Curse of the Werewolf

Here is a French poster for the 1961 British film Curse of the Werewolf, directed by Terence Fisher. The poster is by Guy Gerard Noel a French artist I talked about briefly back HERE.

Guy Gerard Noel

The Killers

United States - 1965

Director Don Siegel

Starring - Lee Marvin, Ronald Reagan, Angie Dickinson and Clu Gulager

This Mummy poster and the Horror of Dracula poster down below come courtesy of user eatbrie at the Movie Poster Forum.
Check out the Movie Poster Database page on Gerard Noel HERE. I found the artist through the Killers poster at the top, I am a big Lee Marvin fan as you may know and was instantly attracted to the poster. I had already comitted myself to seeing the film when I noticed the names of the other stars. Could you ask for a better classic lineup than Clu Gulager, Angie Dickinson and Ronald Reagan? I didn't think so. I regret that I do not have the time to do enough research to uncover more on this great French artist. His style reminds me of something between a screenprint and a theater backdrop. Awesome. If you know anything more about Guy Gerard Noel, drop us a line.

War Is Hell

United States - 1963

Director - Burt Topper

At The Order of the Tsar
France - 1954
Director - Andre Haguet

The Caine Mutiny

United States - 1954

Director - Edward Dmytryk

The Horror of Dracula
United States - 1958
Director - Terence Fisher

Mutant Hunt Promo Art

Thanks to an extra wide reproduction of the poster artwork for Mutant Hunt in the new book Destroy All Movies, I finally noticed the signature of C. W. Taylor on this amazing piece of video history. It also led me to Tim Kinkaid's other Charles Band produced sci-fi gem Robot Holocaust which, sure enough, features poster art by Taylor. Jeeze, how did I miss this?
Follow the link HERE to my old post about the artist, and HERE to my post about Mutant Hunt, a film that has haunted me for over a decade.

Luigi Martinati

Big Jim McLain

United States - 1952

Director - Edward Ludwig

These posters were painted by Italian artist Luigi Martinati who did Italian versions of posters for all sorts of movies as well as political posters and advertisements, most notably for the Italian car manufacturer Fiat. A small amount of his work can be found online, almost all of it in low resolution, but I haven't yet found a decent gallery so we'll have to piece it together ourselves.

 High Sierra

US - 1941

Director - Raoul Walsh

poster from To Bathe In Filmic Waters

Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison

US - 1951

Director - Crane Wilbur

Mildred Pierce

United States - 1945

Director - Michael Curtiz

Flamingo Road

United States - 1949

Director - Michael Curtiz

John Solie

John Solie is another name that exploitation film fans should know, except that a lot of us don't, we're too young. Solie is no longer in the movie poster business because the movie poster business is no longer into art. Solie first went to work for Columbia pictures in the early 1960's despite his best efforts not to get the job. He kept increasing his demands but he got the job anyway and it turned out he loved it. He continued illustrating movie posters for the next thirty years, for major and independent studios including Roger Corman's New World Pictures.









In an interview in "What It Is... What It Was", Solie says that it was one of the funnest jobs he has had, with total freedom to come up with whatever he wanted, sometimes a sketch on a cocktail napkin  was the only draft he submitted. Most of the posters you can find online by searching for Solie are for either blaxploitation films or Corman productions. Solie did over 200 movie poster images, but I have only been able to confirm those I've listed or scanned here.  but by the 1980's posters with art were starting to disappear.

Once there was no longer a market for illustration in movie posters, Solie moved on to do romance book covers but these too became the realm of computers and he did work for TV Guide magazine which you can see at his website HERE. In addition he has done a number of fine art pieces with western and war themes as well as commissions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).


It is surprisingly hard to find the names of many of the movies Solie did posters for, much less the artwork itself. Below is a list of all the posters collected at IMPAwards as well as anything that readily turned up in an image search engine. The images I've included here are those not included in the first two categories. I would appreciate any confirmable contributions to this list if you come across them.

John Solie dot com

Big Bad Mama
Candy Stripe Nurses
Capone and Capone 2
Challenge to White Fang
City on Fire
Grand Theft Auto
Last Days of Man on Earth
Lili
Moving Violations
Piranha
Raid on Entebbe
Ryan's Daughter
Savage!
Shaft In Africa
Shaft's Big Score
Smokey and the Bandit
Soylent Green
Starcrash
Strange Brew
Street Girls
Summer School Teachers
Swashbuckler
Tarzan
Tender Loving Care
The Invisible Boy
The Swinging Barmaids
Tidal Wave
TNT Jackson

Solie's painting of the last cavalry charge in U.S. military history, commissioned by the U.S. Army.

 John Solie with a painting he did for the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Oregon.

A Solie painting of the Hubble Telescope.

Willow

Willow

United States - 1987

Director - Ron Howard

RCA Home Video, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 2 hours, 10 minutes

Hey, I know it's a pretty mainstream video that's readily available on DVD, but if you notice the red border on the box there, it may bring back memories of other boxes with a similar motif. RCA/Columbia kept the same design for a long ass time, a vestige of the early days of VHS when the quality of the physical product was judged on the reputation of the studio.

The cover/poster artwork for Willow was created by John Alvin, the man responsible for the promo art of such classics as Bladerunner and Rhinestone among many, many other films.

A Fistful of Dollars

A Fistful of Dollars

Italy - 1964

Director - Sergio Leone

I recently discovered that well known illustrator Bob Peak did some posters for the Sergio Leone westerns, including these two, or rather this one, re-designed for an advance (below, notice no title). If you're an illustrator, make sure your contract precisely describes how, and how many times the client is allowed to use your artwork.
Incidentally, you can also download a free version of that title font at 1001 Free Fonts, it's called "Eastwood."

Hard Times

Hard Times

United States - 1975

Director - Walter Hill

One of Hill's and Bronson's better films, this is my favorite poster for Hard Times. It reminds me of a poster and/or hand colored photograph from 1933. Maybe that was the point? I'm going to label it as drama rather than action because it's more about the relationships between Bronson and other folks than it is about the boxing. Appropriate and timely. At the moment you can watch the whole movie at IMDB, and I recommend it.
Bronson had appeared earlier as a boxing instructor, coaching none other than Elvis in Kid Galahad.

 This Japanese ad if from CinemaisDope.com

All of these posters come courtesy of IMP Awards.

The poster above looks like work by by Bob Peak, but it's too small to see any signature and it may just be a copycat. IMP Awards has a page of his artwork including the iconic Apocalypse Now and Star Trek posters here. You can also Google his name and come up with an assload of great 70's Peak art like this sweet Old Hickory Bourbon advert.

Deodato's Cut and Run and The Barbarians

Cut and Run

Italy - 1985

Director - Ruggero Deodato

New World Video, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 27 minutes

Director Ruggero Deodato is most famous of course for Cannibal Holocaust, his contribution to cannibal cinema and the fake documentary which many, including The Blair Witch Project copied to such success. But like many Italian exploitation directors of his time he was willing to do just about anything, including coat-tailing popular themes. His House At The Edge of The Park is a direct spin-off of Wes Craven's Last House On The Left, though more viscerally brutal, and Camping Terror AKA Body Count was a sad attempt to cash in on the slasher genre already waning by the time it came out..

But that's one of the things we should love about exploitation film, its attempts to replicate success. Here we have Cut and Run (aka Inferno in diretta) another cannibal film, this time stacked with exploitation workhorses Michael Berryman and Richard Lynch. The theme here attempts to deepen the intrigue of Deodato's prior cannibal films by drawing the jungle and the modern world together more closely, namely via some strange things called sympathetic characters, plot and narcotics. Much of Cut and Run is standard 80's intrigue, but nevertheless quite entertaining. This VHS tape unfortunately takes after its namesake and has at least three minutes cut. One nice thing about it however is the cover art by Chris Consani. I have been unable to find any sources that explicitly credit him with this art, but the signatures match, so I'm satisfied. Nor does Consani have website, Googling his name results in page after page of paintings of Humphrey Bogart, Elvis, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe playing pool. Well rendered, but, I just don't get the appeal. In any case, this is the only movie related artwork I can atribute to Consani, but there are several different versions.
The following two are UK sleeves from It's Only a Movie.co.uk and feature what appear to be alternate versions of the Consani artwork:

 

 The above version, while not quite as intimidating as the following, does feature the suspended Fran character (Lisa Blount) which ads a different sort of menace to the whole thing.

 

Furthermore, according to the book Cannibal Holocaust: The Savage Cinema of Ruggero Deodato, Cut and Run was originally titled Marimba and slated to be directed by Wes Craven. Obviously it didn't end up that way but as you can see above it does prominently star the unforgettable Michael Berryman who also glared out from the screen, posters and VHS boxes of Craven's The Hills Have Eyes parts 1 and 2 (1977 and 1985 respectively.) Deodato really has a thing for Wes Craven.

Deodato also re-hired both Berryman and Lynch for Barbarians, his entertaining last minute entry in the barbarian/fantasy craze that briefly swept the post-Conan 1980's.

 

Barbarians

Italy - 1987

Director - Ruggero Deodato

Media Home Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

Strangely this post began as a short write-up of this amazing VHS tape, but upon remembering my Cut and Run tape, I got sidetracked, so this is what you get. Suffice to say that Barbarians is pretty tongue-in-cheek funtastic as well, despite what should just be skull mashing stupidity. No matter what, ol' Ruggero hits his mark.

Over The Top

Over The Top

United States - 1987

Director - Menahem Golan

Warner Home Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 34 minutes

Well before I ever saw Over The Top I had been witness to its long lasting impact. Any time anybody ever had an arm wrestling contest, drunk or sober someone inevitably yelled "Over the top!" If someone included the phrase "over the top" in the conversation, chances were good someone else would mutter approvingly. Directed by Israeli expatriate Menahem Golan, Over the Top is really an attempt to re-legitimize working class morality in an era of accelerating hyper-wealth.

This is the "arm warmer-less" version of the promotional artwork which can be found at The Movie Database, an open-source Wiki-style alternative to IMDB. It's actually rather nicer than the arm-warmer version seen above on my VHS tape and fortunately with the additional material, namely smashed gate and chrome sky ripples, it also includes the artists signature. One "R. Casaro", or Renato Casaro who I believe is responsible for the Conan the Barbarian poster below.

I found a few other posters attributed to Casaro, but other than these two, they're all too low resolution to confirm the artists signature.If you visit Imp Awards where I got this Running Man poster you'll find a number of other Casaro pieces. I just couldn't help but keep the tough guy theme rolling here.
 

Anselmo Ballester

A week or two ago I posted some artwork for the 1954 movie Invasion U.S.A., and more recently the Marlon Brando picture On The Waterfront. After a little bit of research I found that both of those posters were done by Italian artist Anselmo Ballester. His signature is visible on both of them, I just didn't know who it belonged to. According to his ItalianWiki page, Ballester was born in Rome in the late 19th Century and did art for political posters before he did movies.

Above is another one by Ballester, for the 1947 film T-Men, directed by Anthony Mann, but I also highly reccomend this awesome gallery of Ballester's work. The site is in Italian, but the images are clickable and of course, beautiful.

Murderlust

Murderlust

United States – 1985

Director – Donald M. Jones

Prism Entertainment, 1987, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 30 minutes

Because I enjoy horror films people often assume that I don’t mind violence and gore in real life, but that’s pretty off the mark. I like splatter and dismemberment performed by zombies and even sometimes people as long as they’re fictional, but the real thing is pretty repulsive to me. Even working in a meatcutting union I have a hard time watching the butchers break the sides of cow. That’s why I’ll never get the “popularity” of serial killers. I can sit through a Giallo or slasher movie fine, but I prefer silly monsters, and  Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer did not appeal to me.

Murderlust seems to have come at a time when things were changing from the fictional to the biographical in the serial killer microgenre. It would have been difficult to get away with too much realism before then, which I suspect is why Henry is considered such a watershed moment. Something happened in 1984-6 that hardened the American psyche, and that sort of callousness wasn’t so shocking anymore.
One of the things that distinguishes the pre-biographical era is its combination of the ridiculous and sinister and Murderlust is no different. In fact it actually has a lot in common with Bill Lustig’s Maniac (1981), and not just in that respect. Intentionally or otherwise, Joe Spinell’s Frank Zito was both a psychotic murderer, natty photography critic and affectionate boyfriend. But he was above all over the top.

In Murderlust Steve Belmont is pretty much the same , but his overarching problems are stupidity and religion. He manages to stain a borrowed necktie before even putting it on but easily forges a masters degree in psychology to land a job as the director of his churches teen crisis center. Steve is fundamentally unsettling but the character is portrayed with a sort of pitiful slovenly loserishness that comes across mildly comedic. The guy is literally beer swilling trailer trash and can’t hold down a job or pay his rent but functions as the church's highly respected Sunday school teacher. This dichotomy captures the irony of horror films for me; Steve does unpleasant things, but otherwise the guy is a bumbling laughable idiot. Even the direction and script treat the subject as a sinister joke, and while I’m not compelled to sympathize, I can’t help but chuckle, and I can appreciate it because of it's hyperbole.

Murderlust is a movie that I bought for the same reason I became obsessed with VHS tapes in the first place: I saw the cover art and had to have it. The artist responsible is Roger Loveless who went on to do young adult mystery book covers and Dungeons and Dragons artwork (right) before turning to religion and “inspirational” artwork as it is called on his website. I can’t find any other movie related art to his credit, and needless to say, the Murderlust cover is not featured on his website. Although disturbing, like the movie itself the cover is rendered too intentionally, in a way that lends it a surreal, posed quality that pretty much makes my point all over again.

C. Winston Taylor

In my recent post about Warriors of the Apocalypse I noted the sheer awesomeness of the box art that accompanied the totally wacky movie therein. The main thing that appealed to me about this cover in particular is its concise encapsulation of the ideology behind men's pulp adventure magazines of the Cold War period. The adventure pulps (and their close siblings the sex pulps) have justifiably garnered their own attention both for sociological and artistic reasons.

On the latter subject it seems to me that the VHS box art, and prior promotional materials from which most of it was derived (in the pre-Straight To Video era) are direct descendants of the pulp tradition. The themes are virtually the same, horror, adversity to evil, sex and machismo, and the coarse appeal to masculinity that is as obvious as the list I just made. Stories popular in trash magazines were easily as popular in trash movies, it just required a new marketing framework. The poster and box art is without a doubt the post-video continuation of exploitation media promotion.
Hence my fascination with VHS/poster art in general, of which C. Winston Taylor's art for Warriors of the Apocalypse is an almost perfect example of the pulp art lineage.
Taylor is a Vietnam Veteran, turned highly talented American artist who did quite a number of film promotional pieces between the 70's and 90's. He seems to be one of the lucky few artists whose signature is regularly preserved on the downsized and cropped VHS box versions of their art.
Upon conducting a little research I found several more of his film illustrations which are included below. A few were credited to Taylor though I wasn't able to see a signature, these are noted. Sorry for the low resolution on some of them, they were all found online and I did what I could.




Guardian of Hell
a.k.a. The Other Hell
Italy - 1980
Director - Bruno Mattei (as Stefan Oblowsky)
image from impawards.com

Evilspeak
United States - 1981
Director - Eric Weston
no signature visible, credited to Taylor at emovieposter.com

Time After Time
United States - 1979
Director - Nicholas Meyer
image from emovieposter.com

Lone Wolf McQuade
United States - 1983
Director - Steve Carver
image from impawards.com

The Swarm
United States - 1978
Director - Irwin Allen
no signature visible, credited to Taylor at impawards.com

The 5th Musketeer
Austria - 1979
Director - Ken Annakin
image found on Ebay

Firepower
United Kingdom - 1979
Director Michael Winner
image from moviegoods.com





More posters and promo art by Taylor:
Mutant Hunt
Robot Holocaust
 
In the early 1990's Taylor was hired to illustrate the covers of the Quantum Leap comic book series based on the TV show of the same name. I don't remember liking the show much and I can't imagine the comics were any better, but Taylor's art is really particularly excellent. See the Quantum Leap images including several pictures of the artist at Al's Place: A Quantum Leap Fan Site. During this period Taylor also did some religious artwork which seems sloppy considering the QL work (his gallery is third from the bottom) but nonetheless showcases his terrific sense of depth.

I'm sure there is much more C.W. Taylor work out there, but these older pulp illustrators from the pre-internet era are hard to track down since they so rarely have websites. Any additional information you might have on Taylor of his artwork are greatly appreciated, send it my way. If more come to light I will post them here.

If you're curious about the pulp adventure and sex magazine illustrations I mentioned above, I recommend starting with It's a Man's World and Sin-A-Rama both excellent books published by Feral House and both chock-full of color illustrations of magazine covers and interior art.