Best Re-Edited Trailers/Movie Sequences

I’ve seen my share of bad trailer and scene recuts on youtube. You can usually tell if one is a dud right when you click on the video, because there will be a big fat red bar showing how many people dislike the recut.

But every so often people get it right. These examples are relatively old, but still hysterical in my mind. First off you’ve got the Luke Skywalker OCD clip:

This is a great exercise to challenge yourself with. Finding moments, beats, or reactions from famous movies like this innocuous scene from “Star Wars” and changing it around so it has a completely different meaning.

These video recuts definitely work best for dramatic or serious movies, and the intended outcome is usually humor. Think of your favorite dramas and imagine what you could change up in certain scenes to make it seem a lot more ridiculous.

I think the scene that inspired the OCD clip was actually this re-cut of Darth Vader being an asshole. Check this one out:

Now so many people are trying to recut and spoof famous films that it’s really a good exercise to make one that doesn’t suck.

Another great example is this trailer that won a genre switch trailer contest. The idea was to take a movie of a particular genre and re-cut it so it looks like a trailer for a movie from a totally different genre. In this case the editor used the Stephen King/Stanley Kubrick horror movie ‘The Shining’

When you watch this vid you’ll see a ton of other trailer re-cuts but none of them really capture it like “The Shining”. This one that tries to make “Nightmare on Elm Street” a comedy kind of works, though the voiceover could be better.

The music is really key. The final sequence where she is beating up Freddy, that music is PERFECT. The opening Third Eye Blind music works too though it goes on a little too long and is a little too loud. If the opening music were a little more subtle and instrumental, then went into the Boogeyman song I think it would have been better.

But in general, these are great fun. I had yet to see one successfully cut of a comedy that turns it into a serious… until I saw this brilliant re-cut of “The Hangover”. Check out how tight this is and how the music really does all the work:

So… do you have a favorite movie you’d like to re-cut? Or is there a great re-cut trailer that I missed?