Welcome back to the Shock-O-Rama Poster Show! Today we are returning to the vaults for more "classic" posters from my collection (posters I had BEFORE I started posting them online). With the exception of the first two, the bulk of this post will be devoted to JAWS knock offs. Joy! I do want to apologize for the photos---I am no photographer (and you'll see why I usually post the photos from the auctions I win from). So let's let the poster parade begin!
REVENGE OF THE SHOGUN WOMEN (3D):
I love this poster.I've never seen the movie--and probably never will. It's a long forgotten martial arts movie from the '70s. Snore. But why do i love the poster? It's just the art. It really tries to convey the 3D experience. The characters and their weapons are popping off of the painted screen while the audience members below scramble to dodge out of the way. Couple that with some eye=popping color and you have a fun poster. In fact, this was the VERY FIRST framed poster I hung up in my house as an adult.
HILLBILLYS IN A HAUNTED HOUSE:
Ferlin Husky (who?) is B-A-C-K. After the moderate success of LAS VEGAS HILLBILLYS (featuring Mamie Van Doren and Jayne Mansfield!), a sequel came about---this time set in a haunted house. Yowza! Joi Lansing filled in for Mamie...and horror has-beens John Carradine, Lon Chaney and Basil Rathbone are on hand for the horror hijinks. Silly--and filled with country music performances (O' the horror of that!).
JAWS (re-release):
Until I got my copies of the original JAWS poster, I had to settle (for years and YEARS) with this re-release poster. That was okay--it was still the same iconic image--but every time I looked at it, it made me want the original that much more. Ironically, I never saw JAWS in the theater until the re-release. Ha!
PIRANHA:
This was a great little flick (--and it's already been remade twice! Jeepers). I had been shipped off to my bio-father's house for the summer (he lived in the mountains--miles from any theater) when this came out---so I didn't get to see it at first. I later caught it as a co-feature for another film (the poster for it is below. I'll mention it when we get there) and loved it. This is probably my favorite JAWS knock-off.
PIRANHA II: FLYING KILLERS:
PIRANHA II: FLYING KILLERS (aka PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING) was a dud. The flying piranha were cool---and they made for a nifty poster--but the over all movie was WEAK. I first saw this poster while traveling through Europe in 1981. Zowie! The art made me really want to see the film desperately...but I had trouble with the title as it was usually printed in another language (Spanish, French, Italian, German? I was all over that summer...). I missed it in my home town (I was travelling), but from what I could see, it only played at a drive in when it was here. Oh well--the poster is cool.
KILLER FISH:
I remember seeing the ad in the paper for it when it came out. Ooooo I wanted to go so badly. I didn't get to see it until it debuted on TV (NBC, as I recall) in the fall of 1981. I remember that as I had just gotten back from my stint as an exchange student to Chile. When I saw this flick, I was so taken with it because it featured the Brazilian airline Varig (which had been the airline we had flown from Florida to Rio and then over to Santiago in Chile---and back). While on Varig, at the tender age of 16, I was pleasantly surprised when the stewardess (they were still called stewardesses then--not flight attendants) gave me a bottle of wine with dinner---without asking for ID or charging me for it. Zowie! On the way back home, I had stopped in a duty free shop and purchased a stuffed real piranha while in Rio. So a piranha movie with Varig airlines taking place in South America really resonated with me at the time. The movie is just so-so (dig that cheesy tornado that comes and goes so quickly. It looks like someone doodled it onto the film stock. Ha!), but fun in a campy way.
GREAT WHITE (Teaser):
When this came out, I was in high school. I'd look at the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times movie ads in the school library. I saw this picture in the SF paper WEEKS before the film came out...but already knew I HAD to see it.
GREAT WHITE:
When this film came out, it was immediately slapped with a lawsuit by Universal Studios for copyright infringement/plagiarism. I read about the court case in the paper daily. Oh my stars! I HAD to see this. I rushed down to the theater showing this one day via foot/bus---that's how badly I wanted to see it. Yes, it was pretty crappy...but in an awesome way. I am so glad I got to see it, because the very next day it had been yanks from the theater and some double feature of movies that had recently had their run was put in to finish off the week. Universal won the suit---I mean, the lead character is a writer (not a police chief) named Peter Benton (similar to JAWS author Peter Benchley). There is a mayor bent on keeping shark talk hush-hush for fear it will scare away summer tourists and summer dollars. And there is Vic Morrow doing his very best Robert Shaw as Quint imitation.
CROCODILE:
I caught this on video back in the VHS era...and was surprised to find it had played theatrically when I came across this movie poster. Of COURSE I bought it instantly. What a cool poster.
UP FROM THE DEPTHS:
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, I would spend the weekends with my grandmother and we would go to the movies. I usually ended up dragging her off to see some horror flick---which she hated. After going to see DAWN OF THE DEAD with her (I had to---the theater was treating it like an R Rated film and I was only 13 at the time), I knew I could not do that to her any more. (She had walked out of DAWN OF THE DEAD and spent the rest of the movie in the lobby.) So I began to look for alternate movies she could watch while I watched my horror flicks. When UP FROM THE DEPTHS came out, it opened at a 4-plex and was co-billed with PIRANHA. Ooooo I HAD to see that double bill. But what was there for grandma (and my younger brother, who was also along that weekend). I sent them to THE MUPPET MOVIE (which started a long time after my double bill did and finished way earlier than mine). Towards the end of UP FROM THE DEPTHS, my grandmother and brother snuck into my theater to wait with me and watched the rest of the film with me. They had hated THE MUPPET MOVIE. Ha! Oh well. I tried to appease them. UP FROM THE DEPTHS was lousy and the dialogue did not match the mouths--it was just a tad slow. But I dug it any way. The poster was one of the first things I sought out when I first discovered eBay. SOLD!
Thanks for joining me. That's all today. Now, don't go all to pieces. I'll be back again soon with more posters to share.
CHEERS!
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