A landmark American film, Easy Rider defined a generation and was a touchstone of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Directed, co-written by and starring the late Dennis Hopper, the film was produced by Peter Fonda, who also helped to write the screenplay and starred alongside Hopper as one of two bikers who set off on a cross-country trip through the Southern United States. At the beginning of the film Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) pull off a successful drug deal and decide to take their earnings and ride from Los Angeles to New Orleans to attend the forthcoming Mardi Gras festival.

Along the way the pair meet an assortment of unusual characters, including a hippie hitchhiker (Luke Askew) who takes them to a commune, drunken lawyer George (Jack Nicholson in a career-defining role) who helps them to escape jail and joins them on their trip, and a pair of prostitutes (Karen Black and Toni Basil). They also experience the hostility of the authorities and suspicious locals whose aggression towards the bikers leads them question if the halcyon days of the early 1960s are well and truly over. After one particular encounter George comments ”You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.”

The film is infamous for its scenes featuring actual drug use (prominently marijuana) and, thanks to its incredible box-office success, Easy Rider is also credited with kickstarting a new era in Hollywood that saw a slew of low-budget films helmed by avant-garde directors being financed, particularly once studio heads realised the profits easily outweighed the initial production costs. Thanks to the success of the film Dennis Hopper was given carte-blanche for his next directorial effort, 1971′s The Last Movie; a film that saw woeful critical and commercial performance and effectively ended his career as a director for over a decade.

This is the Japanese poster for the film, which features the stylised portrait of Fonda, as featured on the American one sheets. The colour scheme and use of stars is unique to this poster and there is also a blue version featuring the same design, which I have in my collection and can be viewed here.

The film’s original trailer is on YouTube.

If I had to choose my top 10 horror films of all time there’s no question that Tobe Hooper‘s 1974 classic would be very close to the top of the list. 37 years after it was filmed it has lost none of its raw power, despite the countless imitations made since, and its impact on the horror genre cannot be underestimated.

To my mind there are few scenes in horror as brutal and shocking as the moment involving Leatherface and the sliding door. The film features little in the way of the kind of gore that modern horrors seem to rely on, yet is no less disturbing for it. The 1986 sequel famously upped the gore and violence significantly.

This Japanese poster features star Marilyn Burns in one of the film’s most disturbing scenes involving ‘Grandpa’, as well as smaller images of Leatherface, Grandpa himself and the infamous meat-hook scene.

Check out the Japanese poster for a 2007 festival re-release of the film and the classic US poster.

Bizarrely, the house featured in the film is now a family restaurant!

Here’s the brilliant original trailer.

A striking design on this poster printed for the Japanese release of For a Few Dollars More, the second in legendary director Sergio Leone‘s unofficial ‘Dollars trilogy’, all three of which starred Clint Eastwood and helped put him and the sub-genre of the so-called Spaghetti Western firmly on the cinematic map. Although not conceived by Leone to be a series, The ‘Man with No Name’ concept was coined by the studio United Artists as an angle to sell the films, particularly since Eastwood plays the three different characters with similar mannerisms and dressed in the same attire. Despite the ‘n0 name’ label, Eastwood’s characters have a different nickname in each of the films.

In For a Few Dollars More he plays Manco (Spanish for ‘one-armed man’), a bounty hunter who is on the trail of the ruthless outlaw El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) and his gang. Whilst on the hunt Manco meets Col. Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef, who would also appear in the next film in the trilogy) another bounty hunter who is also after the same man, and the two agree to team up and eventually split the reward. As the bullets begin to fly it soon becomes clear that the bounty hunters have different motivations for wanting to kill El Indio.

This Japanese poster is actually for the 1972 re-release, although it’s almost identical to the one printed for the original 1967 Japanese release, which can be seen here. The only really notable difference is the alternate studio logo in the bottom right corner and a different number on the Eirin stamp.

A fantastic illustration on this Japanese B2 for The Empire Strikes Back by the Japanese artist Noriyoshi Ohrai which, in my opinion, is the best artwork for the best film in the six film saga. I’d have a hard time choosing between this and Tom Chantrell’s classic design for the greatest overall Star Wars poster artwork.

As well as this Japanese B2, the artwork featured on a Japanese B1 as well as several other international posters, including an Australian one sheet. Sadly it was not to be used for the US or UK campaigns. Last year, for the ESB 30th anniversary, Lucasfilm released a limited edition one sheet of the poster taken from the original artwork transparency – see this article for more info.

Noriyoshi Ohrai is my favourite Japanese artist and certainly in my top five greatest film poster illustrators of all time. He’s responsible for a number of other Star Wars related posters, including this lovely 1982 B2 to celebrate the release of the Japanese dubbed version of the original film. He is also know for a series of Godzilla posters, some of which can be seen here. In March 2014 a retrospective exhibition was held in Japan of Ohrai’s work and I made the trip over to Miyazaki to see the exhibition and I’m very glad I did as it featured most of his original artwork and a whole array of posters and book covers. A full report will follow soon.

The posters I’ve managed to collect by him can be seen by clicking here.