It’s time for another look at posters and box art for movies that are great for all the wrong reasons. Today I bring you four more bangers, one of them a real video store gem that most people remember for its truly ambitious gimmick, another being a pretty decent flick obscured by a poster with some seriously outrageous design, another one set you up for ninjas, and the last is a real dog but still managed to outpace most of the Mad Max ripoffs emerging left and right from Italy.
Movie marketing is wild business. Let’s get into it.
The Dead Pit
Distributors, Imperial Entertainment, knew they had a dog on their hands when they picked up The Dead Pit for distribution. This movie fucking sucks. I just cannot be charitable in any way. It is profoundly boring and amateurish, a bad movie through and through with no redeemable qualities. But what a box, right?
By the late 80’s, the volume of titles on shelves at video stores was reaching a critical mass and you couldn’t be cute like Charles Band anymore and stuff your tapes into oversized boxes. Shelving at the shops couldn’t support them. The direct-to-video market accelerated available titles a hundred times over in only a few years. Shop owners took to stocking their shelves side-on, like bookshelves, to maximize shelf space and accommodate the positively silly volume of tapes they had for rental. Not everyone did this, of course, and new release shelves tended to keep the box art facing forward. But every tape looked fundamentally the same at a glance and it took a real crafty gimmick to grab people’s attention and the most memorable tape in the shop at the time was easily this one. The box featured a relief of the poster art, standing off the flush surface of the tape, begging you to reach out and at least touch it. The central zombie of the movie, Dr. Ramzi, climbs out the titular dead pit and the box replaced his eyes with a pair of blinking green LEDs when a button on the box was pushed. A for effort, you guys. Now, that’s how you sell a video tape!
Adding a tactile quality appealed to people’s built-in need to experience the texture and even if you didn’t rent the tape, you were definitely going to tell your friends about that horror movie with the blinking lights on the cover. Taking even just a couple of seconds to pay attention to it made you remember it better than the half dozen kickboxer movies released that month.
Sole Survivor
Long before Final Destination there was 1984’s Sole Survivor. The very same year, the film’s director Tom Eberhardt, would also release the much-better-known cult favorite, Night of the Comet. And where Night of the Comet is the better movie, Sole Survivor has the better poster.
Before distributors figured out that there was an art to video movie marketing, they usually just plastered the movie poster on the box and sent it off to shops where people would rent just about anything. When you were more concerned with getting asses in seats than you were with making a good movie, it was often a good idea to be cryptic with your poster and let the ads on TV and radio sell the tickets. At the time, people often simply went to the movies with no plan of what they were going to see. Unless there was some kind of watershed picture out at the time, simply dropping by and buying a ticket to whatever looked good on the marquee was a reasonable plan of attack for a Friday night. It was a lot like dropping by the rental shop. Before packaging for the home video market was even a consideration, you had to fall back on sticking lobby card photos of the movie on the back of the box (and sometimes distributors didn’t even bother with that). This completely accidental approach to selling tapes ended up giving your movies a certain allure if the poster art was cool enough or suggested some kind of weird menace. Sole Survivor’s poster is an example of this. It’s not even a bad movie. I consider it simply okay with some neat ideas. The poster simply oversells the movie with some absolutely gnarly imagery that makes perfect sense once you’ve seen the movie but without context it’s impossible to get an idea for what it’s about.
Gymkata
Gymkata is an absolute fucking atrocity and I have no idea how Robert Clouse ended up in the position that he did here. The same guy that brought the world Enter The Dragon and Game of Death somehow ended up sucking crumbs ten years later with this absolute disaster of a movie that should never have been made in the first place.
By 1985 the whole ninja thing was running on fumes. Only a few years prior, Cannon kicked off a wild fury that would engulf the world in ninja-fever with their unspeakably dull picture, Enter The Ninja, inexplicably starring Franco Nero. Mediocre martial arts action and dubious plotting flooded the American video market with dozens of utterly crap martial arts movies thanks to a morally heinous diplomatic relationship with the Philippines and the can-do American capitalist spirit that seeks to mine the greatest return from the smallest possible investment. There was an insatiable hunger for a few years in the 1980’s for anything with a ninja star on the poster but the wave collapsed when not one of these movies managed to produce anything worth watching. Savvy Producers seized on the public’s fascination with China and Japan as exotic destinations and pivoted to flicks like The Last Dragon, The Golden Child, and Big Trouble In Little China. Everyone else sunk like a fucking stone and no movie represented the absolute bottom of the barrel like Gymkata, a movie so bad that the poster resorted to straight-up lies to move units. Spoiler: There are no ninjas in this movie.
But I have to get something off my chest. I was 9 in the summer of 1985 and I didn’t care that ninja movies were garbage. Ninjas ruled and here’s two of them getting the shit kicked out of them right on the poster! So enamored was I that I didn’t even notice that the header tried to sell me on the ludicrous idea of gymnastics as a deadly art of killing. I didn’t even know who Kurt Thomas was. This was a year after the ‘84 Olympics and the cultural love affair with America’s Sweetheart, Mary Lou Retton, was in full swing. As it turns out, this bomb was a sad attempt to capitalize on that excitement by offering us an unbelievably terrible movie starring a guy who almost went to the 1980 Olympic Summer Games in Moscow had Jimmy Carter not boycotted the whole affair. Poor guy. Even worse for us, he’s not an actor by even the most generous of descriptions and as it turns out, gymkata doesn’t work unless the inexplicably medieval setting of Parmistan is littered with shit like parallel bars to swing off of and pommel horses installed in the middle of town. But what a poster, right?
Escape From The Bronx
Everyone was inviting us to Escape From New York. I talk this up in my article about Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper. New York was in a real shit position at the time and The Bronx was easy pickings since the entire borough seemed to be permanently on fire. The only images of The Bronx that anyone was seeing at the time were photos of buildings in ruins since every landlord in town suddenly found it profitable to set their own property on fire. I had also seen Carpenter’s Escape From New York right around the time that our local shop, Video Paradise in Salem, Massachusetts pasted this one up on the wall over the action movies section and it really held my attention. It’s an extremely kinetic poster. Shit is exploding all over the place, dudes are falling out of vans, there’s a helicopter, and right there in the middle of all the action is Mark Gregory with a big-ass pistol and that strange submachine gun in the middle of it all. At the time that I was enamored with this movie I was too young to really figure it out but the presence of that weird-ass Italian submachine gun, with the tapered muzzle, seemed to imply some kind of importance, as though it played a role in the proceedings. I’d later catch up with the movie and realize it’s just on the poster. After working in marketing for a while I’d eventually become familiar with design a bit and get my mind around the notion of negative space and nowadays I realize that it’s there to fill a gap and squeeze a little more jazz into an otherwise already-busy poster.
Escape From The Bronx represents the last of the three Mad Max ripoffs that Enzo G. Castellari made for Fulvia Films in 1982 and it really shows in the movie. Hell of a poster but the movie is about as low-effort as dusty Italian post-nukes get. It’s a sequel to Castellari’s 1990: The Bronx Warriors, a not-half-bad apocalypse flick that at the very least mined material from great American exploitation movies outside of the Mad Max paradigm, notably The Warriors. Both star Mark Gregory as Trash, leader of a scavenger biker gang called The Riders, but 1990: The Bronx Warriors is the better of the two movies, having an enthusiasm that this one lacks. In spite of it being made mere months after its predecessor, it’s connected to the prior movie by Gregory alone. It’s really no wonder that it ended up on Mystery Science Theater.
Oh, Gymkata. I've only endured clips, and that pommel horse scene always kills me. I saw TV ads for it back in the day and the swinging on the high bar conveniently installed in an alley had 14-year-old me and my 11-year-old sister cackling at its inanity.