Dario Argento is a director I must admit I just don’t “get”. I found his supposed masterpiece Suspiria a badly-acted incomprehensible mess, but maybe that’s missing the point. His movies don’t really care much about characterisation or logic, they are more about atmosphere and bloody set-pieces. Tenebrae (“Darkness”) is a ‘giallo’ thriller, featuring bad dubbing…
His Kind Of Woman
I’ve never seen His Kind Of Woman, yet I came by 2 posters for it by accident. This 1951 film noir cum comedy (apparently) stars Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, billed as “the hottest combination to ever hit the screen.” Producer and RKO Studios boss Howard Hughes took out huge fireworks-shooting billboards in LA with…
The Expendables
I’ve written before about how I don’t much care for the lazy photo-shopping of most modern movie poster designs, but this poster for The Expendables is one of the more striking images from recent years, I think. Sly Stallone’s knowing 80s action hero team-up is a lot of fun (before the 2 sequels began to…
Werewolf Of London
1935’s Werewolf Of London has the distinction of being the world’s very first full-length werewolf movie. Strangely, it never came up on TV when I was a kid in the 70s, when I saw most of the Universal horrors from the period, so I have never seen it. It was originally intended to star Boris…
The Lost Weekend
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Billy Wilde’s 1945 Oscar-winning movie about alcoholism. This is a super-rare Belgian poster, featuring star Ray Milland as an alcoholic writer on the mother of all benders. The movie won four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director for Wilder, and Best Actor for Milland. Interestingly, the liquor industry…
The Wild Bunch
This is a French poster for Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece, one of the all-time great elegiac Westerns. The Wild Bunch is best known for its slow-motion “bullet ballets”, as featured in both the extended opening sequence and the climax, as various protagonists get ripped to shreds by gunfire. It became part of the debate about…
Up In Smoke
I’ve never seen any of the ‘stoner’ movies Cheech and Chong made in the 70s, including their first (and apparently best), Up In Smoke. Cheech and Chong were a Canadian hippie stand-up comedy team, who’s schtick basically revolved around being stoned the entire time. You probably had to be high to get the jokes in…
Lawrence Of Arabia
This is a Belgian poster for David Lean’s classic. Lean’s 1962 multi-Oscar winning movie is epic in every sense – from run-time to the vision and scale of its action sequences. It also features one of the all-time great lead performances from Peter O’Toole in the title role, and one of the most remarkable supporting…