Mad Movie Posters

I love vintage/foreign/strange movie posters, and this selection of hand-painted ones from Ghana, posted on Ephemera Assemblyman, is amazing. The images are really wild, and the artists really seemed to have had a thing with body parts being cut/torn/bitten off. As the author of the post (FYI: I discovered the link to it on Boingboing) points out, they were painted on the backs of used flour bags for a now defunct practice in which "mobile cinemas" would travel between villages and show films on VHS using a VCR and TV hooked up to a portable generator. They sold tickets to the screenings, which would take place in any space available, or simply outdoors, and the posters were used to advertise the screenings. As you can guess, the artists didn't see the films beforehand, so liberties -- pretty awesome ones, if you ask me -- were taken. I mean, really, wasn't Evil Dead II sorely lacking in the flying-skull-with-bat-wings department?

Also, as I suspected, some of these are from the insanely prolific Nigerian homegrown film industry (a.k.a. Nollywood), which is known for cranking out massive numbers of shot-on video hyperbolic religious horror films/morality tales. Hence the poster for Stolen Bible 2. I found the trailer for the first Stolen Bible on YouTube, here, and it's completely mental. Imagine an African version of Paul Schrader's Exorcist prequel crossed with Sister Act and a late night used car dealership ad. The special effects are sort of like the low-brow video version of the aforementioned movie posters. You can also find the entire film on YouTube, if you're so brave...

Back to those posters -- they're apparently from a now out-of-print book that I'd never heard of called Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana, and damn, used copies are pricey.

Assemblyman also links to this page, which has a few more images, and this page, which sells the posters through eBay. I also found a few more here, and a great write up on the history of them here (including more awesome examples).

But this hand painted movie poster tradition isn't limited to Africa. I've got one from Pakistan, which was sent to me by a filmmaker there who had some made up for his horror movie in order to revive the dying art. I'll try to post a pic of it soon. In the meantime, you can see some examples here.

-Dave Alexander