A great movie trailer will excite audiences to set time aside to see an upcoming movie. However, some trailers are just so bizarre that it is unclear whether the movie should be avoided or embraced as a triumph of lunacy.
For your viewing pleasure, here are our choices of the 10 weirdest movie trailers of all time. If you've not seen any of these films, ask yourself if you'd go out of your way to see these flicks just based on their trailers.
"Glen or Glenda" (1953): "It's Fantastic! It's Unbelievable! It's true!" claimed the trailer to this no-budget jumble from the notorious Ed Wood, which grafted the headlines surround the then-current headlines around Christine Jorgensen's sex reassignment surgery into an incoherent tale about an anxiety-burdened cross-dresser (played by Wood). While the trailer mentions Bela Lugosi as the film's star, the one-time Dracula is nowhere to be seen in this breathless mess of a trailer.
"Conquest of Space" (1955): Billed as "The Biggest True Story of Our Century!", this George Pal sci-fi adventure is notable for serving up some of the crummiest special effects for an outer space odyssey. But you haven't lived until you've seen the astronauts' faces droop when they start traveling at 14,000 miles per hour.
"The Horror Of Party Beach" (1964): This film has everything - a band playing "six rocking hits," a motorcycle gang ready to rumble, lovely young ladies having a slumber party and "ghoulish atomic beasts who live off human blood." It's hard to say which is more terrifying, the rubber-suit monsters with ping-pong eyes, the conspicuously muscle-free bikers, or the overaged slumber party gals of those "six rocking hits."
"Black Belt Jones" (1974): During the early 1970s, blaxploitation and martial arts were two of the most popular movie genres. This film combines the genres with some of the strangest action sequences ever captures on film, including a kung fu fight in a train depot full of soap suds. (Don't ask, just enjoy.)
"The Black Cauldron" (1985): The Walt Disney Co. (NYSE:DIS) lost so much money on this animated feature that it put the fate of the studio's animation enterprises at risk. The trailer was one of the main reasons audiences stayed away, with its odd mix of cut-rate Tolkein and cutesy Disney flourishes that gave the film a bizarre split personality.
"Tom And Jerry: The Movie" (1992): The fast-packed knockabout of the Tom and Jerry shorts was jettisoned for this sticky-icky feature that finds the cat and mouse duo helping a young girl escape from an abusive guardian. This trailer seemed to emphasize the worst aspects of the film, including cheapjack animation, inappropriate voices for the title characters, dreary musical numbers and a surplus of uninteresting supporting characters.
"2016" (2010): Perhaps the most infamous movie to come out of Ghana is this high-octane science-fiction escapde involving an alien invasion of West Africa. The film became a viral video sensation when it was uploaded to YouTube in 2011, albeit for all the wrong reasons. (No spoilers, just see for yourself.)
"Venom" (2018): On a technical level, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this trailer for the Sony Pictures (NYSE:SONY) action film. However, there is an itty-bitty problem - the title character is nowhere to be seen in the film. Based on this trailer, it would have made more sense to call the film "Eddie Brock."
"Cats" (2019): This trailer reportedly frightened many young children who saw it on the big screen, but it also generated waves of unintentional laughter among adults expecting something very different from this. YouTube user Taleef Tamsal probably said it best: This is a prime example of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
"Clerks 3" (2022): Last (and, arguably, least) is the upcoming Lionsgate (NYSE: LGF-A) offering with Kevin Smith (remember him?) resurrecting the characters and situations from his 1994 "Clerks" into a cinematic rumination of what it means to be older but not wiser. For Smith's sake, let's just hope the film packs all of the good stuff into its feature-length presentation and the trailer just included the dullest of celluloid shavings.
Photo: Jennifer Hudson in Cats, courtesy of Universal Pictures
