Great Posters for Terrible Movies

Rather than pulling my hair and banging my head on the desk (or in this case the table at Flavour Cafe), I combat writer’s block by engaging in a staring contest with the Internet. It rarely provides any inspiration or shatters the block, but it does occasionally give me gems like this:

The movie poster for “Beastmaster.”

Check out all that bad-assery. It looks like it’d be an awesome movie, right?

Well, not so fast.

I’ve always had a soft spot for “Beastmaster,” but it’s not a great film. At the very least, it’s certainly not as cool as the concept or the poster above would lead you to believe.

Over the years there have been some great posters for movies that didn’t live up to the promise of the image encased in glass on the wall of the Multi-Plex. What follows are  just a few examples.

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ANY GIVEN SUNDAY (1999)

The rundown of the cast alone (sans LL Cool J and maybe Cameron Diaz) should be enough to get you excited. Unfortunately, the poster cleverly leaves out a name that should provide ample warning for what’s to come: director Oliver Stone. What could be a riveting ensemble drama examining the depths of depravity, hedonism, and hypocrisy in America’s #1 sport is instead reduced to a bloated mess with all the depth and subtlety of a love poem written by a 6th grader.

What a waste of James Woods.

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GHOST RIDER (2007)

Really, this shouldn’t have been too hard. It’s a guy whose skull is on fire, gets his powers from Satan, and beats people up with a chain. Yet, almost masterfully, master hack Mark Steven Johnson manages to completely screw the pooch by writing and directing one of the hands-down worst big-budget films ever made. A terrible movie even by Nic Cage “oh crap, I need to do a movie quick to get next month’s mortgage payment in” standards.

Amazingly, this is getting a sequel. God help us.

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G.I. JOE (2007)

Another one that should have been hard to completely miss the boat on, but never underestimate Hollywood when it comes to screwing up a sure thing. All this film needed to do was cash in on lazy nostalgia and it couldn’t even accomplish that, opting instead to re-imagining the franchise by setting it in “the near future” (almost always indicative of lazy, terrible writing) and refusing to make a decision as to whether or not it should take itself seriously. Honestly, either way would have been fine, but it commits to neither and as a result ends up being a whole lot of nothing.

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MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE (1987)

There wasn’t anybody more excited for this film than I was, and yet at seven years old (which is how old I was when I finally had my mother rent the film for me from the local Price Chopper) I was aghast at the creative(?) license they took with the characters and concept.

How bad was this movie? Well, like so many other 80s action/sci-fi films, it made the mistake of listening to the one guy in the room that insisted it needed a teenager or two to be part of the plot in order to make it “relatable to the kids!” Apparently, it also needed a gremlin-like creature to replace the wizard Orco and provide comic relief.

And on a geek note: is it me or did they completely confuse Skeletor (played by Frank Langella…?!) for Mumm-Ra from “Thundercats”?

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STAR WARS, EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999)

We’ll be here all day if I try to go into where this misguided film (and subsequent installments in the prequel trilogy) went wrong. In short, though, it’s right there in the image. While amazing and chill-inducing for unsuspecting fans of the original films, it should have been our first hint that something was amiss.

Who the Hell cares what Darth Vader was doing when he was a pre-pubescent child?

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SEX AND THE CITY 2 (2009)

Ignoring “Carrie On,” which is such a terrible tag line that most people didn’t realize it existed despite the fact that it played off the main character’s name, the poster is memorable, gorgeous, and pops out at you. Carrie comes forth like an angel sent from Heaven (or at least the corner of it occupied by the Versace family) to deliver women from the agony of perpetual adaptations of comic book properties and action-adventure fair.

…unfortunately, what women got instead were ignorant caricatures shamelessly showing their age in clothing that isn’t suitable for women half their age in a zany two and a half hour version of a late-80s sitcom vacation episode.

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SPIDER-MAN 3 (2007)

Man, this was it! Spider-Man, the black costume, the identity crisis followed by the unveiling of the most popular villain in recent decades. Cool, right?

Not so much. The film stumbles from one scene into another until it culminates in a Bollywood-style dance number with Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) as an evil post-emo hipster with rhythm. Yet somehow, that wasn’t the most ludicrous and inexplicable character turn in “Spider-Man 3.”

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TERMINATOR: SALVATION (2009)

All of Christian Bale’s behind-the-scenes rage (warning: NSFW) is mystifying considering how much he mailed in his performance in this film. Not that he could have saved it from a hacky script and McG’s one-dimensional creative vision.

Side note on that infamous rant: that shouldn’t have gone more than thirty seconds before director McG stepped in and took control of that situation. I don’t care what song he sang in “Newsies,” you don’t ever let an actor announce you’re ‘going again’ or take over a shoot like that.

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THE SHADOW (1994)

The poster tried to invoke the mystery and intrigue of The Shadow, but the only mystery here is what this film was trying to accomplish. As a character and a property, The Shadow was a pulp hero (borderline anti-hero) ahead of his time. Too bad this film got ahead of itself.

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WATCHMEN (2009)

I know I’ll catch flack for this one since so many people loved it. But while the posters and even the film’s actual imagery were mostly faithful to the source material, it didn’t carry anywhere near as much depth as Alan Moore’s original mini-series from which it was adapted.

As a director, I think Zack Snyder is all flash and pop and not much else. I hope for his (and art’s) sake he proves me wrong.