Dead Ringers (1988)

Coming as it did two years after The Fly, this trailer harks back to a time when mainstream audiences could reasonably be expected to know who David Cronenberg was.

The trailer kind of tries to sell the film to fans of The Fly — with lots of creepy shots of operating rooms and funky tools “designed for use on mutant women,” not to mention Mr. Narrator driving the point home — but audiences found instead a relatively sedate, rather depressing (but still great) drama about psychotic obsession and death. Yay, make the popcorn!

Jeremy Irons wasn’t exactly a major star — he never has been — but the trailer sells him pretty much exclusively, as it should, since he is more or less the movie. It’s stylishly edited, though — I like the placement of the shot of Irons being lifted on the operating table.

Yikes.

~ by Rob Gonsalves on January 2, 2008.