Retro DVD trailers

As I mentioned previously, Buried was the last film I watched before I closed the rankings on my 2010 movie list.

But when I first put it in the DVD player, you might have thought I was working on my 2003 movie list or my 2006 movie list, rather than 2010.

In fact, I was quite sure I did not have Buried at all, but some impostor wearing the Buried DVD artwork.

See, the first trailer that came on was for Open Water. Not Open Water 2: Adrift, which would have been a slightly more recent movie to be pimping. Even if Open Water 2 came out in 2006, that would have been better than the 2003 release date of the original.

An anomaly? No. Because the next trailer that came on was for An American Haunting, which came out in 2006. It took until the third trailer to get something from 2010, at which point I breathed a sigh of relief.

Can you ever remember seeing DVD trailers for movies that were this old? Usually you can be pretty sure that the movies advertised have only just hit DVD, or, more likely, aren't even on DVD yet. In fact, sometimes they aren't even in the theater yet. You can so take this to the bank, that it can be fun to watch older DVDs just so you can be reminded of the time when this film and these other four films were all current releases. It's like a snapshot of a bygone era, a little time capsule.

The sudden inexplicable hawking of these older movies could only be explained by one thing: that Lionsgate, which released Buried, was attempting to clear out its old catalogue. But only Open Water was also released by Lionsgate; An American Haunting was not. Even if they'd both been from Lionsgate, why these movies? Why now? Did they have 10,000 copies of An American Haunting just sitting around in a warehouse somewhere, because the movie is total crap?

You could also posit a thematic relationship between the movie I came to see and Open Water, at the very least. Being trapped in a coffin is an equivalent impossible situation to being stranded at sea in shark-infested waters. But that just gives An American Haunting a second reason to be an illogical choice for this particular DVD. Or third, if you're counting its lack of a contemporaneous release date, its origins at a different studio and its failure to have anything to do with Buried.

I guess I will just scratch my head and move on.