Come to daddy ... Jack Nicholson
in The Shining
A film trailer currently doing the rounds alerts audiences to a heart-warming tale about a father and his son. Father is a sensitive soul, struggling to complete his novel and inadvertently neglecting his cute, lonesome kid. Before the closing credits, we are led to believe, there will be a tearful reunion and maybe a kite-flying trip to a nearby park. Or possibly not. It transpires that the trailer is for Stanley Kubrick's leering, blood-soaked adaptation of The Shining.
Robert Ryang's spoof Shining trailer is a thing of genius. It was the winning entry in a competition arranged by an American post-production house in which assistant editors were asked to "recut" original trailers. Other highlights include West Side Story rejigged as a New York zombie movie and the moving Psycho: A Love Story.
Elsewhere things turn still more daring. Lord only knows what Walt Disney would have made of the new, improved trailer for The Parent Trap. Once an innocuous tale of twin sisters at summer camp, it has now been made-over as a classic piece of New Queer Cinema, starring Hayley Mills as a pair of pint-sized lesbian lovers. (To view The Parent Trap click the Paul Lacalandra link here, then the "Ordinary Girls" image)
The competition was presumably set up as an affectionate little game for movie buffs. It has bloomed into something rather more significant and subversive. The best of these trailers brilliantly debunk the concept of the movie trailer (and, by implication, the entire advertising industry). They show how a Hollywood marketing department can spin a film any way they want it, bamboozling us into believing that a product is something that it patently is not. After all, is there much difference between a trailer that paints The Shining as feel-good family fodder and a trailer that paints Revolver as a really good film? Both are misrepresentations at best, outright falsehoods at worst.
In the meantime, we have been dreaming up more of the same. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre overhauled to become a homespun comedy about a bunch of pampered city teenagers who are taught some crucial life lessons by their salt-of-the-earth country cousins. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs refashioned as a cartoon porn flick about a pallid bigamist. The possibilities are endless.
