This third Trailer Trauma disk, easily the best of the entries I've seen, offers a little less than seven and a half hours of horror movie trailers from the 1980's, plus a commentary for each year of the decade.
I was a child/early teenager during the 1980's. I saw only two of these films in a theater when they first played (Swamp Thing and Maximum Overdrive - in retrospect, I wish I had picked more wisely). I do remember seeing newspapers ads and television previews for many of these movies. In addition, I have fond memories of the video boxes of most of these films in the VHS days. Since then, I have seen the majority of the films on VHS, DVD, or Blu-ray. The 1980's is my decade for horror movies, and this collection delivers. I was humbled to find that there were three 1980's horror films on the collection that I had never heard of (Raiders of the Living Dead, The Kiss, and Heaven Becomes Hell).
I could nitpick about some of the choices (the revenge film Ms. 45, the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors and the nudie flick Stripped to Kill 2 are horror movies?) and some of the omissions (missing personal faves include: Born of Fire, Brain Damage, Forbidden World, The Gates of Hell, The Lady in White, Razorback, and Stagefright). However, I am happy by how many films I love did make the cut.
As for the commentaries, each year in the decade has a new commentator(s) except 1986 and 1987, which are both covered by Stephen Romano of the Shock Festival trailer book/DVD. Since I usually enjoy listening to the commentaries on the 42nd Street Forever collections, it is no surprise that my favorite two commentaries were by two of the 42nd Street Forever gang, Chris Poggiali covering 1981 and Michael Gingold covering 1983. I wish they had been paired together for all ten years. Also worth a listen to are the commentaries for 1985, with the incredibly fast speaking Grady Hendrix, for 1987 with Stephen Romano, and for 1988, with Dan Buskirk. I also admired film director Ted Geoghegan for his enthusiasm (he seems to love doing this commentary!) even if his information is not always correct. The commentaries for 1980, 1984, 1986 (also Stephen Romano), and 1989 are not essential, worth a listen once for diehards like myself, but they could also be easily skipped.
Trailer Trauma 3: 80s Horrorthon is a love letter to 1980's horror movies. For some viewers the trailers here will be nostalgic. For others, like myself, the trailers will be more bittersweet (I saw Maximum Overdrive in a theater but not Aliens? True, I was a preteen, but still).
