Known as ‘The Streetfighter’ in the UK and elsewhere, Hard Times was director Walter Hill’s debut and was to be the only time he and Charles Bronson would work together.

The trailer can be watched on YouTube.

Writer Josh Olson adds a commentary on the great Trailers From Hell site.

Lurid, no-bullshit artwork by Japanese artist Seito for this 1975 schlockfest, The Giant Spider Invasion. From IMDb:

A black hole hits North Wisconsin and opens a door to other dimensions. Giant 15 meter spiders emerge from it, who have an appetite for human flesh! Dr. Jenny Langer and Dr. Vance from the NASA try to save the world.

As featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the American TV series which lampoons bad movies, the film sounds absolutely legendary:

In a scene depicting the giant spiders attacking a little league baseball game, the spiders are obviously Volkswagen Beetles with puppet legs attached. Tread marks can be seen in several shots. 

Incredibly, the remains of these spider cars were recently found in the woods near where the scenes were shot.

“Pfantz’s steel framework was covered with black Fun Fur to make the spiders both hairy and scary. The mechanical nature of the beast required seven people to be stuffed within the cramped confines of the VW floorpan – a driver and six children to work the spider’s legs.”

Here’s the original trailer.

Legendary action star Bruce Lee was given his break into acting after being cast as Kato, one half of the crime-fighting duo in the 1960s TV show The Green Hornet. The masked vigilante began life as a radio show that was created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker and aired in 1936. It went on to be produced as film serials and as comic book series in the 1940s, before being adapted for a TV series in the 1960s.

Van Williams starred as Britt Reid, the playboy owner of The Daily Sentinel who runs his media empire whilst simultaneously fighting criminal gangs as the titular vigilante with assistance from his martial-artist sidekick Kato. The series was to only last for one season of 26 episodes but nevertheless proved popular in the States and elsewhere, with Lee being catapulted to fame on the back of the show. In Japan the series was apparently even aired as The Kato Show.

This Japanese B2 poster was printed for the 1975 release of the first of two films based on the character that were cobbled together from several episodes of the TV show and are apparently as incoherent as that would suggest. As can be seen from the design, the emphasis was placed firmly on Lee’s character, particularly since the studio was clearly keen to cash in on the star’s fame following his run of classic action films that ended with Enter the Dragon (1973) and his untimely death that same year.

White Line Fever was made during the heyday of trucking in American popular culture and tells the story of Vietnam veteran Carol Jo-Hummer (played by Jan-Michael Vincent) who returns from the war and takes over his father’s trucking business, only to run up against the corrupt shipping firm Red River who are a front for an organised crime gang. Kay Lenz stars as Carol’s sweetheart Jerri who awaited his return from Vietnam and eventually helps him take a stand against the gang.

It would later be followed by other trucking-based action films such as the Burt Reynolds mega hit Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy (1978). Director Jonathan Kaplan would go on to direct Jodie Foster to an Oscar win in 1988’s The Accused.

This style B US one sheet depicts a moment from one of the climactic scenes in the film and I’m unsure who is responsible for the artwork so please get in touch if you have any ideas.

The original trailer is on YouTube.

A British action thriller directed by Peter Duffell, Inside Out sees the inimitable Telly Savalas star as conman Harry Morgan who teams up with James Mason and Robert Culp on the hunt for a stash of Nazi gold hidden since the end of the Second World War. Duffell is perhaps best known for his TV work, but he also directed the classic Amicus horror The House That Dripped Blood, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

I’m unsure who is responsible for the artwork on this US one sheet so get in touch if you have an idea. You’ll notice that there is some foxing present on the bottom part of this particular copy.

This was cult director Walter Hill’s debut feature film and starred action legend Charles Bronson in one of his more memorable roles. A mysterious drifter named Chaney (Bronson) arrives in New Orleans and has a chance meeting with Speed (James Coburn) an organiser of illegal bare-knuckled boxing matches. Chaney asks Speed to set him up with a fight and he quickly proves himself as a fearsome boxer. He also meets and begins a relationship with Lucy Simpson (Jill Ireland – Bronson’s wife at the time) but it’s not long before Speed’s chaotic nature and addiction to gambling begins to threaten more than just their partnership.

This was to be the only time Hill and Bronson would team up together with the director later recalling “We had kind of a falling out over the film. He thought I’d been a little too… how do I put this? Too draconian in my editing of his wife’s scenes.”

The film was originally released as Hard Times in the US.

The trailer can be watched on YouTube. Writer Josh Olson adds a commentary on the great Trailers From Hell site.

This 1974 Canadian horror, originally produced and released as Black Christmas, is often credited as being the first in the slasher sub-genre that went on to spawn countless others in the years that followed, including John Carpenter’s Halloween and Friday the 13th. It was one of the earliest films to feature the concept of a mysterious psychopath hunting down and murdering teens one by one, and it also was one of the first horrors to feature scenes shot from the killers point of view. Director Bob Clark was an American who worked in Canada for over a decade, producing some of the country’s most successful films, of which this was the highpoint. He had previously helmed the low-budget zombie horror Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1973) and would later see great success with the teen comedy Porky’s (1982) and the classic A Christmas Story one year later. Clark was tragically killed along with his son in a head-on car crash in 2007.

Although the film had seen great success in Canada with its production title of Black Christmas (for its release in 1974) the American distributor Warner Bros apparently changed the title to Silent Night Evil Night (and later Stranger in the House) because it feared audiences would think the film was an entry in the then burgeoning blaxploitation genre. After flopping in its first release in the USA (in 1975), the title was later changed back to Black Christmas and the posters that had already been printed with ‘Silent Night…’ had a snipe with the original title glued over the top, as can be seen on this one sheet.

The artwork is by the American artist Robert Tanenbaum. To see other posters I’ve collected by him click here.

Peter Fonda and Warren Oates are pursued across Texas by a satanist cult who they witness apparently murdering a woman in a sacrificial ritual in Race with the Devil. Following on from the 1974 hit Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, in which Fonda played a bumbling criminal being hunted by a relentless police force, this film was a mix of the popular car chase genre (Vanishing Point, Gone in 60 Seconds etc) and Hollywood’s interest in films of an occult nature that was burgeoning following the success of The Exorcist (1973). Fonda and Oates play friends who head off on a vacation in an RV with their wives, but when the group pull off the main road and find a remote spot to camp for the night they unwittingly do so near an occult shrine at which the aforementioned sacrifice happens.

When the group are spotted by the cult their RV is attacked by masked men before they manage to escape to a nearby town. The local sheriff calms the group down and drives the men out to the spot where they witnessed the ritual,  only to discover that the cult have removed (almost) all evidence of their deed. The group decide to carry on with their holiday but it soon becomes clear that the satanists aren’t about to give up their pursuit and that not everyone they meet along the way is who they appear to be. The film has the requisite tension to make it an enjoyable watch and features several well staged car chase scenes, with some very impressive stunt work. The film also features a classic freeze-frame shot at the end.

This US 30×40 boasts excellent explosive artwork and I’ve been frustrated in my attempts to identify the artist, but I suspect it could be the work of John Solie. The American artist usually signs his artwork and this poster features no such signature, but the artwork is certainly rendered in a similar style to his. I intend to contact the artist to see if this poster can be attributed to him. Unusually the artwork itself is actually copyrighted by the studio (see picture 17).

One of the best Australian films ever made, Peter Weir‘s enigmatic mystery Picnic at Hanging Rock was released in 1975 and is based on the novel of the same name by the Australian author Joan Lindsay. The story focuses on the mysterious disappearance of a group of girls who travel to the titular rock with a school party and vanish without trace, much to the horror of their fellow pupils and the head teacher of the school. Infamously Lindsay elected to remove the ‘final’ chapter that fully explained their disappearance from the novel and it was not published until after her death in 1987 as ‘The Secret of Hanging Rock’. Weir and screenwriter Cliff Green thus filmed the story without the standard Hollywood explanation, which apparently frustrated American distributors looking to buy the rights and who were unused to ambiguous endings.

The film has an unforgettable atmosphere, helped by the ethereal cinematography of Russell Boyd who utilised the same material used for bridal veils to cover the lens and give many of the outdoor scenes a soft glow – this look was much imitated in the years following. The cast is uniformly excellent, particularly the key group of school girls that includes the beautiful Anne-Louise Lambert as Miranda (as featured on this poster) who is the focus of more than one characters’ infatuation. Filming took place at the real Hanging Rock in Victoria as well as a mansion called Martindale Hall that doubled as Appleyard College. The film was a global critical and box office  success, despite some audience frustration at the ending, and it retains its legacy as one of Australia’s most beloved films.

This British quad was illustrated by one of my favourite British artists, Brian Bysouth, who worked on a number of classic British posters during the 1970s and 1980s. It is unique to this particular poster but has some elements that also appeared on the original Australian poster that can be seen here (image taken from emovieposter.com).

You can read my extensive interview with Brian by clicking here. The other posters I’ve collected by him can be seen by clicking here.

The Land That Time Forgot was the first entry in a series of British sci-fi/fantasy b-movies that were directed by Kevin Connor and starred the prolific American actor Doug McClure, known for his hammy leading man performances (McClure was one of the inspirations for The Simpsons’ Troy ‘You may remember me from…’ McClure). The series continued with At the Earth’s Core (1976) and The People That Time Forgot (1977), and ended with Warlords of Atlantis (1978). The initial three were shepherded through production by Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky’s Amicus Productions, which was based at Shepperton studios and is perhaps best remembered for its series of portmanteau horror films. By the time Warlords of Atlantis was released the company was almost defunct and so EMI Films stepped in and produced it, utilising many of the same cast and crew as the previous films.

The Land That Time Forgot starts with the torpedoing of a passenger ship by a German U-boat crew. The few remaining survivors, including Bowen Tyler (McClure) and Lisa Clayton (Penhaligon), manage to overcome the U-boat’s crew when it surfaces and they force the captain to pilot the craft back to allied waters. The crew decide to sabotage their plans and the craft ends up completely lost in unknown waters. They happen across a strange island and find an underwater cave through which they pilot the U-boat. When they surface in the islands interior they are immediately set upon by a dinosaur-like creature that eats one of the crew before Tyler manages to decapitate it. The crew then venture through the strange land and come across more giant beasts and a tribe of primitive cavemen before discovering oil, which they hope will allow them to escape back to civilisation.

The film is never less than entertaining and McClure definitely gives it all he’s got. The creature effects have really dated badly, however, and are definitely not up to the standard set by Ray Harryhausen. There’s one excruciatingly bad sequence where the crew blast away at a pair of T-Rex like creatures and the second one takes an age to fall over unconvincingly (explained away by saying that the creature’s brains are slow to send signals). There are some decent special effects like the U-boat scenes underwater but it’s one film that hasn’t stood the test of time as well as some of its contemporaries.

The brilliant artwork on this quad, featuring a cheeky image of a T-Rex underwater (which is definitely not in the film itself), is by Tom Chantrell, the celebrated British artist whose dynamic and colourful work featured on hundreds of posters over a forty year period. His official website features a great biography written by Sim Branaghan, author of the must-own British Film Posters. Chantrell illustrated many classic poster designs, including several Hammer posters such as the brilliant quad for ‘One Million Years B.C.’, and was also responsible for the iconic Star Wars quad, the artwork of which ended up being used around the globe. I have a number of other designs by him on this site.

I’ve waited many years to add this iconic one sheet for Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Jaws to the Film on Paper collection as I wanted to find a rolled copy, which is no meant feat considering the film’s popularity and the fact that it was released in the mid-1970s (rolled posters from this period are rare). I finally won this copy in an auction earlier this year and what’s notable is that when other rolled originals of Jaws appear they almost always have the same NSS information layout at the bottom as this one, which many dealers and collectors believe means they originate from the Cleveland, Ohio NSS office. CineMasterpieces have a number of Jaws one sheets in their inventory (many already sold) and you can compare the different layouts of the NSS information (here’s an example).

The instantly recognisable image was painted by the American artist Roger Kastel and was originally commissioned for the paperback cover of Peter Benchley’s novel, but when Universal saw the artwork they bought the rights to use it for the poster and following the worldwide success of the film it would go onto become one of the most imitated and parodied images of all time, as well as a merchandising product in its own right.

Collector’s Weekly published a fascinating article about the creation of the poster and the events that led up to Kastel being commissioned to work on the poster. The artist recalls the day the project dropped into his lap:

“I had just delivered a painting to Bantam’s art director, Len Leone,” he says. “Bantam was just loaded with great artists at that time, and Len really gave Bantam its look. I was sitting in Len’s office when Oscar Dystel, Bantam’s publisher, came in. He said, ‘Wait a minute. Don’t leave. I have a great book for you to read’. And he ran out and came back with ‘Jaws.’”

A cover had already been painted by the renowned book cover illustrator for the Doubleday hardback edition of the book but as Kastel remembers it Dystel wasn’t happy with the first cover:

“He wanted me to read the book to pick out a new part to illustrate. But, of course, the best part was the beginning, where Chrissie goes into the water nude.” Turns out the Doubleday concept, if not the execution, was not so bad after all. Kastel did a sketch for Dystel and Leone to critique. “The only direction Oscar and Len gave me was to make the shark bigger, and very realistic.”

Kastel visited his usual go-to source for reference material, the Museum of Natural History in New York, but came up short:

“They didn’t have anything I could use, so I asked if they had a shark exhibit. They said they did but that it was closed for cleaning. It was lunchtime, so I went upstairs anyway, and there were all these different stuffed sharks, just laying on boards. I had my camera with me so I took a few pictures. The shark in my painting developed from there. I just tried to paint a ferocious-looking shark that was still realistic.”

When the book was released the graphic nature of the image saw the paperback banned from shelves in Boston, Massachusetts, and St. Petersburg, Florida, but Bantam didn’t mind the publicity as it greatly boosted sales. The cover also caught the attention of the film studio who were developing the story for the big screen:

“Apparently Universal had tried other poster ideas, but in the end they picked mine. They changed the color of the ‘JAWS’ lettering, added the actor names and other credits, and blurred the girl’s breasts with some foam.”

Kastel is unsure what fate befell the original oil painting (which was approximately 20″ x 30″) and the last time he saw it was when the paperback was first released:

“It was hanging at the Society of Illustrators in New York,” he says. “It was framed because it was on a book tour, and then it went out to Hollywood for the movie. I expected it to come back, but it never did. Either someone has it or it’s lost in storage at Universal. They really should report it as stolen.”

I’ve credited the design of the poster to three parties, although Tony Seiniger (and his agency) is most often cited as the man behind it. This article on Posterwire features comments that also call out another agency called Magidell who apparently had input as well as Universal’s in-house marketing team. Kastel also painted the ‘Gone with the Wind’ style one sheet for The Empire Strikes Back. Check out his official site here.

Arguably Jack Nicholson‘s finest performance (not an easy choice when there are films like Chinatown), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of only three films that have won all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor in Lead Role, Actress in Lead Role, Director, and Screenplay), with the others being It Happened One Night (1934) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Ken Kesey, the film focuses on goings on inside Oregon State Mental Hospital, which is where the book is set and, fortuitously, production was able to take place.

Nicholson plays Randall McMurphy a lifelong petty criminal who is sent to the mental hospital for evaluation after he fakes insanity in order to try and avoid a prison sentence in a traditional jail. After adjusting to life among genuinely disturbed characters including Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif) and Martini (Danny DeVito) and Taber (Christopher Lloyd) he starts to lead a small rebellion agains the authorities in the hospital and gains a cult status amongst the patients. But McMurphy hasn’t reckoned on the determination of the cruel Nurse Ratched (an unforgettable Louise Fletcher) who realises how much of a threat he is to life at the hospital and the tension between them escalates until a shocking ending that hasn’t lost it’s power 40 years on.

The film was a huge box-office and critical success with the Academy Awards being only some of the many accolades the film would garner. The film has been oft parodied in the years since with several elements of the story entering the cultural lexicon, such as uncompromising authoritarian figures often being referred to as being Ratched-like.

I’m unsure who’s responsible for the design of this poster so if anyone has any ideas please get in touch.

Lurid artwork features on this Turkish poster for Steven Spielberg’s 1975 masterpiece Jaws. Apparently the film wasn’t actually released in Turkey until 1981 which explains why the enterprising designer of this poster has used American artist Lou Feck’s illustration of a shark from the poster for Jaws 2 (1978) and inserted a bikini-clad victim into its mouth (as well as blood dripping from the shark’s teeth). Feck’s illustration was used around the world to promote the sequel after originally appearing on the front of the Jaws 2 novel and I have the Japanese B2 in the Film on Paper collection.

The US one sheet’s instantly recognisable image was painted by the American artist Roger Kastel and was originally commissioned for the paperback cover of Peter Benchley’s novel, but when Universal saw the artwork they bought the rights to use it for the poster and following the worldwide success of the film it would go onto become one of the most imitated and parodied images of all time, as well as a merchandising product in its own right.

Friend of the site Steve Guariento got in touch to point out that the bikini-clad lady was also adapted from another piece of art, namely the Italian four sheet for the Hammer film Dracula AD 1972 (click here to see it) that was painted by one of my favourite artists, Renato Casaro. The designer of the poster clearly had a Turkish artist paint some open eyes and an open mouth over the original art since the woman is asleep on Casaro’s poster. All of which makes it a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of a poster!

A striking design by the artist Romuald Socha on this Polish poster for the release of the Soviet drama Anna i Komandor, which appears to have never been released in the US or UK. I’ve struggled to find out any details about the film other than the information on its IMDb page. It was directed by the late Yevgeni Khrinyuk who died 3 years after this film was released and has only 3 directorial credits to his name. The actress who plays Anna, Alisa Freyndlikh, was somewhat more prolific and appeared in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, amongst other films.

The artwork is credited to Romuald Socha and I’ve had a similarly hard time discovering much about him, other than he was born in 1943 and that he’s responsible for a number of other posters, as can be seen on Polishposter.com  and GaleriaPlakatu.com.pl. If anyone has any more information about Socha please get in touch.

This one sheet for the largely forgotten (and ill-advised) quasi-sequel to the classic 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, The Black Bird, features one of the earliest film poster illustrations by the legendary artist Drew Struzan. The film is the sole directorial effort from David Giler, who is now best known as a producer on pretty much every Alien film in the franchise, up to and including Alien Covenant (2017). George Segal stars as the son of detective Sam Spade, who was played by Humphrey Bogart in the first film. The plot is described on IMDb:

The son of famous detective Sam Spade carries on the family tradition of getting involved with the Maltese Falcon – and with the people who will stop at nothing, including murder, to get it.

The Black Bird was trashed by critics at the time of release and audiences stayed away too. Unless I’m mistaken, the film has never been released digitally and is only available if you still have a VHS player.

Drew Struzan is an artist who barely needs an introduction given that he painted many of the most iconic film posters of all time, including several for Star Wars, Indiana Jones and a slew of other beloved classics like The Thing and The Goonies. The artist’s own site features 4 pages of his work for films and Drew also worked in other areas, including product marketing, book and magazine covers, editorial and multiple paintings as a fine artist. Drew declared that he’d retired in 2008 but has worked on a handful of special paintings since then, including one to announce the most recent Star Wars film in 2015.

To see a gallery of the other posters by Drew that I’ve collected click here.