David Wain and Michael Showalter proved themselves experts at comedically capturing the recent past through Wet Hot American Summer — both in original movie form and in its recently released Netflix prequel series.
Today they released a trailer for another nostalgic film — that doesn’t exist. Second Sound Barrier is a fake 70s action epic in which three men — played by Jeremy Sisto, Peter Mensah, and Vincent Kartheiser — are examples of “mankind pushing against the limits that mankind has already pushed beyond.” The premise: the sound barrier has already been broken with the sonic boom, but these men — the “fastest men in the world” — are breaking the second sound barrier to “save the life of a mysterious recluse” named Lady Billionaire, played by Didi Van Harten — aka Juliette Lewis. The trailer is replete with fake critical acclaim — it’s a “pulse pounding pound of pulsating poundage” — and harrowing dramatic twists — that table of food is actually Lewis in disguise!
“It’s like the big race movies, where you realize at the end, it had no point,” Wain told GQ of the trailer for the non-film. “It’s a run-on sentence of ridiculous pulse-pounding trailer beats…It’s normally my process to figure out what the spine of something is and take away all the stuff around it, so you’re cutting it down to its essence. This is the opposite. The more random stuff it had, the funnier it got.”
And according to its press release, it’s part of an advertising campaign for Robert Graham Cologne. Designer Robert Graham and his $125+ odors are never mentioned in the video itself, but for in the fake MPAA rating at the beginning, where the typical MPAA text is replaced by the Robert Graham logo.
Watch: