So, a while ago I was gonna do this post on the rise of the red band trailer, you know, the ones that are all naughty and used to show once in a blue moon before R-rated (or worse) flicks and now seem to be popping up more and more online. But a couple of bloggers have already done the topic justice here and here.

Still, I thought I might share my own memory of the first time I saw a red band trailer, just because it’s so damn obscure. Spring break ‘88 I decided I would spend my free time watching one movie a day in the theater. It was slim pickings that March (I remember Masquerade was one of the titles) but I was particularly psyched to see Off Limits, part of the wave of post-Platoon Vietnam zeitgeist flicks.

This one was really a buddy cop film in which Willem Dafoe (you just couldn’t take him out of Southeast Asia could you?) and Gregory Hines were two MPs or something investigating a dead prostitute or prostitutes in Saigon. Kind of a forgettable film, except for the fact that beforehand there was a trailer with a big red screen before it for a film called Bad Dreams.

Now some of you might remember Bad Dreams as a Freddy Kruger knock-off. Some of you might even know that its director and co-writer, Andrew Fleming went on to helm the rather improbable slew of Threesome, The Craft, Dick, The In-Laws (remake), Nancy Drew and Hamlet 2.

But all I remember is that at the end of that trailer, the voiceover says “Take a stab at it!” and you see a guy’s hand get stabbed. And then I thought, “Holy shit! That guys hand just got stabbed! They can’t show that in a trailer!”

And that’s how I found out what a red-band trailer was.

Here it is, with the rather obvious caveat that it’s kind of gross.

(Funny that I remembered the hand stabbing but not the dismembered hand or the horribly disfigured killer.)

Oh, and if you read that first article and you’re wondering what the hell a yellow band trailer is, it’s this…

Happy Thanksgiving!