Fake trailers put a twist on the classics

When you are deciding weather or not you want to watch a movie, the trailer is one of the biggest deciding factors. What could be a better indication of what a movie is going to look like than actual footage from the movie? Well a popular Internet trend has recently shown that movie trailers are far from reliable. Taking footage from actual movies, people have re-cut trailers that imply a different genre than what the movie really is. For example, one popular re-cut trailer shows footage from the horror film The Shining yet uses specific cuts and music so that anyone viewing the trailer would think that it is a feel good movie. Anyone who has seen Mary Poppins knows that it's a children's musical, yet another popular re-cut trailer titled Scary Mary uses footage from Mary Poppins to create a terrifying trailer for a horror movie.

Some re-cut trailers take the idea a step further by combining two completely different movies into one single movie, creating what has come to be known as a Mash-up. This idea can range from the simple idea of adding a character into the trailer, Such as Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber to help create a trailer for the fictional movie Aliens and Predator vs. Lloyd, while others actually attempt to combine the plots of two separate movies. On of the most successful is a trailer titled Brokeback to the Future, which uses footage from the movie Back to the Future but implies a love story between Doc and Marty in the style of the critically acclaimed Brokeback Mountain. Line such as "I'm in it with you and I don't even understand it" are able to take on an entirely different meaning to help the parody out when they are taken out of context.

Another popular trailer mash up is titled 10 Things I Hate About Commandments, which retells the story of the 10 Commandments in the style of a high school comedy, similar to 10 Things I Hate About You. While all of the footage in the trailer comes from The Ten Commandments, the soundtrack used in the trailer is very similar to the soundtrack from popular teen films. Its amazing how different scenes from the Charlton Heston epic can feel when they are set, not to a dramatic score, but to the song "What I Like About You" by the Romantics.

While many of these fictional trailers combine two or more movies, some are used to imagine what direct sequels to already made movies would be. These are often based on previously established franchises such as Star Wars or Spiderman, but the truly memorable ones are those that envision the most outlandish sequels possible. One of the videos that bests proves this is the fictional sequel to the mega blockbuster Titanic, which features Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack Dawson being found frozen and thawed out in the modern world. Spoofing the idea of unnecessary sequels, this fictional Titanic sequel is titled Titanic: Two The Surface and turns the story into Jack trying to face the modern world. While some clips are taken from other DiCaprio films such as Romeo + Juliet, the trailer borrows clips from several movies including Austin Powers and Spiderman 2 in order to make the idea work.

As these humorous videos grow in popularity, a site has been created, dedicated to these bizarre tributes to movies. www.thetrailermash.com is a site devoted to collecting re-cut trailers and trailer mash-ups and organizing them by genre.

The site also features a top rated list that as well as a search feature to help people find trailers inspired by their favorite movies.