I never had the pleasure of visiting The Deuce as New York's 42nd Street was called during its heyday as a venue for exploitation cinema. On the one hand it sounds like it was one scary ass neighborhood, but if some rundown theater was running all of the Ilsa Films back to back or maybe a Sonny Chiba marathon, or perhaps an Andy Milligan retrospective, I might have been tempted to take the risk. For a fascinating history of films on 42nd Street I highly recommend Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford's book Sleazoid Express, and I have to say 42nd Street Forever, Vol. 3 - Exploitation Explosion recently released by AV Maniacs and Synapse Films also makes for a great introduction to the exploitation films of this period.

I've collected tons of trailer compilations over the years, and this is easily one of the best. There's a whopping 47 trailers here, some of which will have B-movie buffs scouring Ebay and Amazon for the film itself while others will leave you shocked and appalled that anyone would waste film stock on such an atrocity. The deal is sweetened by the addition of a handful of TV spots, some of which cover the same films as the trailers. But the highlight of the disk is the audio commentary, a feature I've never seen on a trailer comp. Edwin Samuelson of AV Maniacs, Fangoria Managing Editor Mike Gingold and Film Historian Chris Poggiali provide some fascinating background. What kind of movies are we talking about here? The trailers are grouped by sub-genres covering every category from martial arts to horror to dopey Porkies-inspired comedies.
For martial arts flicks we have Wild Wild West star Robert Conrad slumming it in Sudden Death, a phillipino produced action flick directed by Eddie Romero, the man behind The Twilight People and Mad Doctor of Blood Island. We also have the tale of an amputee martial artist with The One Armed Executioner, and kickboxing champion Joe Lewis makes a failed bid for karate film stardom with Jaguar Lives. Django star Franco Nero stars in Enter the Ninja, and we have Lightning Swords of Death which was one of the entries in the classic Baby Cart series.

Moving on to horror flicks, there's a number of Exorcist-inspired posession movies, including Beyond the Door (pictured above) which has Nanny and the Professor's Juliette Mills cursing and turning her head all the way around. Years before Bruce Campbell fought his own possessed hand in Evil Dead 2, Stuart Whitman had trouble with his own devilish appendage in Demonoid. There are a couple of psychokinetic horror flicks like Patrick (telekinetic paraplegic) and Jennifer (Carrie, but with snakes) before the disk changes gears again and tosses out some killer animal movies like Phase IV (smart ants), Bug (incendiary cockroaches), The Pack (killer dogs) and the easy enough to figure out Alligator, Killer Fish and Shark's Treasure.

The R-rated T & A comedies are probably the disk's weakest point. A comedy that fails to be funny is about as unpleasant as it gets. At the very least, it's kind of interesting to see how trailers back in the day weren't necessarily shy about showing the gratuitous nudity that was one of the film's reasons for existing in the first place. Hot T-Shirts, Cheeleaders' Wild Weekend, Summer School Teachers (starring Candice Rialson), and King Frat are on display here with Gorp being of extra interest for not having destroyed the careers of Fran Drescher, Dennis Quaid, and Rosanna Arquette.

Things turn more salacious as the disk delves into the women in prison genre with Prison Girls (which was released in 3-D), 1,000 Convicts and a Woman and Chain Gang Women. While this genre can be interesting just for the sake of seeing how far the film makers will go, generally once you've seen one you've seen them all. From there we jump to a couple of interesting looking thrillers including The Penthouse and The House by the Lake, before jumping into naughty nurse movies with Night Call Nurses, The Young Nurses, and Candy Stripe Nurses.

The one hardcore porn flick in the bunch, The Life and Times of Xaviera Hollander, is notable for being the target of an obscenity lawsuit, legal action from the real life Xaviera Hollander, and a lawsuit from Disney because of an orgy scene involving people wearing nothing but mouse ears. That trailer is paired with the R-rated The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, which was made with Hollander's approval and boasting a cast that includes Martine Beswick, Phil Silvers and Adam West.

Survive, an exploitation film take on the plane crash and subsequent acts of cannibalism that were also the basis for Alive, and Guyana: Cult of the Damned, which was based on the Jonestown suicides/murders, form the tabloid trash section of the DVD. Savage Streets, which stars Linda Blair and Linnea Quigley has the distinction of being one of the sleaziest films of all time, or so we are told in the audio commentary. Frankly, I consider that a challenge and plan to track this one down, though it doesn't appear to have made it to DVD.

Next up are a pair of films exploiting the trucking/CB craze of the 1970s, the most interetsting of which is Convoy, based on the C.W. McCall novelty song of the same name and directed by Hollywood legend Sam Peckinpah. Observant film buffs will notice that the duck hood ornament on Kris Kristofferson's rig was also used for Stuntman Mike's car in Death Proof. The other trailer in this category is for High Ballin' with Jerry Reed and Peter Fonda. The disk rounds out with a Charles Bronson double feature -- From Noon Till Three and Telefon -- the latter of which features Bronson as a Russian with no accent. And finally we have a pair of thrillers, Lies and the steamy Tattoo with Bruce Dern and Maud Adams.

More often than not, they do put all the good stuff in the trailers, making this disk a pretty awesome distillation B-movie insanity. I can't recommend this highly enough.