Boss posters for bad movies part 1

A love affair with the empty boxes on the rental shelves

This is a remake of one of the old Cinema Suicide’s most-popular articles. It’s a topic that I love revisiting because it brings me back. It brings us all back, and what’s nostalgia good for if not cheap engagement?

The old school video store experience was a treat that’s hard to communicate to people who never experienced it. Even the kneecapped version of it at chains like Blockbuster and Video Update was better than the current iteration, where you scroll endlessly through the list of movies available on Netflix or Shudder before realizing that it’s late and you’re never going to find something you feel like watching, so you shut it all down and go to sleep, instead. Back in the day it was easy and if we’re talking about the 80’s, everyone had at least a small selection of tapes for rental, even gas stations and convenience stores. My family’s first rental membership was at a spot in Salem, Massachusetts, right in the middle of the downtown area, on Lafayette Street called Video Paradise and they did it up right. Posters covered the walls above the shelves in the shop with high-ceilings like wallpaper, advertising the trashiest trash ever produced and I was enraptured by it all.

The analog experience of standing in front of the shelves, poring over the shop’s salacious collection of empty boxes was something, especially when you were a little kid with a hysterical mother that was absolutely certain that seeing Friday the 13th would lead you down a dark path of madness that ended with murdering your family. You may as well have been sneaking into the section at the back of the store, the one behind the beaded curtain. Between the horror section and the action movie section you caught a glimpse of an exciting world of boobs, bullets, and explosions. The box art, usually a fifty-fifty split between a photograph or a painting, was trying its hardest to convince you, a kid who didn’t know any better, that the movie on that tape was a thrilling experience like no other. And then you’d get it home, pop it in the VCR and realize as the minutes pass, that the box art may have been lying to you. But it’s all good. Rolling the dice was a part of the fun and when you found a winner, you’d bring the news to all your friends and pop off, excited that they’d seen it too! There were a few that really caught my eye, though, and they stay with me to this day.

Poster art for Umberto Lenzi’s caveman craptacular, Ironmaster

Ironmaster

Man, would you look at that? Dramatic lighting, a faceless hero in silhouette, hair blowing in the wind. He asserts his absolute dominance with a clenched fist and the most ridiculous, phallic sword ever committed to canvas. This box excited the hell out of me because I loved sword and sorcery and the stuff they were getting past the MPAA with a PG rating, while solid, didn’t hit the same gnarly notes that Ironmaster did with this box. It suggested something darker and heavier within. If Dragonslayer was Motley Crue, Ironmaster was Metallica. The reality of it was like a bucket of cold water dumped over your head or a slap in the face. At the time of its release, the world was reeling from the world premier of Mr. Universe, himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan The Barbarian and all of a sudden the shelves at the shops were filling up with cheapo sword and sorcery movies to meet the ravenous demand. But here’s the thing: Ironmaster isn’t a sword and sorcery movie.

Having grown up with a deep and abiding love of trashy movies, I eventually got around to finding out how they were made, both at home and abroad in different markets and what I found out about the way that these movies are made and sold sheds a lot of light on why the art and posters are the way that they are. Particularly in foreign markets like Italy, a studio buys the movie before there’s even a script. A producer hits the sales event or pitches a studio a handful of movies at one time with nothing more than a brief synopsis of the movie they want to make and an exciting painting bearing the pitch’s major themes. In Ironmaster’s case, they clearly pitched a Conan ripoff with this awesome Frank Frazetta-style poster, but between that meeting and the actual production something changed. And this isn’t uncommon in any market. Budgets get cut, the script sucks, directors change. Big Trouble In Little China, for instance, was originally pitched as a western. Lamberto Bava’s supremely crappy Blastfighter started out as a Road Warrior ripoff directed by Umberto Lenzi. Ironmaster changed somewhere between the pitch and release and turned into a crappy Quest For Fire lookalike. Quest For Fire is great but it’s not exactly a genre piece that movie fans were clamoring for more of but you do what you gotta do when you’re making movies in Italy and a solid poster will sell any old piece of crap.

The excellent, overpromising poster for Canuxploitation legend Def-Con 4

Def-Con 4

Man, did Def-Con 4 overpromise or what? If Wargames taught us anything, it’s that the Defense Readiness Condition scale runs the other way, so this movie’s title always got to me a little, a nerdy kid with an obnoxious preference for precise language. Defcon 4 indicated that NORAD was on a slightly higher alert than total peacetime, Defcon 5. Defcon 1 was the status that meant we were all doomed. But what a poster! I’ve seen it elsewhere, stripped of its movie branding, sold as a piece of science fiction art and why the hell not? It’s outstanding but this is a movie made in Canada, where there isn’t a whole lot of desert to speak of. As a matter of fact, there’s vastly more mud and pine trees in Def-Con 4 than the dusty climates of your average Road Warrior knockoff.

The movie, itself, is great. It’s better than most of the garbage briskly trotting out of Italy at the same time. It’s just not what you see on the poster. And in spite of the difference, the themes remain intact. It’s about a bunch of people aboard an orbital missile platform that witness nuclear armageddon on the planet below and zip back down to the surface in an escape pod to find that there’s plenty of survivors and they’re all psychotic hillbillies paying fealty to a heavily armed gang in a walled compound. It approaches the usual post-nuke themes from a slightly different angle but it doesn’t exactly matter in the end. Everyone was trying to make the same radioactive western that George Miller did, with tricked out vehicles and queer-coded bad guys. If you’ve never seen it, you should, especially if you’re a fan of the Astron-6 fellas. There’s a lot of parallels there.

But here’s the rub: The satellite in the movie doesn’t look like the badass satellite on the poster and there’s nary a space suit to speak of. It’s just more dope movie marketing by a company that vastly overestimated the sort of movie they were going to be able to make on the budget afforded them by the Canadian government and the high point was this awesome bit of poster art.

Demi Moore’s uncredited ass notoriously sold the legendary rape/revenge roughie, I Spit On Your Grave

I Spit On Your Grave

Boy, do I have a hard time with this one. I do not particularly enjoy I Spit On Your Grave but that poster sure does leave a mark, doesn’t it? I’ve seen it a couple of times and it’s just not my scene. I was positively shocked to find out that in the last twenty years it’s been remade and then several sequels were produced, for some fucking reason, but if there was a box on the shelves at the video store that triggered something deep inside me at the earliest dawn of my sexual awakening it was definitely Demi Moore’s bruised ass peeking out from under torn panties. Oh, you didn’t know? I felt weird looking at this one and Slumber Party Massacre, which Video Paradise had a huge onesheet of hanging on the wall above the horror movies. I would sneak a peak at them when I thought that no one was looking and then slink away, hoping that no one noticed me doing so because then I’d be in trouble, probably. I never even lifted this one off the shelf out of sheer terror at the thought of being seen.

I’m hard pressed to give it up to a movie poster like that advertising that fucking movie but man, that’s an attention grabber, isn’t it? Having seen it, I have real problems with sexualizing the movie’s sexual violence. Rape is pretty common in these nasty, trashy movies, especially seeing as how I find Japanese Pink Film drifting into my movie diet lately, but there’s something different about the cringey scenes in something like Female Convict Scorpion versus the two extremely brutal, extremely realistic scenes in I Spit On Your Grave that just kind of sickens me. But attention grabbing is one thing this box had going for it.

It was originally released to US rental markets by Charles Band under his Wizard Video label in those great old big-box releases that were deliberately made to stand off the shelf better than the boxes which simply slipped over the tape. Where Band simplified the boxes to reduce colors at the printing press and thereby reduce production costs, he wisely maintained the original photographic art for this one.

Few video tapes were as roundly threatening as Faces of Death 2

Faces of Death 2

Holy hell. No tape on the shelves screamed danger quite like this one. The original Faces of Death box spoke to its inherent cheapness by way of an underwhelming black box bearing a skull, the same warning advertising true thrills for degenerates, and a corner label which proudly (and falsely) declared that it had been banned in 46 countries. But Faces of Death 2 ratcheted up the tension with a label bearing eerie art of a threatening surgeon and a series of faces meant to suggest decomposition. The same warning about the content remained but most of all, it bore the most threatening distribution logo of any on the shelf: Gorgon Video. Where most distributors kept it strictly business with names like New World, Vestron, or Media, Gorgon had this heavy metal quality about it that gave license to impressionable young children like me to be very, very frightened of what you might see were you to lift the tape and turn it over. The skeletal surgeon leers at you, pointing its scalpel and the entire jacket is blood red. No tape on the shelf advertised a horror movie quite like this one, which promised that it was a documentary and within you would see scene after scene of real people dying in gory fashion. At the height of the Gene Siskel Crusade, no tape was poised to do real damage to society like this one.

Alas, Faces of Death fucking sucks. All of them.

I’m not much for Mondo movies and The Killing of America will scratch any itch you may have had at the time to see a movie packed to the rafters with people getting killed for real. It’s also a vastly better documentary and, most of all, an actual documentary where Faces of Death and its sequels simply pretend to be. Faces’ scenes of “real death” are crappy re-enactments, with some newsreel footage mixed in to keep it out of court on fraud charges and if it’s banned anywhere it’s because many a nation has laws prohibiting the killing of or depictions of killing animals. It’s the same reason that most of the cannibal movies out there were also banned, exceptionally gory violence, notwithstanding.

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That’ll do it for this volume of Boss posters for bad movies. The original post that ended up reposted elsewhere a million times had a dozen titles in the post and I intend to cover them all and then some. So get subscribed for more boss posters.