Don’t know too much about Japanese artist Shohei Otomo except that his work is utterly amazing and he does it all in ball point pen. He mixes traditional and contemporary themes in his drawings successfully. A lot of modern Asian art mixes old themes with modern/western images and a lot of it is simply mundane. For example the image of Chairman Mao eating at McDonalds in a painting in China is a little worn out but you still see similar images all the time. Shohei Otomo’s images are hard line, high contrast drawings and the impact is stunning sometimes. He often leaves much of the drawing surface blank and nestles his finely detailed illustration in the center. Other times he fills in the page with painstakingly drawn imagery. He dabbles in Henati and Manga themes and other times takes traditional Ukiyo-e wood cut themes and warps them around a bit. A couple of the images are fairly adult in themes and at least one I was just not comfortable uploading to the site. I used to do some drawing and preferred the pen and ink medium. When I see work like this I have an ambivalent mixture of  inspiration and despair. On the one hand I want to suddenly draw something again and on the other I become more resolved to never pick up an ink pen again. His site called Hakuchi is here and it is in Japanese but easy enough to navigate or just translate using Google.

MORE SHOHEI OTOMO HERE >>

Sorry,  I do not have any real information or trivia on these posters from Thailand to share at this time.  Normally I like to add some researched information to a post but I am a little tired right now and may have to get back with some of that later if I can find out anything. Many of the posters here you may recognize as they are American horror movies staples like An American Werewolf in London and the Evil Dead films by Sam Rami.  Others appear to be some films out of Hong Kong. Others I am not to sure about. Not really sure whcih ones may be actual Thai films to be honest. I could have researched it a bit more but, like I said, I am really tired lately and a bit burned out with blogging. Do hate blogging, just need a breather. Need to just put up an easy post here and get back to something more involved later. I have a big collection of these so expect some more eventually.

MORE THAI MOVIE POSTERS HERE >>

The only movie from this assortment of posters I have actually seen is the Takashi Miike film Imprint which I reviewed way back in the early days of the Café. Technically it is not even really an actual Asian film as it was made for the English language Showtime series Masters of Horror. But I love the design and like Miike’s work in a general way and a poster showing a Japanese girl with pins jammed through her face is about as Asian as you can get. I love the artwork on these posters. Even on the cheesy schoolgirl vs. zombie stuff from Japan. It can truly be said that in Asian film the posters are typically much better than the actual movie. I am not a fan, for example, of the technically well made South Korean schoolgirl/ghost films that are so popular here in China with students. But the poster art is usually great and spooky. I just don’t see what is scary about a ghostly young girl or child staring through its hair at you but it sends people up the walls here. I have seen my fair share of modern Asian horror (Japanese horror in particular) and the reason I watch the stuff is I am lured in by the promising poster art. The Japanese and South Korean posters are simply nice looking pieces or art and make great desktop wallpapers. Just hope a day comes when most of the films can half way live up to the promises these eerie and haunting posters make.

SEE MORE CREEPY ASIAN POSTERS HERE >>

Recently downloaded a batch of these movie posters from Ghana without having any idea what I was getting into.  it was a horrifically pleasant surprise. Seems that during the mid 80’s to mid 90’s there was in Ghana some thing that has come to be known as ‘mobile cinema’. VHS tapes of western films (and African films as well) were transported from village to village and shown on a television set that was powered by a generator. To promote the shows artists painted images from the VHS cover when available, or from the film if they had the chance to see it or sometimes they created a painting based on what they thought the film might be about without ever having seen it. The paintings were typically done on old flour bags and one see the damage and wear many of them accrued after countless displays in the isolated rural villages where the films showed. The paintings are raw and intense and are in many cases more entertaining than the originals. In particular I like the Cujo painting that really seems to have little connection to the actual film, and the Friday the 13th painting seems to show some woman who looks a lot like Hillary Clinton terrorizing a puppet sized Jason. The mobile film movement did not last long but its brief history is recounted in the book Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana from where these exciting images were scanned. I don’t know what most people think but I find these much more vibrant and enticing than the glossy, Photoshopped stuff you see in cinema lobbies these days. Makes me want to see Hostel and Evil Dead II one more time each.

MORE EXTREME CANVAS FROM GHANA HERE >>

I saw a post over at Gilligan’s My Retrospace and it ignited a little flame in me. I have often found myself searching the net for damsels in distress pictures. I had long had the idea for a them like this and seeing what he did with Monsters Love to Carry to Girls made me realize how much I liked this line of thinking. Maybe even more than my Girls with Guns fetish. Not sure. The image of a hapless female being carted away by a monster or brute is simply an integral part of the horror mythos. It cannot be taken away. It is one of the main pillars that hold up the temple of horror. I did not want to focus my theme only on woman being carried away but decided to find assorted images of women generally being menaced, threatened and harassed by apes, mutants, madmen, aliens and God knows what else. This will probably become a recurring theme and will eventually earn a category listing after another post or two. I guess one day I can go into some deeper analysis of the whole girl over the shoulder of a brute fetish but I would have to admit I am not sure what the appeal is. No doubt there is a lurid and fetishistic nature to some of these images, and what is wrong with that? A couple are publicity stills and seem designed to simply show off the ample curves and cleavage of the frightened females. I have been looking to broaden out what I do here with simpler posts. I simply get worn out doing my long treatises on the films of Al Adamson or Ted Z. Mikels that no one probably reads and want a break sometimes. Maybe will get back to posting more comic book and poster art as well and give myself a rest while I am working on some posts in my drafts folder. Have no fear, there will be more monster and girls themed posts in the future. There is certainly no end to such images to be found online. Also, expect another Girls with Guns post soon as well to keep the balance. Sometimes girls get tired of being carried off and they pick up a big long barreled gun and blow the heads off their tormentors. Both theme have their place here at the Café.

MORE GIRLS BEING MENACED BY BIG, NASTY MONSTERS HERE >>

I now have literally tens of thousands of poster and VHS cover images on my hard drive and need to share a few of them from time to time with the readers. Some images I have gotten from batch downloads I have not seen in Google Image search yet. There is no real theme here or in depth comment on each image. I am just trying to get back to posting and doing what I started this site to do, to be a purveyor of fine cult and classic horror/exploitation themed cinema, and what better way to do that than to show off the usually great art work created to promote these often strange films. I have seen most of the films here but not all.  I am getting a little older now and sense of desperation takes me over as I realize there is less time than before to see dark gems like The Brides Wore Blood and Port Sinister. I regret now wasting all those precious years working full time and going back to college.

MORE CULT FILM POSTERS >>

Tom Chantrell is one of those people in the film industry whose influence is far reaching and you are familiar with his work even if you are not familiar with the man’s name. A prolific and hard working illustrator Chantrell’s career spanned a half century and literally thousands of posters, the bulk being British Horror films (most notably his work for Hammer studios) and American horror and exploitations films. His career all but came to a halt in the 1980’s and then ever more so in the 90’s when digital designs became the preferred method of “creation” for movie posters, CD covers and paperback book jackets. He would begin to gain some degree of well deserved cult status before his death in 2001. The man could produce three or four posters a week and  had a keen commercial instinct. His posters were often used to sell a movie before the film had even been completed. He was a British gentleman with a wry wit and sense of humor who never took himself or his work too seriously. As well the man served his country heroically in WWII disarming landmines, a duty that typically had a fairly short life expectancy. Luckily he survived the war and went on to a long and happy life as a great illustrator and family man.

I look at his stuff then look at the posters and paperback covers of today and my heart simply aches for a time when an artist could be an artist and produce actual artwork. I am not saying I hate all the poster artwork of today or that I detest good Photoshop works. But it seems that is all there is anymore and it all lacks grand designs and vibrant colors. His posters (as can be said of many great horror and exploitation posters) were often more thrilling than the movies they tried to sell. I included what might be his most well known image, one of his Star Wars poster designs (Hong Kong version) and it is a much imitated layout and design, as well it should be. The bottom line is they don’t do posters and artwork like this any more and those days are not coming back. That is a sad thing in my little book.  Here is a link to a page on his career with Hammer with some photos and a short interview.

(more…)

Some films I purvey here are of such an eclectic variety (a euphemism for bad and forgotten) that it can be difficult sometimes to find a decent poster to represent the film here on the Uranium Café. For example though I tried as hard I could never find a decent poster for The Creeping Terror and for that I am sorry.  Also I often  like to place a foreign poster next the American covers because sometimes the art can be more striking or even outlandish. I have taken to watching more foreign films than I had previously in my movie watching career and while searching for a reasonable poster for Mexican horror film Night of the Bloody Apes I came across a VHS cover for the film that was just simply perfect. And it struck me suddenly how different VHS covers were from DVD covers. I am not here to do a comparison post, that one is better or worse than the other, but they are certainly different in the style and effect they have on the person doing the browsing. In my early video renting days in San Antonio I usually hit the local ma and pa video stores back in the time when the Ron Jeremy style porno was often publicly displayed along side Burt Reynolds movies. The glory days of video before the chain stores like Blockbuster set the mundane standards. Not to say I did not rent some fine features from Blockbuster. But usually the ma and pa store let you take the cover home with the tape, while at Blockbuster you had that drab generic plastic box.

(more…)

THE HOUSE OF HAMMER

The House of Hammer was a British movie magazine put out in the mid 70’s when Hammer as a film company was grinding down to a near stand still. But at the time the magazine was the best selling movie magazine in Britain. The publication tried to combine what Warren magazines was doing with Famous Monsters of Film Land and its black and white comic magazines. The artists that contributed to the magazine were also frequent Warren contributors and they may have jumped at the chance to illustrate some of the classic Hammer films in narrative form. The magazine however did not only focus on Hammer films or exclusively on British cinema but contained articles on classic American horror as well.  I included an illustrated version of one of the better latter day Hammer films Vampire Circus drawn by the fantastic Brian Bolland. I have all the issues on my hard drive and look forward to posting some more samples from this curious magazine including some comic strip hosted by an illustrated Peter Cushing as Abraham Van Helsing. For now enjoy Vampire Circus and a couple page samples.

MORE HOUSE OF HAMMER #17 HERE >>

Another collections of old movies posters from the Uranium Cafe vaults. The only films here I ave actually see are the Hammer version of Dracula, some of Blood Bath (still need to finish that one) and Russ Myer’s Motor Psycho. The rest of the images just caught my attention and thought I would share them with the readers here. While some of these movies may be the bottom of the barrel in terms of production and final quality the art that promoted them is great and much more exciting than the Photoshopped works that grace cinema lobbies these days. The glory days of movie posters are long as far as I am concerned. You just do not see art like that promoting The Undead anymore and I fear we never will again expect in arcane collections.

MORE POSTER ART HERE >>