe studio couldn't bother to include on the actual DVD release.

Another Paramount title whose trailer was missing from the official release is also here, the cult favorite Captain Kronos- Vampire Hunter, written and directed by the great Brian Clemens. From there we get five trailers that have been mainstays on compilations for many years, albeit in HD here: the MGM giallo combo of Black Belly of the Tarantula and The Weekend Murders, the earlier period giallo The Murder Clinic, Lucio Fulci’s Schizoid (the AIP reworking of A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin), the sexy and trippy The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, and the AIP release of Mario Bava’s Baron Trailer TraumaBlood.

Those titles are all lots of fun, but chances are you’ve seen most of those in some form or another. Now here’s where the disc really starts to swerve into new territory and piles on the eye-popping rarities almost without letup. For some reason the American trailer for Massimo Dallamano’s decadent, delirious, and oh-so-mod Dorian Gray has been unobtainable until now, and it was absolutely worth the wait. Then it’s a triple header of big studio supernatural horror with the body-swapping 20th Century Fox madness of The Mephisto Waltz (a terrific piece of editing that makes the film look much more intense than it really is), a killer trailer for the perverse and excellent The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (which is insanely unavailable anywhere in the world on any format since the VHS days), and yet another Paramount rarity missing from the DVD release, the twisted Shirley MacLaine vehicle The Possession of Joel Delaney (which only hints at the lunatic, deeply uncomfortable levels the film actually reaches).

From there we briefly jump back to 1962 for the Lopert Pictures Corporation double bill of  Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus (better known now as Eyes without a Face, one of the greatest horror films ever made) and the lovably cracked US/Japanese co-production, The Manster. Perhaps the craziest trailer here is Banana Monster, the reissue of John Landis’s gorilla monster comedy, Schlock, complete Trailer Traumawith a call out to one of the director’s most famous recurring jokes. The monkey business continues with the 1973 Saxton Films trailer for The Gorilla Gang (five years after its German release), one of the weirdest of the later Edgar Wallace krimi titles. One of the most-requested Universal ‘70s horror titles pops up next, the feline phobia favorite Eye of the Cat, followed by more animal antics with the rat attack favorite Willard (another one frustratingly missing on home video at the moment) and the ‘70s arachnid attacks of Kiss of the Tarantula. Trailer Trauma

The Canuxploitation chiller Cathy's Curse will be welcomed by its surprisingly hefty legion of fans (especially over at Kindertrauma), while Jess Franco pops up at last with his witch persecution saga, The Demons (complete with some of that trippy ‘70s electro-rock score). Then it’s more magical antics with the regional horror staple Mark of the Witch and Norman J. Warren’s Argento-inspired Terror, followed by a waxworks pairing with trailers for Terror in the Wax Museum (featuring a past-their-prime Ray Milland and Elsa Lanchester) and Crown International’s Nightmare in Wax (featuring Cameron Mitchell in whatever phase he was in). Speaking of Crown, there’s also the Al Adamson zero-budget vampire antics of Blood of Dracula's Castle. The baffling ‘60s robot gothic Castle of Evil comes next (any chance of Paramount pulling this one from the heap of Republic titles from Blu-ray), followed by Roger Corman’s three-day wonder The Terror and a duo of scream-worthy trailers, the horror-tinged, multi-national Euro swashbuckler Tower of the Screaming Virgins and the later Italian-Spanish gothic Scream of the Demon Lover. Of course there’s more title thematic continuity to be found with the Amicus crawling hand favorite And Now the Screaming Starts and the AIP release of one of the greatest of all Euro horror films, the Spanish shocker The House That Screamed (come on and release this one already, MGM!).

The title play continues with a batch of “house” films starting off with the most obscure one, Hell House Girls, an incredible, psychedelic come-on for a UK reform school girl programmer originally entitled The Smashing Bird I Used to Know. More familiar are the Vincent Price Euro-trash excesses of House of 1000 Dolls, the Paul Naschy giallo-inspired Trailer Traumashocker House of Psychotic Women, and the ‘70s gothic chiller House of Seven Corpses. However, the real gem in this section is easily the magnificent Canadian rape-revenge classic House by the Lake, aka Death Weekend, which is Trailer Traumasadly still languishing over in the vaults at Lionsgate. The usual MGM trailer for Dan Curtis’s effective Burnt Offerings is followed by the substantially less frightening UK teen proto-slasher Horror House with Frankie Avalon. British horror distributor Tigon gets double representation here with the so-so Beast in the Cellar and the stellar cult classic Blood on Satan's Claw, with a return to America for another slasher forerunner, the eerie Silent Night, Bloody Night (one of the many trailers narrated by Adolph Caesar), and the drive-in double header of Women and Bloody Terror and Night of Bloody Horror, both overwrought and frequently reissued.

The 1972 AIP combo pairing of Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (its final mummy film, albeit without a traditional mummy) and Night of the Blood Monster (the PG version of Jess Franco’s The Bloody Judge) still makes zero sense today, while the Allied Artists trailer for the pulpy sex-horror French offering The Blood Rose is very welcome after its absence from the Mondo Macabro DVD. And the red stuff keeps flowing with Blood Demon (better known as the Christopher Lee German outing The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism), the long-running Filipino drive-in thrills of Brides of Blood, Al Adamson’s gory mad scientist film Brain of Blood, and more Filipino plasma sucking from director Gerardo de Leon with The Vampire People (aka The Blood Drinkers on DVD) and Curse of the Vampires (aka Blood of the Vampires). The vamp trend continues with the peculiar 1971 horror/sort-of-comedy Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? (out on Something Weird DVD), which is immediately dwarfed by a very welcome HD upgrade for the trailers for Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, which haven’t seen the light of day since their ancient Screen Gems VHS days due to director Paul Morrissey’s hatred of those particular retitlings. (An ‘80s 3-D reissue trailer for the latter film was included on the first Trailer Trauma disc.) We’re back to more traditional territory with the familiar trailers for the mild Trailer TraumaItalian semi-giallo The Embalmer, the Robert Quarry programmer The Deathmaster, the outrageous AIP favorite The Thing with Two Heads (Milland again!), and a manic Klaus Kinski in the Edgar Wallace mystery Creature with the Trailer TraumaBlue Hand. However, we soon dive into more rarified waters with the creepy Paramount-released Amicus thriller The Psychopath (a great Freddie Francis title still without a decent legit home video release anywhere -- and check out that rhyming narration!), the not-really-Amicus horror anthology Tales that Witness Madness (whose Paramount trailer failed to materialize on Olive Films’ Blu-ray or DVD releases), and the American trailer for Jess Franco’s tawdry Fu Manchu adventure, Kiss and Kill. That last film’s kinky overtones take center stage in the AIP trailer for the ill-fated, X-rated biopic De Sade with a strangely cast Kier Dullea, followed by Computer Killers (a drab Hallmark retitling of the wonderfully absurd and gory Horror Hospital, narrated here by a ridiculous Rod Serling impersonator), a very young Christopher Walken in the downbeat sci-fi film The Mind Snatchers (aka The Happiness Cage), and the odd 1965 Warner Bros. combo of the nifty Jeffrey Hunter noir Brainstorm and the UK Gordon Hessler mystery The Woman Who Wouldn't Die, now out on DVD under its original title, Catacombs.

Fans of the excellent Let's Scare Jessica to Death will be ecstatic to see its very memorable, beautifully edited Paramount trailer here at last after its absence from the DVD release, while the Bert I. Gordon film Necromancy (featuring Orson Welles with a fake nose) is represented here with its rare Cinerama trailer before it was drastically reworked as The Witching. Night of the Eagle is the original UK for the much-loved occult shocker Burn, Witch, Burn (which had a very different trailer crafted by AIP), and despite the fact that Sony hasn’t included a trailer on any of its releases, we finally get one for the eerie satanic scope favorite, The Brotherhood of Satan. The British religious mania oddity Beware My Brethren is a retitling for a film more commonly now known as The Fiend, while the Greek horror film Land of the Minotaur with Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence is now more readily available uncut as The Devil’s Men. Trailer Trauma

Trailer TraumaWe get back to Hammer again (not for the last time) with the American trailer for the modest fantasy The Lost Continent, and one can imagine the fun audiences had with the combo represented by the gory sci-fi horror classic Island of Terror and the gruesome teleportation mishaps of The Projected Man. The flawed but fascinating H.P. Lovecraft adaptation The Shuttered Room gets a suitably creepy trailer for its Seven Arts release, and at last we finally get the long-missing trailer for the Amicus anthology Torture Garden, which hasn’t been on any releases of the film itself. (It’s a doozy, too.) In the Devil's Garden is one of the many titles for another giallo-inspired film, a UK mystery also known as Assault and The Creepers, among many other titles). Too bad the UK and US DVDs are both seriously lacking; hopefully Rank will try remastering this one eventually. The Devil's Nightmare is the usual trailer for this insane Euro potboiler with Erika Blanc bumping off sinful tourists, and Devils of Darkness is a halfhearted Fox mishmash of monster tropes out on DVD paired up with Witchcraft. Back to retitlings, the Joan Crawford pregnancy shocker The Devil Within Her is another one we’ve seen around before, though sometimes under other titles like The Monster and I Don’t Want To Be Born! Finally we get two more doses of Hammer with the Columbia double header of The Gorgon and Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (talk about an eye candy pairing) and a combo trailer for The Old Dark House, the black-and-white edition of William Castle's comic remake with Tom Poston, and Maniac, the fun Hammer thriller with Kerwin Matthews. And hey, why not finish things off with a fresh scan of the Jerry Gross trailer for Lucio Fulci's beloved gutmuncher classic, Zombie?

The trailers in this collection represent the combined efforts and collections of DVD Drive-in’s George Reis and Garagehouse’s Harry Guerro, and the quality for the most part is excellent with very little color fading and the usual minor amounts of damage due to projector wear and tear. Reis also appears for an audio commentary with The Bloody Ape director Keith J. Crocker, chatting extensively (and nonstop for the entire running time!) about how the release came about and offering trivia about each of the films as they unspool. Also included on the disc are bonus trailers for the first volume and another Garagehouse essential title, Ninja Busters. Dig that crazy organ music on the main menu, too.

Reviewed on May 2, 2016.