This was funny, but I’m guessing I would have found it at least ten percent funnier if I lived in the UK. More than once when no one was laughing I thought “oh, I can tell there’s a reference here that we don’t know.”
Today’s fake poster references a movie about a different Hall, and a different set of creepy family relations.
When this was two movies, the pacing of the second one always seemed strange, and it’s even stranger as one big movie. The first half spends a huge amount of time building up The Bride and O-Ren Ishi, and their final battle feels earned.
Then intermission hits, and the second half moves at a much slower pace. We learn more about Bill, but it’s almost all from other people talking about him. The final battle is more of a conversation than a fight. I like that in theory, but as it’s done here it feels anti-climactic.
Today’s fake poster is based solely on the other movie also having a rhyming title.
I’ve been meaning to watch this for decades, but never got around to it until The Flop House did it on Flop TV. It takes itself very seriously, which is impressive for a movie that features a hairy Scottish guy in a red diaper. But I didn’t hate it!
Today’s fake poster is a really strong copy of the poster for Harper. Too bad pretty much no one (including me) remembers seeing the original. I like that it looks like the movie is about some guy with a drawn-on goatee.
My friend’s grandfather, Terry Frost, was a character actor who appeared in hundreds of movies from the forties to the sixties. Letterboxd only lists 89, but I’m guessing many of his parts were uncredited. I’d never seen any of his movies. Most of his movies were westerns, but this sci-fi horror flick had the largest part of his that I could find to watch, so I went with it.
It’s exactly what you’d expect from a 40s science fiction b-movie. Low budget, short, full of nonsense science, wild coincidences, and a laboratory with a gorilla for no reason other than mad scientist’s labs are supposed to have gorillas. A perfectly acceptable excuse to sit in the dark and eat popcorn.
Today’s fake poster is the third one I’ve done based on a movie from the seventies’ “classy porn” period. The others are here and here. I picked it mainly because there are very few decent quality images available from this movie. But I did learn how to load alternate characters from a font into Photoshop. I was afraid I’d have to draw them in manually.
While it’s pretty impressive that this 75 year old movie says “hey, the USA did handle indigenous populations correctly,” it’s also a movie with a very white lead actor in full on red face.
Also: it’s certainly not the fault of the movie, but it is weird that the subtitles for a film about people being forcibly ejected from their land choose to show all the Shoshone dialogue as “SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE.”
Another thing that’s not the fault of the movie: Every time I hear “Devil’s Doorway” I think of Satan’s Alley.
Robert Taylor (1500 Vine Street) looks plain silly in his dark makeup and light eyes, but his actual performance isn’t as stereotypical as you might expect.
OH LOOK A POSTER!
The Knives Out movies are fun. The murder mystery is always there, but they never have the same theme. The first was about family, the second about unchecked wealth, and this one about faith. And they mostly play fair- we get all the clues at the same time as Benoit Blanc. I hope they make a hundred more of them.
The inspiration for today’s poster is a movie that I saw a long time ago: two days before this one.
More saccharine than I expected, but far less saccharine than you’d think from the trailer’s use of Ooh La La by The Faces. Strong performances all around, but it never quite pulled me in.
I’m way behind in my fake poster for real movie based on real poster for other movie project, so I’m starting to lean in to the simpler ones. At this rate my last one will be a remake of the advance poster for Ant-Man.
What a beautiful movie.
Deliberate, but not tedious; every frame is there for a reason. I’m sad that most people will watch this on Netflix, because it looks amazing on a real movie screen.
I went for an easy poster today, based on one from a recent movie that has surprising parallels to this movie.
Things I learned from this movie:
The most interesting part of this movie was seeing how the restoration team dealt with the degraded film stock.
Norma Talmadge (1500 Vine Street) was one of the top silent film stars. Like many other actors, her popularity fell with the rise of talkies. Unlike many others, she had saved a ton of money and was happy to get out of the public eye.
If you’ve ever driven down Talmadge Street in Los Feliz and wondered who it was named after, now you know.
Today’s poster makes a morality tale about drug abuse look like a rom-com.
A fun little caper flick. Does it make sense? No, but everyone in the movie believes it does, and that’s enough to make it work. Jack Elam is a glorious twitchy rag doll of creepiness.
Edward Small (1501 Vine Street- I accidentally did this one early) produced about a billion movies, mostly westerns. There are very few pictures of him online. I guess he was camera shy, but you wouldn’t guess that from his production company’s logo:
Today’s source poster was pretty obscure, but it looked cool so I went for it.
