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.
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!
