There was a time not long ago, though it seems like eons have since passed, when there were no DVDs; no "internet" to speak of. It was a rugged, primitive time, when intrepid seekers (diehard fanatics and the merely curious alike) had to undergo great, almost Herculean feats of digging and research to find, say, Cannibal Holocaust or other once-obscure films to view on an archaic format called VHS (or, worse yet, Betamax...shudder). Though the going was rough, time and effort usually paid off; even if the payoff came in the form of a grainy, crusty, third or fourth-generation VHS dupe with no cover art and (shock! horror!) no special features. We took what we could get. Aspect ratio, schmashpect ratio. Quality be damned! We wanted our meat movies, and we wanted them any way we could get them. Sometimes, all we could get amounted to a little taste here and there; a single reel, a trailer, and what have you. Small though the morsels may have been, they were invariably delicious and satisfying bits of sheer joy, and we savored them...oh how we savored them. Enter a truly odd-duck of a phenomenon...the trailer compilation as a "party flick". Groups of fans, and non-but-soon-to-be-converted-fans, would gather around the flickering light of your Dad's old 26-inch console-style TV, soothed by the gentle humming of the VHS tape within, and watch these collections of clips and trailers as a source of not just entertainment, but almost masturbatory glee. Eventually, someone came up with the idea of making a "film" with a "story" that framed or loosely tied together the trailers, and thus was borne the infamous, and I contend, important, Mad Ron's Prevues From Hell. Important why, you ask? Well, as I mentioned, when this little gem hit the shoddy VHS bootleg circuit, it was infinitely more readily available than most of the films whose trailers appear therein. Further, it's a genuinely fun and funky piece of history. The trailers covered span mostly films of the horror, a dash of action, a smattering of porn, but all exploitation from the early '60's to the very late '70's. So, to start off the "review" (review in quotes because it's damned near impossible to review a film like this in the standard way), I'll give you a little joke...what's 90% gooey, gritty, bloody, kick-ass, nasty, trailer goodness and 10% corny, ridiculous, borderline stupid, but strangely humorous linking commentary? That's right guys and ghouls, it's Mad Ron's Prevues From Hell. Relive the goodness...

The synopsis...
...but that's kind of impossible, right? Well, sort of. There is a "framing story" here. A bunch of zombie types wander into a crumbling cinema, grab a bunch severed body parts (for, you know, snacking and shit) at the concessions stand, and hunker down to watch the shenanigans onscreen. Frothing, chained-up projectionist "Mad Ron" runs a series of forty-some-odd classic horror and exploitation trailers from the booth, while ostensible "host", a really dorky looking guy (and horrible, horrible, oh my holy sweet merciful living fuck is he horrible ventriloquist) named Nick and his zombie/dummy companion named "Happy" interject from time to time with godawful puns, lewd (by 80's standards) jokes, and odd bits of interaction. Meanwhile, more and more shuffling undead fill the theatre, and are entertained to no end by the trailers. Finally, a would-be "thief" tries to make off with Mad Ron's stash of trailers, and (spoiler alert, if you're really fucking worried about spoiling a trailer compilation) Happy makes his eyeballs explode and the guy bleeds to death. That's, basically, all there is to it. Certainly, the main attractions here are the trailers themselves, though to be totally fair, some of the zombie makeups and bits of "extracurricular" gore are pretty well done. But jumpin' Jesus on a pogo-stick, are those jokes awful. Did I mention that Nick is a horrible ventriloquist? And a dork? I digress...

Here's the list of trailers on display (in alphabetical order, not the order in which they appear in the movie):

Africa: Blood and Guts (1966)
Black Christmas (1974)
Blood and Lace (1971)
Bloodeaters (1980)
Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)
El Buque Maldito (1975)
Cannibal Girls (1973)
House of Exorcism (1973)
Beyond The Door (1974)
Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)
Color Me Blood Red (1965)
Torso (1973)
Deranged (1974)
Lady Frankenstein (1971)
Flesh Feast (1970)
God Told Me To (1976)
Night of the Bloody Apes (1968)
I Dismember Mama (1974)
I Drink Your Blood (1970)
Ilsa: She Wolf of The S.S. (1975)
La lama nel corpo (1967)
Love Me Deadly (1973)
Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968)
Malenka (1969)
Miss Muerte (1966)
Night of Bloody Horror (1969)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
The Blood Spattered Bride (1972)
Kill Baby Kill (1966)
Man From Deep River (1972)
The Devil's Nightmare (1971)
Deep Red (1975)
Twitch Of The Death Nerve (1971)
The House That Screamed (1969)
Silent Night, Bloody Night (1974)
Sisters (1973)
Tales from the Crypt (1972)
The Corpse Grinders (1972)
The Ghastly Ones (1968)
The Last House On The Left (1972)
The Mutations (1973)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The Thrill Killers (1964)
The Undertaker and His Pals (1967)
The Vault of Horror (1973)
The Wizard of Gore (1970)
Three on a Meathook (1972)
Tower of Evil (1972)
Two Thousand Maniacs (1964)

...fucking whew. And not a bad one in the bunch, I might add. Oh, certainly many of these trailers represent bad films...of that there can be no doubt. But we're not talking about the actual movies, here. No, we're talking about the lost art form of the exploitation movie trailer. Allow me to wax philosophical for a moment, and forgive the admittedly self-righteous pretension while you're at it. They just don't make trailers (or, technically, "previews") like this any more. The screen is literally awash with explicit gore; amputations, stabbings, slashings, bludgeonings, disembowelings, you name it. Further, there are on display enormous quantities of (to borrow a phrase from "South Park") "Major Bewbage", all entirely gratuitous, of course. The reality is that the producers of these previews knew exactly what their audiences wanted, what would pique their interest. There were no vagaries, only pure intent to sell tickets based on mayhem, boobs, and buckets of bright red fluids. Even now, with mainstream exploitation movies like the Saw series, and others, being advertised at predictable and regular intervals every single year, I have yet to see a trailer for one of those movies that even attempts to achieve the sheer, giddy inappropriateness and the heights of truth in advertising that were achieved so easily by any given one of the trailers on view in Mad Ron's Prevues From Hell. As I said, this is an important document of a long-gone era.

Some cynics will, no doubt, lambast Mad Ron's Prevues From Hell for being an amateurish, silly, and not particularly "high quality" production. Well, honestly, go fuck yourselves. While all of those things may be absolutely true, that's the ever-lovin' point of the whole exercise. It's like yelling at poop for being brownish and stinky. It simply is what it is, and I love it. The movie, not poop. Just so we're clear. The trailers range from grimy, grainy, faded, washed out, and altogether rough to suprisingly clear and clearly well-cared-for. The shot-on-video linking sequences are grainy and extremely dated looking, but again, all of these things add to the overall charm of the whole affair. It's presented in an aspect ratio resembling 1.33:1, but it's not quite right. The trailers are framed within the overall 1.33:1 matting, and some of them fill the screen, while others appear to have been taken from widescreen sources. In any event, the trailers are presented just as they would have been seen on cinema screens during their appropriate time frames. Luckily, there is one aspect of MRPFH that absolutely works perfectly, and that's the pacing; it's like a bullet train of gore, exploitation, boobs, and silliness. So it's got that going for it...which is nice.

I'm going to digress for a moment and say a few things about a word that I've thrown around several times in this review, a word that gets thrown around quite a lot in general. That word is "exploitation", in the sense of "exploitation films". Most people think that the term refers to a film that latches onto a particular subject (usually a controversial or inherently inflammatory one) and "exploits" it...bleeds it for all it's worth. Maybe. I'm not a particular fan of that definition, because honestly, all films...heck, all forms of art and media...are inherently exploitative in that sense. No, I'm of the "alternate" definition of "exploitation film" camp, which states, more or less, that an exploitation film in this context is one that exploits the viewer, or more specifically, it exploits the individual viewer's sense of morality, tolerance for discomfort, and intestinal fortitude. What is exploitative to some may not be for others. Exploitation, then, is entirely within the mind of the viewer, and therefore, not particularly the "fault" of the film or films in question. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, let's be clear, every damned one of the films whose previews appear on this compilation do their very best (some exceedingly well) to latch onto the viewers sense of exploitation...titillation, even. It's just an important distinction, that's all.

Since Mad Ron's Prevues From Hell has long since been out of print in its original VHS format, its reputation as a collector's item for the freaky cinephile has only grown. Now that Virgil Films and Entertainment is finally putting out a DVD release (available on September 14, 2010), we can all partake in the goodness of this wonderfully nutty piece of horror ephemera/history. This is being billed as the "Extra Mad Edition", and indeed, as if the fact that we're actually holding a copy of the film in our sweaty little hands wasn't enough, there are some interesting, if somewhat oddball extras on the disc. These include quite a few deleted scenes and behind the scenes footage from the wraparound sequence, but most valuably, the "Hellacious Movie Poster Gallery" featuring at least one (but often more) poster for each of the films represented in the film. So you've got the art of the trailers themselves, and as an added bonus, extensive poster art that demonstrates unequivocally that the marketing skill of these films' promoters was not limited to just the previews. The best feature, for this guy, was not a "special feature" to speak of, rather, it's basically chapter stops, but they allow the browsing viewer to jump to any specific trailer on the disc...sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't.

One final note on Mad Ron's Prevues From Hell. I've tried to go to great lengths in this review to stress the historic and nostalgic value of this compilation, and my own personal feelings on it. That said, even if you're a young'un and/or haven't heard of MRPFH, it's worth seeking out and owning for the sheer, unadulterated, splattery, goofy fun that it embodies. Kudos to Virgil Films and Entertainment for having the balls to pick up this title and give it a proper DVD release after all these years. It's an Atrocities Cinema Essential, after all...