LASER BIN : 2 Hitchcock Discs--Complete With Coming Attractions

“The Birds” (MCA Home Video 11007, 119 minutes, all three sides CLV Extended Play, under $35) and “Family Plot” (MCA 11005, 121 minutes, Sides One and Two CLV Extended Play, Side Three CAV Standard Play, under $35).

“Coming soon . . . “ to your own living room. The lure of both these laser discs, besides the crisp picture and sound, lies in the classic coming-attraction trailers for several Hitchcock films--six on “The Birds’ ” disc alone. “Family Plot” offers a photo scrapbook, plus “Plot” trailers. With scratchy sound tracks and uncorrected color visuals, the trailers are all vintage Hitchcock. The corpulent director’s five-minute history of how humans have mistreated their feathered friends--delivered over a chicken dinner--is great fun. Then, there’s Hitchcock giving a seven-minute tour of a quiet motel and an old house off the highway. He enters the motel-room bathroom, pulls back the shower curtain to reveal a screaming Janet Leigh and the admonition: “The picture you must see from the beginning or not at all!” Jimmy Stewart offers an in-character introduction to “Rope” and a personal introduction to “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” An anonymous professional narrator does a bang-up job of introducing “Vertigo” and “Rear Window.”

On the “Family Plot” disc, Hitchcock narrates two trailers for the film in typically droll fashion. The photograph album’s 53 stills include Hitchcock’s appearance in “Family Plot”--his profile seen behind the glass door of the Registrar of Births and Deaths.