I know, right? I know.

Laying down the template for many, many mad affairs to come, 1988’s Fresh Horses could very well be the first example of Tennessee Williams-lite drama that’s actually set in the North. From here onwards, any starlet wanting to be taken seriously would start to drop her g’s and act as a runaway from a broh-kan, you-can’t-fix-me nameless town. Or, for that matter, any pretty boy wanting to account for more than being a pretty boy would just try the junkie/bookie/victim/angel/lunatic angle.

So, let’s get to the plot, fast:

“A Cincinnati college student breaks off his engagement to his wealthy fiancée after he falls in love with a backwoods Kentucky girl he meets at a party. She says she’s 20, but he finds out she’s 16 and married to an abusive husband.”

Yeah. Everything you need to know, tidily compressed into a 1’ trailer. Except Ben Stiller. And the abuse-y bits. Neat.

Ringwald gives off a distinct  “Southern Gothic dame lost in a maze of negatives” vibe here, which should never, ever sound like a backhanded compliment, but it sort of does.

Oh, this one’s a keeper.

A quintessential rite of passage for any girl born between 1965 and 1980, depending on the mood, John Hughes’s Pretty In Pink becomes a) the reason why an awesome soundtrack was put together; b) a very Eighties take on the Cinderella paradygm; c) the lowest common denominator for anything connected to nostalgia; and d) all of the above.

It also makes for a classic trailer, in its own right. The opening credits montage of Molly Ringwald getting dressed and ready for school [i.e. is the chick flick equivalent of the other Eighties staple, the “hey, let’s go grab some guns” action montage] is spliced throughout the whole thing, acting as a visual refrain to the Psychedelic Furs’ lyrics for the title song. Every possible subplot is explored, as far as the teen characters are involved (guess that poor Harry Dean Stanton not letting go of his deadbeat wife didn’t resonate at the box office), while the main plot is, well, laid bare. At least the third act resolution is left as a guess.

Which makes me think of another trailer that made the rounds back then (video release, maybe? dunno), this one with an unusually Duckie-heavy slant. Did wacky borderline obsessive third wheel sell more than star-crossed class-transcending teenage love? Really? Oh, ok.

If you never saw it as a grownup, be sure to check out The Spader in all his own sniveling glory. He looks so much better with the benefit of some distance.

Due to copyright issues, assorted YouTube mishaps and a whole slew of Unintentional Metafuckery, we are able to showcase 1992’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer theatrical trailer, but not the must-be-seen-to-be-believed TV ad which was on the air that summer.

So, go check out this link…

… and then join esteemed web designer Matteo and I in our little chat.

——

M: So. What do you make of it?

V: What do you make of it?

M: I saw the movie, but never tuned in for the show, and I know I’m the only one. In the TV ads Donald Sutherland doesn’t even exist. Were it released now, it would be hyped for months. It came off as just some dumb thing back then, because the Nineties were oh so serious, depressing, as Rourke would say.

V: You get some Sutherland in the theatrical trailer, but not a whole lot of him.

M: True. What you get is a lot of Luke Perry. But his name only pops up at the end. The TV ad goes like, “so, ok, this is just a regular 90210 episode with a couple vampires thrown in”…

M: (and that’s something they must have tried at some point)

M: … while the theatrical trailer is really keen to tell you “no, it’s a legitimate scary movie with Rutger Hauer, look, Donald Sutherland’s wearing a trenchcoat”.

V: Things the trailer is not telling you, part one: in a most bizarre turn of events, Hilary Swank - who plays Buffy’s lead bitch friend - would go on to become both the only Oscar winner ever featured in 90210 and the only Oscar winner to be fired from 90210.

V: Things the trailer is not telling you, part two: David Fucking Arquette turns into a vampire.

M: Is Buffy’s cheerleader outfit an homage to Bruce Lee’s yellow jumpsuit, way before Tarantino did it?

M: Did Rutger Hauer still have a manager at this point or just didn’t care anymore?

V: It went straight to video here. I seem to recall atrocious dubbing being involved.

A few weeks ago I had the dubious privilege of introducing a girlfriend to John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. She kept a stiff upper lip until the end credits were rolling. Then she turned to me and said, “you know, I always thought it was a comedy”.

Blame it on the trailer: general vibe falls squarely in the “kids today and their wacky (but still sort of wholesome) hijinks” category, what with the running in the hallways, the rockabilly riff coming up halfway, and all those shots of the leads busting random moves.

In retrospect it’s a little weird that they threw the pot smoking in, but maybe it was the then-compulsory bait for the lowbrow comedy crowd. Why, was “Molly Ringwald holding a lipstick between her tits” an unmentionable asset those days? (Come to think of it, it probably was.)

Strangely enough, there’s no mention whatsoever of the hu-u-u-u-u-uge amount of drama inside.

Marketing divisions all over the world were still to discover the “1980s are the new 1950s” angle, and teenage angst would become a newly profitable genre only later in the decade. Were it made now, the trailer would come with its own built-in LJ community. I guess.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “theres a guy in my language class that looks almost exactly like the jock.”

“I better start living up to that potential.”

Not to be labeled as a “guilty pleasure”, James Foley’s Reckless is a great example of ’80s teen melodrama done just right.

Foley directed the living fuck out of a so-so script, and he gave leading man cred to first-timer Aidan Quinn, who’d come to regard this as a breakthrough role way more than Daryl Hannah (she had already become a minor star with her Blade Runner turn and would hit the “wholesome temptress” note again the same year in Splash).

Lovely New Wave soundtrack is pushed front and center, with no less than three songs - Romeo Void’s Never Say Never, INXS’ The One Thing and Kim Wilde’s Kids In America, aka the score to the notorious pool scene - splitting the trailer into three acts: him, her, them.

Dialogue is wisely cut down to a few snippets - it works much better as a nonverbal sort of movie, with the score framing choice moments like this one.

Absent: the dreary industrial locations, which effectively set the mood for the film and lend it a much needed frame of reference.

Present: editing doesn’t quite show, but hints to the copious amounts of sex inside, which was pretty suggestive for its time and genre. After all, “being a teen-marketed piece of fluff” is not the same as “introducing a part of your demographic to the notion of having sex being on top”. Yeah, those were the GTs.