Most movies that use red band trailers do it to give audiences a better sense of what the movie is about, whether it's dirty jokes or ridiculously over-the-top violence. You know, when you've got an entire movie about people making dick jokes, you want to include that in the trailer. And while Choke definitely seems like the kind of movie that can pull this off, the new red band trailer actually makes it even more difficult to figure out what the hell the movie is about.
The new trailer is available at the official Choke website, though you have to get through the usual age restriction barriers to get to it. There are a whole lot of new scenes you don't see in the regular trailer, though many of them are covered with a pink "big screen only" banner that strategically hides the, uh, naughty bits. Based on this trailer, the movie seems to be entirely about a guy who works as a colonial re-enactor and has sex with every woman who crosses his path. In the first, all-ages trailer, though, you see a whole plot about his ailing mother and the actual source of the movie's title-- pretending to choke on food in restaurants.
Yeah, yeah, I get that sex sells, and showing all the scenes of wanton sex will probably get plenty of people into theaters who would otherwise never bother with a Sundance hit. But by leaving out any semblance of plot in the red-band trailer, they're really just selling short what seems like a half-decent movie. There's a skill to balancing the sex appeal and the actual content in a red band trailer, but the marketers behind Choke don't seem to have quite figured it out yet.
