When cool movie posters fall beneath Cinema Blend’s thinly padded theater style seating and end up stuck to the floor, they eventually get pried loose and deposited here in the Posterplex. Today on display we have a bunch of great overlooked one sheets for upcoming movies. Great posters are a work of art all their own, bad ones are better used as toilet paper than marketing materials. For once, no floating head posters in this batch.
Below we break down new movie posters for the Luke Wilson/Kate Beckinsale movie Vacancy, the Hilary Swank film The Reaping, Molly Shannon’s indie foray Year of the Dog, the Elisha Cuthbert horror flick Captivity, Eli Roth’s second Hostel movie, and Shia LaBeauf's next Disturbia. For high res versions, click on whichever poster grabs your attention:
I really love this poster for Vacancy. It might seem like the obvious thing to do for a movie with that name about two people being terrorized in a hotel room, but so often in a movie with “names” like Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale there’s the temptation to go with a standard floating heads poster. Usually they’re so hot to get their star’s faces out there to market the film, that artistic considerations are thrown to the side. With Vacancy they had the balls to take advantage of what their movie is and use it to do something completely cool and unique with their poster. Love it.
This one is a crazy Russian poster for the new Hilary Swank 10 plagues movie The Reaping. I can’t imagine ever seeing anything like this on a theater wall in America. The snake looks like it just fell out of the tree in the Garden of Eden, and the little girl may or may not actually be Satan. It’s plenty creepy, but I’m not sure I like the way it fits together. Not all of the pieces in the image look like they fit. It almost looks like they took pieces of pictures from a bunch of different movies and then used Elmer’s glue to stick them all over the little girl.
If there’s one thing I hate more than Molly Shannon, it’s Molly Shannon on the front of a pretentious standard pretentious indie movie poster. You know it’s a pretentious indie movie, because they don’t feel the need for things like, oh, good artists. They’re too cool to hire good artists. Instead they’ve got Molly Shannon sitting in front of shitty pencil drawings which we’re probably supposed to think are incredibly artsy. Great job Year of the Dog. You’ve successfully pigeonholed yourself as a movie no one will want to see.
You get the feeling with this one that the guy who designed it did so with a topless actress in mind. Since Lionsgate would actually like to use the poster to advertise their movie, that didn’t happen. But the effect remains just the same. I like it. Captivity has come up with a great new way to get a star’s face prominently displayed on the poster. Smash them up against the glass and pour dirt on top of them. Well done.
In contrast to the above poster for Captivity, is this one for Hostel: Part II. Obviously, unlike Captivity, they don’t care whether or not this poster is ever used in theaters. It won’t be. A lot of US horror movies have intentionally created posters for the MPAA to reject as a way of getting publicity, but I suspect they won’t even bother with this one. Still, it gets the point across doesn’t it? Hostel is the premier torture porn franchise. It’s all about chopping up hot, young women, why not put that on a poster.
This one is a sharp little poster for the new serial killer movie with Transformers star Shia LaBeauf, Disturbia. The color choices remind me a lot of the old Big Lebowski posters with everything in black and white except Jeff’s orange, reflective sunglasses. I wonder if that was intentional? Either way, this one is a simple, yet effective, attention getter.
