Third volumes usually fall victim to the laws of diminishing returns, but Nucleus films’ third (or fourth if you count the Video Nasties collection) compilation of exploitation trailers maintains a pretty high standard – unsurprising when you think just how many trailers there are out there. And while much – but certainly not all - of this will be familiar stuff to hardened collectors who have picked up The Best of Sex and Violence, Mad Ron’s Prevues from Hell and a multitude of Something Weird trailer tapes over the years, I imagine for most UK fans, this will be a decidedly tasty slab of fresh meat.

Sensibly going for the scattershot approach, rather than trying to group trailers in themes, this fifty-five trailer collection covers the gamut of Seventies exploitation cinema – with the occasional slip into the Eighties. There’s a heft smattering of post-Deliverance ‘good ol’ boy’ Southern redneck nastiness going on in films like Moonshine County Express, Macon County Line, Black Oak Conspiracy and A Small Town in Texas and sexploitation movies like Swedish Wife Exchange Club, the boobtastic Centerfold Girls, Female Response, Swedish Fly Girls (the narrator of which informs us is “not dirty or wrong under the laws of Denmark”, showing a basic misunderstanding of Scandinavian countries) and Mondo classic Sweden – Heaven and Hell, one of the best trailers you’ll ever see, taking a look at “the sex capital of the world, where topless bands beat out the throbbing rhythm of a turned on generation” – those were the days, eh, Sweden?

There’s also feisty female action movies like Police Women and Superchick, blaxploitation movies like The Spook who Sat by the Door and Soul Soldier, prison flicks like Terminal Island – and Black Mama, White Mama, which crosses all three genres. Plus, you get kung fu, horror, Eurosleaze and westerns. There are a few trailers here I hadn’t seen before – and I have a lot of these collections, so congratulations to Nucleus for digging out some real obscurities.

Not all are good – I could’ve lived without seeing The Doberman Gang trailer ever again, while The Touch of Satan does a good job of reflecting just how dull the actual film is – and picture quality is naturally variable, but you’d have to be a very fussy viewer not to be entirely satisfied with this, especially when it features films like Without Warning (Jack Palance and Martin Landau chewing the scenery while a laughable alien throws surprisingly impressive flesh-eating Frisbee monsters about), Nazi Love Camp 27 (where we are constantly told overly-graphic scenes have been cut from the trailer, even though it’s little more than a parade of nudity, gore and abuse), the undeservedly obscure biker-gore film The Northville Cemetery Massacre and Schizoid – aka Lizard in a Woman’s Skin – which suggests we will be “torn to shreds by terror-madness” – the very worst sort of madness, I imagine.

The DVD also comes with an interview about the trailers – and grindhouse nostalgia – with Kim Newman, and the not-inconsiderable bonus of additional trailers for much of the Nucleus back-catalogue, adding another 28 entertaining previews to those already included in the main feature.

There’ no such thing as too many trailer collections, and this is as entertaining as any you’ll see – a must for exploitation movie fans or anyone looking to liven up a party!

DAVID FLINT

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