Posterwire.com is a movie poster weblog. From images of the latest Hollywood one-sheets to vintage movie posters, this film poster weblog hopes to offer a bit of insight into film key art.
Readers and would-be Adobe Photoshop gurus over at the Something Awful forums recently pointed their weekly “Photoshop Phriday” remix thread at modern movies illustrated in a “Grindhouse cinema” movie poster style. In this case, Grindhouse being the popular label for the low budget film and exploitation movie poster style popular in the 60s and 70s.
It is always interesting to see modern movies re-interpreted through a different style of key art — this film poster remix for Little Miss Sunshine is a particularly good (and disturbing) example.
The official site for Troublemaker Studios — the production company of director Robert Rodriguez — has released a set of what they are calling “limited-edition” Grindhouse teaser posters. Gindhouse is the double-bill feature ode to exploitation films from directors Robert Rodreqiuz and Quetin Tarantino, with each creating their own movie as part of the double feature. Rodriguez is directing Planet Terror and Tarintino helms Death Proof.
Released as exclusive posters at this year’s Comic Con, we are guessing “limited-edition” means “not approved by the MPAA and will not be displayed in theatres“. Since there is no MPAA rating on the posters, perhaps the studio isn’t submitting these as theatrical one-sheets to the MPAA’s Advertising Administration. (We have no idea if any of these are destined for your local theater lobby — would the MPAA have a problem with a poster of actress Rose McGowan’s amputated leg replaced with an assault rifle?)
In the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly, director Rodriguez “dissects” the three Grind House teaser posters:
THE VEHICLE “It’s a slasher movie with a car instead of a knife,” says Rodriguez of Tarantino’s Death Proof, which stars Kurt Russell as a psychotic stuntman. “We did that poster as a silk screen. We wanted to imply an alternate film universe.”
THE GUN In Rodriguez’s zombie-esque feature Planet Terror, Rose McGowan’s go-go dancer-turned-amputee sports a unique fake limb. The poster’s aged look, Rodriguez says, was achieved by the high-tech means of “dragging it around a parking lot.”
THE NEEDLE The director is tight-lipped about why actress Marley Shelton is holding a hypodermic needle in another Terror poster. But he’s more verbose on the subject of Grindhouse sequels: “Yeah, there may be a couple. One might be kung fu. One sexploitation. They’re a blast to make!”
The term grindhouse refers to the exploitation genre of films and movie theaters that showed those types of films in the 1970s. The Weird World of Seventies Cinema defines grindhouse as “inner-city theaters in disrepair since their glory days as movie palaces in the ’30s and ’40s. Known for ‘grinding out’ non stop, triple-bill programs of B-movies. By the late ’60s and into the ’70s they specialized in movies with sex, violence and other taboo subject matter.” This grindhouse cinema has long been an influence for director Tarantino.
The Grindhouse teaser posters and their artwork have embraced all the trappings and style of vintage 70s exploitation posters, including the previously mentioned screenprinted look, distressed edges, poster folds (which seem to be popular recently), and the colorful sensationalism of exploitation movie poster art. We especially love the screenprinted Death Proof movie poster, which replicates the cheaply produced screenprinted posters that were used by some theatres and drive-ins, complete with a blank space at the top of the poster that allowed the local movie theater owner to print their own local theater name, address, showtimes, etc.
Dimension Films has just announced the studio will be producing a remake of the 1978 film Piranha. The original Roger Corman B-movie was directed by Joe Dante (and written by John Sayles), and features flesh-eating piranha fish being released into a summer resort’s rivers. On the surface, Piranha is nothing more than a Jaws rip-off. (Although, the tongue-in-cheek horror film does have its fans — including Steven Spielberg. The film even generated a sequel directed by a young James Cameron.)
The Piranha poster also follows the Jaws poster formula: swimming beauty on the water, in danger from said creature (with large teeth) from below. The Piranha poster illustration does invoke the right look — another example of how exploitation poster artwork was the great equalizer when compared to the advertising of big budget counterparts. After all, hiring a good illustrator wasn’t beyond the expense of lower budget films.
The illustrator giving the Piranha key art it’s teeth was artist John Solie. No stranger to exploitation film posters, Solie illustrated posters for some interesting 1970s films, including Candy Stripe Nurses, Shaft’s Big Score, and Soylent Green. Solie, speaking about his time working for Roger Coreman’s New World Pictures:
If they gave me as much of a free hand as possible to do the work, I didn’t care whether I was working for a B-movie company or a major. At New World, I’d go to lunch with the art director, he’d tell me the story of the movie, I’d make a drawing on a napkin, he’d approve it and I’d go home and do it. I never saw any of the movies, but I made the movie ads and they made a lot of money!
In honor of the upcoming Halloween holiday, it seems appropriate to post a few horror film posters this week. Our first horror one-sheet is what we like to consider The Scariest Movie Poster Ever.
The 1974 film Abby is the story of a female marriage counselor who marries and becomes possessed by an evil spirit — the Demon of Sexuality. The film, by exploitation producer Samuel Z. Arkoff and director Willam Gridler, was reportedly to be titled The Blackorcist. (Not surprisingly, the film was the subject of a lawsuit by the film studio Warner Bros. as being a rip-off of The Exorcist.)
As for the Abby movie poster itself, when you mix such a strange and scary image of actress Carol Speed with a few great low budget genres (Blaxplotation and Horror), it’s hard not to take notice. (This movie poster is also yet another example of the “Big Heads Floating in the Sky” movie poster layout cliche. Or in this case, a “Big Head Possessed by a Demon Floating in the Sky on Fire” film poster layout.)
As we are constantly reminding everyone, there is nothing we like more than “Exploitation” movie posters from past decades. Whether it’s 1950s drug panic films or blaxploitation from the 1970s, the exploitation genres rely on what serves low budget film advertising best: sensationalism. When you take that trait and apply it to a relatively cheap advertising medium (such as one-sheets), movie poster magic can result. More importantly, exploitation posters are a prime example of an advertising campaign overcoming the limitations and quality of the films they are selling. This “saved by advertising” approach is something that Hollywood still tries to replicate to this day.
The Reel Gallery is continuing their movie poster book series with the Exploitation Poster Art book by Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh, along with an accompanying auction of vintage exploitation one-sheets at Christie’s. From the Exploitation Poster Art website:
Sex, drugs, delinquency, Black power, alternative culture and, of course, rock and roll: these are just some of the themes which have attracted the attention of the cinema’s bottom-feeders over the past eighty years. A few of the resulting films have become cult classics, but most were simply tacky — few would probably now want to sit through two hours of High School Hellcats or Prison Girls. The posters produced to promote them, on the other hand, are wonderful period pieces that vividly evoke the social fears, temptations and taboos of bygone eras.
Director Walter Hill created a stir with his ode to 70s era gang warfare with the 1979 cult classic film The Warriors. The film follows the adventures of a New York City gang known as the “Warriors”, wrongly accused of a gangleader’s death, fighting their way back to their home turf of Coney Island. The film has had a surprisingly wide reach for what some consider a cheesy 70s flick. This includes the new Warriors videogame from Rockstar Games, not to mention the upcoming 2006 remake.
The Warriors movie poster features a memorable illustration of key “members” of the various NYC gangs, including star Michael Beck, leader of the “Warriors”. A member of the everyone’s favorite gang, the “Baseball Furies”, is also depicted. Another nice touch is the haphazard spray paint style of the film’s title treatment.
The film is often mentioned with the piece of trivia that it incited gang riots in large city movie theatres when it was released. While that claim may have been true to an extent, I seriously doubt the film’s one-sheet played any role in the mayhem:
After several violent incidents that occurred at various showings of the film, the producers decided to change to poster as a way of cutting down on the violence. The original poster featured the logo as well as a picture of several tough looking gang members. The second poster just featured the logo against a white background. (from the IMDB.)
Cable network Showtime is set to premiere the movie musical Reefer Madness this month. The cable movie is a film version of the hit LA and off Broadway musical Reefer Madness, which was in turn based on the infamous 1938 cult classic film of the same name.
While it’s origin is the subject of some debate, the 1938 anti-drug film was said to originally be conceived by a church group and was called Tell Your Children. The film fell into the hands of infamous exploitation filmmaker Dwain Esper, who retitled and recut the B-movie to help launch the “drug panic” genre of films of the period. The “grindhouse” film circuit became an early incarnation of “indie” filmmaking — independent roadshow filmmakers made and exhibited films that titillate by addressing such forbidden topics as sex and drugs, which the mainstream film studios were unable to do.
In the case of Reefer Madness, the film was nothing more than propaganda, complete with an “educational film” label to justify the topic being depicted. The film’s poster also illustrates another advantage that small-time producers had over their mainstream studio competition — it was relatively cheap and easy to generate a salacious and provocative one-sheet poster, regardless of a film’s budget. Decades before the era of movie trailers and film reviews across all media outlets, a film was judged by it’s cover, the movie poster. Who couldn’t resist the sensationalist images and copylines like:
The deadly scourge that drag’s our children into the quagmires of degradation. Your child may be next!
The most famous B-movie poster of all time may be the poster one-sheet for the film Attack of the 50ft. Woman. The 1958 B-movie is about a rich housewife increased to gigantic size by space aliens. The films tagline: See a female colossus… her mountainous torso, skyscraper limbs, giant desires! The supersized woman then decides to inflict havoc to those who have wronged her. Despite being a camp science fiction classic, far more people have seen the film’s iconic poster than have actually seen the camp film itself. (The illustrated movie poster even makes appearances in other films, including on the wall of the club Jack Rabbit Slims in the film Pulp Fiction.) It’s not hard to see why the Attack of the 50ft. Woman movie poster remains popular to this day — the stylized brush strokes and image of a giant woman smashing cars on a highway overpass is hard to ignore.
X-Rated: Adult Movie Posters of the 60s and 70s offers a visual online gallery (and book) from the “golden age” of porn films in the 1960s and 70s, when x-rated movies actually played in movie theatres. The movie poster art created for these x-rated films remain kitsch classics, with many invoking a surprising sense of style and design.
Featuring posters from such not-so classic adult films as The Love Robots, Call Girls of Frankfurt, Blackmailed Wives, The Pro Shop, Flesh Gordon, Kiss Me Mate, Space Thing, Slaves of the Sin-dicate, Girls That Do, Come Play With Me, Depraved!, Hot Lunch, Danish Pastries, Maid in Sweden, and oh so many more.
