NO ONE LIVES Red Band Trailer Deserves Your Attention

Last weekend I ventured out to the theater to watch Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem (which was awesome, by the way). I was at an AMC, so before the film I saw somewhere around 2,000 trailers for upcoming horror films.

One of them was this red band trailer for No One Lives, a film I truly had never heard of before. It was apparently a midnight selection at last year's Toronto Film Festival and has some genre pedigree as it was directed by Versus and Midnight Meet Train's Ryuhei Kitamura.

This is all to justify why I'm posting a trailer that came out over a week ago. People aren't really talking about No One Lives yet, and it's a shame because this trailer is amazing. What starts out as a regular old Breakdown riff turns suddenly into a kind of slasher film starring an action hero. It's like they stretched the "Tool Shed" scene from Commando into a whole film and made it as gory as it deserved.

That's all I needed to know. If I have one complaint, it's that this trailer, in pursuit of restricted content befitting a red band, gives away a ton of kills. But maybe that's also part of what sold me on the film as a for real piece of action sleaze.

When the trailer cuts to the title, No One Lives, several members of my Lords of Salem audiences guffawed. The laughs seemed more in keeping with the trailer's tone than a disrespectful affront. I certainly hope that when I finally see this on May 10, it's with a crowded, rowdy house.