Random thoughts... on movie posters

You've got to love movie marketing departments. They use the most mercenary methods to get you to part with your cash and pick up a DVD or go to the cinema. With trailers, they'll rip out the best bits of film and spoil them all ruining any bit of excitement and generally trying to tell you the whole damn story. Then with posters they'll usually flat out lie about the contents of the film, sticking a giant picture of a famous actor, who then turns out only to have a redundant five minute cameo somewhere near the end of the film. Occasionally, they try and convince you a film's like another film, even when it's not. Nothing demonstrates this better than a DVD I saw on the shelf of a store yesterday.

Wow, Macbeth, starring human cardboard cut out Sam Worthington from Avatar. Wait, a second that poster looks suspiciously similar to the one for Avatar.

Oh, well maybe they have similar plot. Maybe it's Macbeth set on a space station on a moon, like Space: 1999? No, no it's just Macbeth set in modern day Australia. Oh well, duped again.

Even worse than that poster (but for different reasons) has to be this one for Barbarian Queen, a pretty terrible z-list sword and sorcery tale from Roger Corman that came out in the early 80s in the wake of Conan the Barbarian.

What's that they've put on the front cover. "Lana Clarkson: Murder Victim in the Phil Spector case". Don't think I've seen that one, let me look it up on imdb... hang on. This isn't some made for TV film of the Phil Spector murder case, it's actually the murder victim herself - Lana Clarkson. Wow... just wow. That's a new low for marketing. What's next? A poster for A Hard Day's Night with the tagline - "Starring John Lennon: Murder Victim in the Mark Chapman case"???

Also, it's not like they've done this once. Fair enough, she's the titular character in Barbarian Queen (in both senses of the word - you get to see her rack several times in the film). But it's also on the front cover for Deathstalker in which she has supporting role. Now this is fair enough, clearly it's the marketing strategy they're going for, but please - whoever designed these covers - stay consistent!
 

You've also got The Warrior and the Sorceress starring David Carradine, another Roger Corman cheapie from the 1980s but you've listed "David Carradine: Kill Bill, Death Race 2000, Deathsport" when surely it should be "Starring David Carradine - jerked himself off and died in a closet"?

Well, there's my inaugural post. I'll be following it up with more musings on movies and in-depth analysis of important classics of the past 30 years including Scanner Cop, Six String Samurai, Trancers 5: Sudden Death as well as the life and works of key players such as Gary Daniels, Chuck Norris and Jeff Fahey!

In the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger - "Stick around".