If you were a horror fan in the 1980s, you knew of a VHS tape that some friend of a friend’s cousin had in his collection. It was called Mad Ron’s Prevues From Hell, and it was a Holy Grail of sorts for genre lads. It was about zombies taking over a movie theater while the annoying Nick Pawlow and his equally annoying ventriloquist dummy zombie, Happy, played horror movie trailers from the ‘60s and ‘70s to keep the undead occupied.
Yeah, the “story” was a dumb idea, and Pawlow was horrible to watch, but seeing the trailers was the main attraction. Thankfully, everyone involved knew that, so they kept the story to a minimum and just focused on the good stuff. These trailers included The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Love Me Deadly, Sisters, Deep Red, Bloodeaters, The Mutations, Carnage, Horror of the Zombies and dozens more. If you could get your hands on the tape, it was well worth it. If you couldn’t, well you were screwed until now with the arrival of the DVD.
The DVD has a few extras (mostly pointless and sometimes without sound) and plays up the fact that two of the guys who did special effects went on to work on Avatar and Millennium, but the fun is still in the trailers. They are proof that they don’t make them like they used to.
If you were one of those people hunting this down in the late ‘80s and beyond, you can now get your sweaty mitts on it. It is well worth the wait, though you may want to fast forward anytime you see Pawlow come on screen.
