Here is a very famous movie who’s cultural impact is remembered much more than the film itself. Before Easy Rider, The Wild One was the original iconic outlaw biker movie. Marlon Brando stars as the leader of a biker gang who terrorise a small American town. It is all very tame stuff by today’s standards…
The Face Of Fu Manchu
Here’s a poster and a movie from a very different era…. I remember catching the series of Christopher Lee’s Fu Manchu movies on afternoon television in the 70s. They were obviously considered harmless escapist fare, suitable for kids. Back in the day, it was fine for a Caucasian actor to put on “Asian” eye…
Monsters From An Unknown Planet / Godzilla
I was never much of a Godzilla geek, although I do remember watching some of the old, badly dubbed Japanese originals on afternoon TV as a kid. The kick out of watching these films inevitably came from seeing the regular wanton destruction of Tokyo model sets by men in rubber suits. It was interesting also…
Friday 13th: The Final Chapter
Much as I love horror movies I have never been a fan of the Friday 13th franchise. The original Friday 13th had one decent jump scare at the end when the (un)dead Jason rears up out of Crystal Lake. I also recall a young Kevin Bacon gets offed with an arrow through his neck. But…
Bridge On The River Kwai
Here’s a well-preserved Belgian poster for David Lean’s 1957 classic war movie. Personal story: I have actually been to the site where the bridge was built for the movie. It was shot in Sri Lanka, where I had the pleasure of living and working for a year. One sunny day, a group of us hired…
Marathon Man
Marathon Man is one of my all-time favourite thrillers. It was directed by John Schlesinger and written by William Goldman, who also wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, amongst other classics, as well as authoring the classic Hollywood memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade (a must-read for any movie fan). He initially wrote Marathon…
The Mummy / The Mummy’s Shroud
Here’s two Belgian posters for films in Hammer’s Mummy series. The original Mummy is supposed to be as something of a classic but my memory of it is that it was painfully slow and rather dull, notwithstanding it being one of the relatively few Hammer films to star both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing….
Sid & Nancy
This poster is in rather tatty condition, but for once that rather fits with the aesthetic of the film! Oddball director Alex Cox was riffing off the success of his earlier cult hit Repoman and desperately wanted to call his Sid Vicious romance drama Love Kills but the distributors insisted on the rather more commercially…
The Warriors / Streets of Fire
This is a pair of French advance door panel posters (or ‘pantalons’) for two movies from director Walter Hill. Both are highly stylised, nocturnal and urban. Hill made a number of cracking hit thrillers in the 70s-80s, including The Driver and 48 Hours, but both of these movies got lousy reviews and flopped upon release. …
Cape Fear
Here are two very different posters for both versions of Cape Fear, 30 years apart. The first is a Belgian poster for the Gregory Peck/Robert Mitchum 1962 version. Cape Fear is a taut noir-style thriller about an upright lawyer tormented by a recently paroled psycho he helped put in jail. The French title “les nerfs…