The Vampire Bureau goes public! Criminals beware! But Sherlock Kammen is sitting on the sidelines, still trying to track down Martha and her sorceress Make Love Not War. Well, at least until a waitress starts asking questions. Watch Kammen take a crash course in public relations in “Men that hazard all do it in hope of fair advantage,” chapter 22 of Martha’s Children.
I try to keep an eye out for stories that resemble what I’m writing. This is partly curiosity to see how other writers tackled similar situations, partly interest in seeing the historical development of various aspects of my story. Last week, I went to the cinema to see a program that consisted only of movie trailers. Half the program was a competition between local teams designing trailers to a common theme for a fictitious movie, half a compilation of absurd trailers from the past to the present. Science fiction and horror were well represented in the latter section, ranging from the infamous Zardoz (1974) to the equally infamous Sharknado (last week).
Movie poster
Along the way was the trailer for a movie hitherto unfamiliar to me, Innocent Blood (1992). Innocent Blood doesn’t have a great reputation because it was a case of director John Landis going to the well once too often. He’d scored a success back in 1981 with An American Werewolf in London, and apparently was running short of ideas, as the overseas title of Innocent Blood indicates: A French Vampire in America. And unlike Werewolf, which successfully balances comedy and horror, Innocent Blood couldn’t balance its romantic, horror, and cops-and-criminals elements very well.
Still, the movie has some intriguing ideas. The lead actress, best known for her role in La Femme Nikita (1990), is a vampire who usually slays her victims, so they don’t rise as vampires. But she screws up, turning a Mob boss into a vampire. Rather like my vampires, he doesn’t have his act together at first. But it becomes a contest between him and his growing mob of vampire-criminals versus our protagonist and her cop lover, and death is the only way this is going to be resolved.
All in all, it was an amusing way to while away two hours. Not great, but some fun. The movie was rated “R” in the United States for nudity, sexual situations, and about as much violence and gore as you’d expect in a movie about vampires, criminals, and cops in 1991 (in other words, a bit less less than you’d see today).
Sillyverse 
Now I finally have access again (but apparently not full facilities – long story) on first reading this I couldn’t imagine 2 hours of trailers. But on further digestion, since the trailers usually far out-glow the movies, it could have been an exciting experience. 🙂
Certainly, thanks to the numerous new horror/sci-fi/fantasy trailers, it was a fast-paced experience. I’ve noticed that just as movie storytelling has speeded up, so have trailers.
When you think about it, trailers are an interesting challenge. You have to show enough to lure people to see the movie, not enough (at least in context) to give away the ending, usually. And to do this, scenes are often intercut in quite a different order from the way they occur in the movie. This sometimes gives one an inaccurate idea of what the movie is about. As you say, if the trailer shows all the most dramatic points, it can often be better than the movie.