6 Films that Worked Better as Trailers

It’s widely agreed that the most effective trailers are short films in and of themselves. Beyond that, there are some cases where a trailer is a far better piece of entertainment than the film it’s advertising could ever hope to be.

It’s better to think of them as excellent short films with awful extended cuts, little packets of thrills, scares and laughs that manage to coax 2 minutes’ worth of serviceable spectacle out of the questionable source material. Here are 5 solid examples of this bizarre phenomenon:

Jarhead

On the strength of American Beauty, Road to Perdition and everything else, Sam Mendes had proven to be a pretty safe bet. The idea of him helming a relevant, challenging war film with a stellar cast had a lot of people salivating. Myself included.

The Trailer: Firstly we’re treated to an amusing but uncomfortable view of Jake Gyllenhaal being humiliated by his sergeant (Jamie Foxx), made to play reveille with his mouth. It seems initially like we’re looking at a tongue-in-cheek, boot camp comedic drama. Someone mistakes their sleeping bag for gas gear, paintball to the face, other hijinks.

Then, as Kanye West’s Jesus Walks begins to play things take a very dark turn. We’re treating to galling sights of oil fires, fearful soldiers and 0utright carnage. Some interview footage of soldiers extoling the patriotic honor of their work is shown, but Gyllenhaal is far more upfront: ‘There are bombs, and I’m afraid’. We’ve been wrong footed, this is as real and gut wrenching as it gets, this is reality’s cold hard fist in an unsuspecting stomach.

The Film: While it was still a very interesting, beautifully shot film, it fell short of its promises. Jarhead is one of those films that ultimately ends up feeling more like ‘a bunch of stuff that happened’ than a connected narrative and subsequently the message gets a little lost.

 

The Strangers

There’s no shortage of bad horror, it far outweighs the good in this day and age and it’s usually relatively easy to ferret out the contaminated ones. Their trailers tend to be an unconvincing string of narrative beats interspersed with epilepsy-hating flash cuts and a noise that sounds like someone hitting a bass drum with a bongo drum. Brian Bertino didn’t exactly seem to be breaking new ground when news of 2008’s The Strangers broke, a home-invasion, 70s style slasher with Liv Tyler and Some Other Guy.

The Trailer: It starts out simply enough, the (seemingly) happy couple all loved up on some romantic excursion in an idyllic corner of Who Gives A Shit, PA, then there’s a bumping noise. Sure, we think to ourselves, we’re in for a few ominous taglines and a vague glimpse of something peeking into a window and that’ll be that. Yeah, not so much. Not long into the trailer we see Tyler stood uncomfortably alone in the kitchen and a masked assailant just steps into the back of frame behind her and watches for a few awful seconds. Shit! We think. This is not how it’s supposed to go.

For the rest of the trailer we are again and again granted horrifying money shots of the titular strangers as they crawl out of various shadows and mists of blurred focus, all soundtracked by a broken record player desperately attempting to reprise Gillian Welch’s My First Lover. The chaotic assault is punctuated with a final plea from Tyler:

“Why are you doing this to us?”

“Because you were home.”

Fucking. Terrifying. Putting aside the fact that they borrowed the line from a Richard Pryor routine.

The Film: While it wasn’t exactly the worst film ever made, it’s pretty dire. For all the agreeably ominous ‘creeping out of the shadows’ shots, it’s hard to escape the fact that The Strangers is essentially a film about 2 idiots trying their utmost to be routinely humiliated by a trio of rookie murderers who probably couldn’t believe their luck at how easy murdering turned out to be.

The saving grace of the film is that the camerawork used to such great effect in the trailer remains fairly impressive. The shot of the assailant silently observing Liv Tyler in the kitchen is laudable in and of itself, though I’d never recommend watching an entire movie on the strength of one shot. The French effort Them is a far better example of how to do this kind of thing.

 

Man of Steel

There was plenty of excitement in the run up to Zach Snyder’s dark, moody new take on everyone’s favorite flying Jesus allegory. The last attempt to bring Superman back to public attention has resulted in a rather embarrassing damp squib that even a scenery-chewing Kevin Spacey couldn’t salvage.

The Trailer: The first shot we’re offered is an ominous fuzz of TV static. Gradually the words YOU ARE NOT ALONE shiver into view and an ominous Michael Shannon begins to speak.

“My name is General Zod.”

Butt cheeks, start your clenching.

We’re hit with an onslaught of angry brass and somewhat grating but admittedly thematically appropriate brostep wub as the static rolls back and an invading force of mean-looking Kryptonians appear on screen. We’re offered a few glimpses of a bearded, vagrant Superman amongst the shots of creepy, skeletal space armor and the gigantic, mutated cousin of The Claw from Toy Story coming to rest over the Metropolis skyline.

A breathless, guitar-led piece takes over the soundtrack duty and footage of Superman punching things into other things and Dragonball Z-style aerial combat hurls us into a breathless stupor. In the final moments the updated S logo creeps into view and it’s all over. Butt cheeks, at ease.

The Film: It’s now fairly well-documented that Man of Steel turned out to be one of the most divisive superhero films ever made. Critics of the film sighted a nonsensical Kevin Costner, worrying levels of disregard for human life and an overly austere screenplay as the key flaws. Snyder is developing a rather unfortunate habit of making high-spectacle films that fall apart because of poor scripting and Man of Steel is perhaps the worst offender.