Now playing at the local Arthouse – Can’t you just see it on the marquee?

Do you recognize this dastardly villain? It’s Boris Karloff, playing a hostile Native American in The Last of the Mohicans (1920) directed by Maurice Tourneur. The hero of the film was another Native American, Uncas, played by Alan Roscoe (standing, below).  Subsequent versions such as Michael Mann’s would make Hawkeye, Uncas’s white companion, the hero of ... read more »

Reaching across time, this poster for Gregg Araki’s 2011 film, Ka-Boom, echoes the kaleidoscopic poster design of Daniel Haller’s 1970 psychedelic monster-fest, The Dunwich Horror (screenplay by Curtis Hanson), and makes explicit the subtext of the earlier film … Those Crazy Kids.

Consider the following plotline:  A young man travels to another world where he infiltrates the indigenous people and adopts their ways.  He is befriended by a beautiful young woman who is very important to the tribe and ultimately becomes her lover.  Although at first the tribe has doubts about him, he proves his worth by ... read more »

I like these two movie posters, one for Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), the other for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), and I suspect their similarity is anything but coincidental.  Both posters show Holy Men dressed in garments of flowing red and orange, both men perched on top of mountain peaks that overlook a world about ... read more »

Neither of the two versions of the promo art for John Huston’s The Dead presented by Erich Kuersten, below, are *quite* as misleading as the cover art for the VHS version of The Dumb Waiter, a 1987 half-hour television film directed by Robert Altman based on the one-act play of the same title by the ... read more »

Patrick Goldstein of the L.A. Times has some interesting observations to make concerning the Drag Me to Hell poster (top). As he notes, the actress’s wide open mouth seems to express orgasmic ecstasy rather than the horror of being dragged down to hell: “If this is a horror film where she’s supposed to be scared, ... read more »

Maybe it’s just me, but when I first saw this poster – – I was immediately reminded of this one. Maybe it’s the way the maroon scarf playfully tugged by Ms. Garner in the Ghosts of Girlfriends Past poster performs the same compositional function as the white scarf or white turtleneck or whatever-it-is in The ... read more »

Alice (Sylvia Kristel) has an argument with her husband. She drives off into the pouring rain. There is an accident. When she wakes up, the sun is shining, but something is not quite right. She comes upon a stone wall that seems to have no beginning and no end. She meets various characters who are ... read more »

Have your character – or characters – surrounded by clouds or smoke, completely divorced from any kind of earthbound reality. Your characters – or at least one of your characters (Anna Faris in Smiley Face, James Franco in Pineapple Express) – should display a goofy euphoric grin. Remember, stoners do not dress well. Faded blue ... read more »