Strike a Poster
Friday, February 19, 2016 at 10:00AM It's always boggling to consider how many people's noses a poster has had to pass under in order to get approved, and how they still are often more abysmal than you could have imagined. The floating head syndrome, men with their back to the camera, or a couple back to back are the usual unimaginative posters that fly by. But this week we seem to have been treated to three posters that have gone above and beyond the call of duty to be really really stupid.
Three disasters for three genres (horror, fantasy, dance) after the jump...
The dunce prize of the week has to go to Amityville: The Awakening, which almost impressively found away to include a love heart and the word "lol" onto a hroror poster. Are they trying to imply a sense of dread by a concerned instagram comment from "TotesMarissa"? Is "TerrenceLives" the instagram account of Terrence Malick, whose understanding of natural history makes him concerned about the Indian burial ground history of the property. Maybe lol stands for "lights on leaves"?
The only horror here is the continuation of Jennifer Jason Leigh's pre-nomination career.
Alice Through The Looking Glass also has a new poster which confirms all our fears. This film is going to be just as horrible to look at as 'Eyesore in Wonderland' and every frame will be littered with cgi vomit. And why-oh-why is the title character confined to being skewed in the corner when Johnny Depp's latest lazy clowning is front and center?
Finally, in a dazzling dispay of photoshopped awkwardness, there's High Strung. All the usual mistakes are there: lens flares? tick; Creepy doll photoshop faces? tick; Pretzel of over extended legs and being hit in the stomach with a violin? Well that's a new benchmark, but tick.
Ironically "looks haunted lol" applies more accurately here.
Reader Comments (20)
High Strung's tag line is kind of awful too.... I can't wait to hear the dance 🙄
Agree, they all look pretty bad. One question: due to the fact that there has never once been a decent Amityville Horror movie (the closest thing was the mediocre 1979 original), what is it that keeps this franchise coming back to theaters, over and over again?
Someone will have to tell me how awful Eysore 2 is. I will not see it for myself.
Eyesore 2 will need an Oscar nomination to mandate me seeing it...actually, that applies to everything Sacha Baron Cohen does going forward. His mugging has become as insufferable as Depp's. It saddens me daily to know that two of my favorite books will forever be blasphemed in this way...here's to hoping that ten years from now that we get a good version (if they keep remaking Spider-Man, they could at least do us a favor and give us the proper version of the adaptations that sucked the first time)
John T: I do like the loose idea of Alice in Wonderland as action spectacle and I wouldn't have begrudged a second try...provided they basically switched out everyone major. That means Burton, Depp, Wasikowska AND Woolverton all would have had to go, for different reasons.
High Strung gets props for making me laugh. Is Jenna Maroney playing the dance teacher?
Rob - fair question about a lot of franchise movies - why keep going back?
Eyesore 2 - Well I didn't go out to the first one, so I'm safe. But when I watched it on a movie channel I did enjoy HBC - her Red Queen was the best thing in it.
"Girl take your ballet slipper out of my ear -- I can't hear the dance!"
Poor Johnny. He nearly had saved himself with Black Mass, now it's back to soggy mass-market purgatory. Poor bastard. I won't be seeing Darker Shadows: What's That Sucking Sound.
It would appear to me that the "Amityville" movie is a comedy, but I have no idea if that's the case. The poster is legitimately funny, so it actually wins some points for that.
I'm glad to see that Tim and Helena are civilized enough to keep ensuring their children's continued financial security by working together post-breakup.
God Johnny Depp is insufferable in these roles.
I will say one thing about the Alice trailer - Pink's cover of White Rabbit is fantastic. That song must be a dream to sing for any rock star.
The facial expressions on the stars of HIGH STRUNG look like someone just told them the poster's tagline.
The Amytiville Poster is dull- the Alice poster is headache inducing ( but I did like the movie trailer) and the scary "High Strung" looks like a sci-fi thriller about body snatchers
@Rob: "due to the fact that there has never once been a decent Amityville Horror movie"
there was one - it was just called 'poltergeist'
Weirdly enough, that is the EXACT kind of poster that wr can expect from Alice.
Oh LOL indeed at that Amityville poster, trying too hard to appeal to those insipid instagramers.
Goog God though at High Strung, now that is the worst poster of this bunch!
UGH!!!! GAG ME WITH A SPOON! Those posters are fucking awful.
The AMITYVILLE poster makes me laugh, but I also wonder whether we're just not at all the target audience. They're aiming it at 13-17yos no doubt who aren't aware that all the Amityville movies are appalling. I at least applaud them doing something *different*.
I can't wait to see HIGH STRUNG. It looks fantastically awful.
Glenn Dunks: Well, at least Amityville 4 is pretty much amazing. Not in the conventional way, but amazing none the less.