Jack Sparrow, eat your heart out.
Author: Ink-Stained Wretch
Over at the Hammer Horror Posters gallery, they've got an insane treasure trove of '60s and '70s schlock/shock art, an interview with Hammer's main man with a paintbrush, Tom Chantrell, and best of all "sell posters" for movies that were never actually made.
As an advertising hack, I've been involved in more than a few of these projects... creating a one-sheet for a movie that doesn't exist yet in order to drum up pre-production financing or to secure distribution. Hammer did this pretty frequently... one of the un-produced films was the aforementioned Zeppelins vs. Pterodactyls.... and another one was Mistress of the Seas -- a saga of cutthroats 'n' cleavage that was slated to star Racquel Welch as real-life piratess Anne Bonney. Alas, it never made it to the silver screen... and subsequently, Piracy as a film subject instead remained cursed for decades.
(According to the G-Town Monkey, The Count might have a few words (or pix) to share on this subject....)
Lush disaster and horror images.
Love it.
"The Scent of New-Mown Hay" ?
Was this adapted? Crazy title.
There are some real gems on this
site. I love that they are big enough
to print out.
Yeah, The Scent of New Mown Hay got me, too.... partly because my granddad used to have a copy of the book by John Blackburn, subtitled A Novel of Action, Horror and Emotion. Yes, they had to tell us to expect emotion... which I guess makes sense since the book was kind of an icy British 1958 proto-Crichton fusion of thriller, sci-fi, horror and espionage tropes. But the cover was much, much duller than the painting... I definitely don't remember any women in chains!
LOVE the old Hammer / no-budg horror posters. For years I wanted to get into movie poster design and illustration, and somehow landed right next to the camera instead… I have theories, but I'll not go into them here.
The posters Gtown speaks of are (as I mentioned in a previous thread), the work of a Philly illustrator whose work (including the said posters) can be found here. They're actually (…) based off of the Universal Monsters, but close enough, eh?
Hey, so I'm really de-railing this thread, but I just heard that poster artist extroadinaire John Alvin died last week. This guy pretty much owned movie poster design in the 80's, having worked on posters for E.T., Brade Runner and, um, Ernest Scared Stupid… You can find a pretty nice gallery of his stuff here.
Count: Are we ever on-topic around here???
Your link to the John Alvin stuff reminded me of a comment somebody had made regarding the Tom Chantrell section on the Hammer gallery -- how it's fascinating to meet the guys behind these images -- the commercial artists whose work in many cases is more widely seen and more popularly "known" than the work of many famous & fine artists.
Case in point -- how many people first associate the "two hands touching" with E.T. and not Michelangelo where it came from? (Raised hand -- guilty as charged; in the same way I can't hear Wagner without thinking, first, of Elmer Fudd.)
In a similar vein, Alvin's poster for COBRA is used as a terrific running gag in the quirky, wonderful Russian movie Close to Eden. (The Stallone movie poster is the only piece of unadulterated Americana that's managed to find its way into a backwater Mongolian farming community.)