Written, directed by and starring the late Ron O’Neal, Super Fly TNT was the hastily released follow up to the smash hit 1972 original Super Fly, one of the classic entries into the then burgeoning blaxploitation genre. Reprising his role as Priest from the first film, O’Neal would forever struggle to shake loose from the character and he was always to be known as ‘that Super Fly guy’. In this film, the character has retired from hustling and is living the good life in Rome, Italy with his lady Georgia (Sheila Frazier). Although he’s financially stable following a huge cocaine deal he manage to pull of back in New York, Priest is bored and spends his time playing cards against Italian businessmen.
One day he is approached by an African dignitary Dr. Lamine Sonko (Roscoe Lee Browne) who wants help with a gun smuggling operation that will help overthrow colonialism in his country. Initially reluctant to help, Sonko manages to convince Priest that he owes it to his ‘African brothers’ to help and, feeling a sense of guilt over his hustling days, the Super Fly guy decides to get back into action. The film was critically panned and faired poorly at the box-office; strong proof that rushing a sequel out to cash in on the success of an original usually ends in disaster.
This US 30×40 poster features artwork by the American artist Craig Nelson who has been painting for over forty years, and is an accomplished figure and landscape artist who also teaches at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco where he is Director of Fine Art, Drawing and Painting. Two other film posters that Nelson is known for are the US one sheets for The Monster Squad (1987) and Slap Shot (1977). The artist’s official website can be viewed by clicking here and includes galleries of his fine art paintings and a biography that does have mention of his film work, but there are no galleries of his other posters.
Can you spot the stealth Golden Arches?
One of the best horror films of all time has a poster featuring one of the best taglines of all time. 37 years on, the film has lost none of its raw, brutal power and the US one sheet must have left cinema-goers in no doubt as to the movie they were about to watch. It’s interesting that the decision was made to reveal the (subsequently) iconic Leatherface on the poster and not leave his introduction to the film itself.
This version of the poster was for the 1980 re-release of the film by New Line Cinema. They obtained the rights from the (then) bankrupt Bryanston Distributing Company who originally released the film in 1974. The first release poster is practically identical to this one with the only notable difference being the copyright notice in the bottom left and the lack of an NSS number and blurb on the re-release.
Some more information on the Bryanston/New Line change from IMDB:
“The film’s original distributor was Bryanston Distribution Company, in fact a Mafia front operated by Louis “Butchie” Peraino, who used the movie to launder profits he made from Deep Throat (1972). In return, the production received only enough money to reimburse the investors and pay the cast and crew $405 a piece. The producers eventually discovered that Peraino had lied to them about the film’s profits; after Peraino was arrested on obscenity charges when his role in Deep Throat was revealed, the cast and crew filed a suit against him and were awarded $25,000 each. New Line Cinema, which obtained the rights to “Chain Saw” from the bankrupt Bryanston, paid the cast and crew as part of the purchase agreement.”
The original trailer can be watched here.
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.
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. Decades 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 is the British quad for a 1998 re-release of the film at the ABC Shaftesbury avenue cinema in London. Despite the BBFC declining to issue the film a certificate back in 1975, which effectively meant the film was banned from release, the Greater London Council decided to allow cinemas to screen a pre-cut ‘X’ version of the film. A few other councils around the UK also ignored the ban but many upheld it. An uncut VHS was apparently released on the Wizard label in 1981.
In 1998 the London Borough of Camden passed the film uncut with an 18 certificate and began showing the film in cinemas. Shaftesbury avenue is just inside the Borough boundary so the ABC was well placed to screen the film to central London audiences. The fact that this poster has a December date on there indicates it’s from 1998 and not 1999 when the film was finally passed uncut by the BBFC and given a wider release.
The censorship website Melon Farmers features a great write up of the situation.
The ABC is now an Odeon cinema and it has changed owners several times in its history. Check out this fantastic set on Flickr, which contains photos of the cinema over the years . The same Flickr user has uploaded a veritable gold mine of British cinema photos – see here.
This poster is practically identical to the original 1975 quad (aside from the certificate) and I’m pretty sure they simply scanned the original to create this one. This re-release poster often appears with the cinema snipe at the bottom having been removed.
You only have to look through my poster archive to know that I love schlocky horror films as much as the next person, but I really struggled to make it through The Stuff when I rewatched it again recently. Sadly, that wasn’t because it was too gory or scary but because it’s such a terrible mess of a film, with clunky pacing, a complete lack of suspense and painfully bad acting across the board. Lead Michael Moriarty gives one of the strangest performances I’ve ever seen featuring baffling line deliveries and the general air of someone who thinks he’s acting in another film entirely.
The premise is okay with a mysterious white goo being discovered in the desert by a miner who then samples it, declares it to be tasty, and before long it’s the nation’s favourite dessert and is being marketed as an alternative to ice cream. The only downside is that it turns people into brain-washed zombies who infect anyone else they come into contact with. The leaders of several ice cream companies hire Mo Rutherford (Moriarty), a former FBI agent, to investigate what the secret of The Stuff really is.
I’m unsure who painted the artwork on this US one sheet so please get in touch if you have any ideas.
The original trailer is on YouTube.
Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise is arguably one of cinema’s greatest cult oddities. Part musical, part horror and loosely based on Phantom of the Opera and the classic tale of Faust, the film has an electric atmosphere helped no end by the performance of the late William Finley as the unlucky music composer Winslow Leach who falls foul of the twisted producer Swan (Paul Williams, himself a noted musician and composer). A twisted satire of the state of the music business of the time, the film features a superb soundtrack written by Williams, which is a mix of surf pop, 70s glam rock and romantic ballads.
When Swan sees Winslow performing his music at a small concert he convinces the composer to sell his tunes to him to be used at the opening of his new club, The Paradise. Instead Swan has one of his henchmen steal the music, beat Winslow up and frame him for drug possession, sending the mild mannered musician to the brutal Sing Sing prison. Months later Winslow hears that one of Swan’s bands is to release a record based on his music and breaks out of the prison in a frenzied rage. After heading to Swan’s Death Records factory he tries to sabotage a record press but accidentally falls head-first into it, severely scarring his face and damaging his vocal chords. Escaping from the police, he makes his way to the Paradise where he dons a cape and a beaked mask and becomes the Phantom of The Paradise. Soon he discovers the secret behind Swan’s success and sets out to stop him at all costs.
The film was met with mixed critical reviews and was a worldwide box-office flop, with the only exceptions being in Japan and, bizarrely, Winnipeg in Canada where the film played at the same cinema for months. One of the key reasons for the film’s disastrous commercial performance was the way it had initially been marketed by studio Twentieth Century Fox who had created a campaign that emphasised the rock aspect of the film with the intention of drawing in teenage music fans. The plan backfired, however, when initial audiences realised how negative the portrayal of the music industry is in the film was and how it was effectively sending up the very thing they were fans of.
The brilliant fan site The Swan Archives, curated by Ari Kahan, features a thorough history of the promotion of the film and shows the initial two styles of poster, one of which was designed by Anthony Goldschmidt and illustrated by the late John Alvin and also featured on the album cover. As Kahan notes:
‘The involvement of A&M records (which issued the soundtrack, and which more or less owned the exclusive rights to Paul Williams’ life at the time) in the co-marketing campaign with 20th Century Fox meant that the film was initially pitched towards what A&M and Fox believed to be the teens-through-college “rock music demographic.” John Alvin’s beautiful painted graphics on the posters and soundtrack album emphasised guitars, keyboards, microphones, patch cords, and other musical ephemera, and a photorealistic depiction of songwriter/star Paul Williams, signalling the studio’s intention to rely heavily on Williams’ existing fame in its promotion of the film.’
The rest of the ill-conceived initial campaign is detailed on the Swan Archives page linked to above. After a disastrous few months at the box office, the film’s producer Ed Pressman convinced the studio to allow him to reposition the film with a revised marketing campaign. Kahan explains:
‘Pressman went into action by launching a second campaign, in mid-1975, which tagged the film as “The Most Highly Acclaimed Horror Phantasy of Our Time,” pushing the horror angle and perennial plot line, and downplaying the music. De Palma, Finley, and Graham were made extremely available to give interviews to Castle of Frankenstein, Monster World, and every other horror magazine that would make time for them’
As part of this second campaign Pressman commissioned noted comic book artist Richard Corben to illustrate a new poster image and fellow comic book artist Neal Adams provided an initial concept sketch from which Corben worked (according to Kahan, ‘Adams drew the sketch for free, to aid Pressman in pitching a never-realised Phantom of the Paradise companion comic book, which he hoped might result in some paying work’) . The new painting emphasised the horror aspect and the Phantom’s mangled face and completely downplayed Williams’ presence – you can just spot him at the bottom of the marquee (see the close-up image). The new campaign proved to be more successful but as Kahan notes:
‘The film gradually took on life, bringing in decent (though never great) box office and some positive reviews. As De Palma put it, “When we revised the campaign in the U.S and made it seem more like The Phantom of the Opera than a horror/rock film, we got an entirely different response.”‘
For more on the film’s promotional travails, I again urge you to check out the excellent Swan Archives site. Corben also painted the style B one sheet for the Heavy Metal film, the magazine of which he’d been involved with for several years.