Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. It’s rather a light week, presumably due to the holiday and/or the kickoff of the Toronto Film Festival (which serves as something of a starter’s pistol for the fall movie season), but you can check out the meager pickings after the jump.
The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)
Your author is one of the brave souls who actually sat through The Human Centipede (First Sequence), though it was ultimately an endurance test; it’s a cheap, repugnant slab of geek-show filmmaking, wherein any engagement whatsoever is impossible because we spend the entire second half feeling a) repulsed, and b) sorry for the poor actors. Walking out of that screening like the survivor of a natural disaster, I wondered who would want to make it, who would want to distribute it, and who would want to see it, but the picture’s notoriety apparently inspired enough people to plunk down their dollars, so here we are, the least-anticipated picture of the year (decade? 21st century?). And here’s its teaser. This is a thing that now exists, so I hope you’re proud of yourselves.
The Big Year
It takes real skill to put Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, and Jack Black into a trailer together and not generate one single, solitary laugh. So… congrats? All three of these guys are capable of being either very funny or very lazy, and it appears that we’ve got the latter versions on hand for this male-bonding midlife-crisis comedy/drama from the director of Marley and Me (seriously, they brag about that in the trailer). If this movie wasn’t the result of a studio exec comparing the grosses of Wild Hogs and The Bucket List, I’ll eat my hat.
Retreat
Hey, it’s that movie about the global pandemic! No the other movie about the global pandemic. Carl Tibbets’s three-handed thriller looks like a cross between Contagion and Dead Calm, which is semi-promising; Cillian Murphy hasn’t been in a bad movie in years, and Thandie Newton hasn’t been in a good movie in years, so that’s a draw. But we’re looking forward to seeing Jamie Bell do dark, and the premise is certainly intriguing.
The Weird World of Blowfly
If you spend much time perusing the comedy section at your local vinyl outlet — as we’ve been known to do — you’ll eventually run across an album (or several) by “Blowfly,” the filthy, rapping alter ego of soul singer/songwriter Clarence Reid. His “party records” were underground hits in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and earned him enough fans to keep him working today, though not always in the most glamorous venues. Jonathan Furmanski’s documentary screened at the 2010 South by Southwest film festival; this trailer promises a raw and emotional portrait the influential cult comic.