S. Craig Zahler Is Back, But With A Tomahawk Fashioned From A Toothbrush This Time

2015’s Bone Tomahawk is an important film, because it is one of a select few recently released films that is a pure genre film exercise. Bone Tomahawk sincerely indulges in both the Western and the Horror genres, and with its interesting cast, practical effects, and strong direction, it was a real surprise. It is genuinely nice to see a movie that isn’t trying to hide its genre influences with indie film self awareness. I want genre films that are pure and made with love, so I am certainly excited to see that Bone Tomahawk director S. Craig Zahler is jumping into the prison film genre with Brawl In Cell Block 99.

Straight up, this is a fun trailer. I am a sucker for a rhythm based trailer (see the A Serious Man trailer, which also features, coincidentally, Fred Melamed) which the first half of the trailer is, and then it goes into a soul track that one would think is some dug up gem, but is apparently a song with lyrics written by director Zahler himself, and sung by The O’Jays. I am on board for this in a big way, and the movie that this trailer is selling, is one that I am certainly buying.

The big trailer related thing that I got thinking about after putting my eyes on the Brawl in Cell Block 99 trailer, is that there really is no distinction between a teaser trailer and a trailer these days. For myself, the Brawl in Cell Block 99 trailer is the perfect clip selection, editing, and length for a trailer, but you’ll notice that RLJE Films has it classified as a teaser trailer. A true teaser trailer is something released a considerable time before the release of the film, and it doesn’t even need to have footage from the film, it just needs to announce that the film is coming out.  A good example of this is the Jurassic Park teaser. The reality in 2017 is that we don’t need announcement trailers, because all the information is already out there, and at our finger tips, so I think we should do away with classifying short trailers as teaser trailers, because really there is nothing teaser about them. This is certainly a nitpick, but at the very least it explains why I refer to the majority of teaser trailers simply as trailers.