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Audiences who opted to spend their holiday moviegoing dollars on a diet of giant fucking robots and LaBeoufian light comedy were left scratching their heads at a mysterious trailer that ran before the featured attraction, captured above by a cellphone-wielding audience member who managed to avoid MPAA anti-piracy sniper fire. Details were sparse—no title is given (IMDb lists its "fake working title" as Cloverfield), but the trailer tells us it's a J.J. Abrams production set to open January 18.

The story, as far as we can make out, is about a well-liked guy named Rob, whose going-away party is interrupted by a series of (bad taste alert) fiery explosions that tear through the Manhattan skyline. But it's only once a comically undersized Statue of Liberty head knocks over a telephone pole at the 01:34 mark that we grasp the limited scope of this Independence Day-on-a-camcorder-budget production. It's a sequence Michael Bay could have made incalculably more spectacular by placing a camera inside the decapitated statue's tumbling head, then detonating the painstakingly reproduced set piece with an explosion massive enough to leave nothing but a burned-out crater where the West Village used to be.

UPDATE: The movie's official website, 1-18-08.com, offers even fewer answers than the trailer does. Could this be the start of a new trend of studios snapping up release-date URLs for their desperate-to-go-viral marketing campaigns?

UPDATE 2: Trailer Spy still has the clip up, which we've embedded above.