Roger Kastel artwork on this poster for the 1978 heist-caper starring Donald Sutherland and Sean Connery and directed by the late Michael Crichton. The film is based on his book of the same name, which is itself loosely based on an actual heist known as the Great Gold Robbery of 1855 in which a large quantity of gold was stolen from a train by a master thief and his accomplices. Pierce (Connery) works with Agar (Sutherland) to acquire the four keys that are required to break into the storage compartment on the moving train and must then attempt to escape with the loot.

The film is notable for the stunt-work, including walking on the roof of a moving train, that was apparently done by Connery himself. It’s also worth noting that the film was renamed to The First Great Train Robbery in the UK so it wouldn’t get confused with an infamous British train robbery in 1963 in which £2.6 million was stolen from a train in Buckinghamshire. The crime was dubbed The Great Train Robbery by the British press.

Roger Kastel’s website can be viewed here and it features plenty of great images of his brilliant work, including the iconic image that he originally drew for the paperback cover of Jaws, which was later used on movie posters for the film all over the world.. He’s also responsible for the excellent ‘Gone with the Wind’ style one sheet for The Empire Strikes Back.

The original trailer for the film is on YouTube.

This British quad for Terry Gilliam‘s time-travelling fantasy features artwork by the director himself. His signature can be seen to the bottom right of the castle and a more scribbly ‘Gilliam’ is subtly hidden in the background hills (see photo 3). Time Bandits is one of the director’s best, in my opinion, and features typically brilliant imagery combined with a great cast, including a few surprising cameos.

The film follows 11-year-old Kevin (Craig Warnock) and his adventures with a troupe of time-travelling dwarves who are on the run from their master, the Supreme Being. As the gang use a special map to hop through holes in the universe and into different time periods they soon realise that their journey is being controlled by a sinister force. It’s not long before they are forced to confront Evil and save themselves from certain death. The ending of the film, which I won’t spoil, is brilliantly bonkers.

According to IMDb, in 1996 Terry Gilliam and [screenwriter and actor] Charles McKeown collaborated on a script for Time Bandits 2, bringing back most of the original cast, with the exceptions of David Rappaport and Tiny Ross who had passed away a few years before, and owing to Jack Purvis being paralysed from a car accident, his character was written to be in a similar state. But following the death of Purvis, the project was shelved indefinitely.

The excellent, unusual trailer is on YouTube.

Utterly bonkers, laughably terrible, bizarrely brilliant; Zardoz is one of those films that you have to see at least once just to believe that it was even made. There are countless unforgettable images in the film, not least of which is Sean Connery in a red leather nappy and knee-high boots. There’s also a moment where he dons a wedding dress.

The script is also rather special; ‘The Penis is evil! The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the Gun shoots Death and purifies the Earth of the filth of Brutals. Go forth, and kill! Zardoz has spoken”

I’m a fan of this poster for a number of reasons, including the tagline and the strange choice of images to depict from the film, but it’s the film’s logo that deserves special mention as surely one of the best of the 1970s, if not ever.

The artist for this poster is American artist Ron Lesser, who is also responsible for the excellent High Plains Drifter one sheet (thanks to MightyMcT for confirming this).

Check out the trailer to get a taste of the wonder of Zardoz. If you want to see the best bits someone has made a short film entitled ‘Zardoz in 10 minutes’.

Finally, bear witness to Zardoz dog!

This is the style B Japanese B2 poster for the release of the 1979 musical oddity Roller Boogie, with a unique, and rather wild, montage that was designed by Kazuo Yuasa. One of those films that’s something of a time capsule, the film was put into production by Irwin Yablans the independent producer who had struck gold a year earlier with John Carpenter’s Halloween. Yablans is credited with the film’s story and the intention was to capitalise on the then craze for rollerskating that was sweeping the States.

 Mark L. Lester (known for Commando and Class of 1984) was hired to direct and Linda Blair (The Exorcist) was given the starring role opposite an award-winning amateur skating champion called Jim Bray who was originally attached as a stuntman but was later given acting lessons when the production struggled to find a leading actor.

Blair plays Terry Barkley a Beverly Hills rich girl who is largely ignored by her parents who are determined to see her attend a prestigious school in New York and carry on as a flautist. One day whilst visiting Venice Beach she meets a hotshot skater named Bobby James (Bray) who dreams of making it to the Olympics. The pair strike up a friendship and eventually Terry asks Bobby if she can teach him how to skate and create a routine for them both so they can compete in a Roller Boogie contest at a skating rink called Jammer’s. Unfortunately a nefarious property developer plans to buy Jammer’s and raze it to the ground, so the pair team up with other skaters to put a stop to the plans whilst practicing their routines ready for the big night.

The film was largely panned on its release but found success with teen audiences and has since gone on to have something of a cult following. Plans for a mooted sequel were scrapped when disco music and roller skating lost their popularity.

I’ve struggled to find out anything about Kazuo Yuasa and this is the only other Japanese poster that I can find credited to him. If anyone has any more information about him please get in touch.

Ridley Scott‘s seminal sci-fi classic needs no introduction and is on many people’s ‘top 10 films of all-time’ list, including my own.

This British quad is based on the French poster credited to Jouineau Bourduge which is the combined surnames of two French poster designers/artists (both with the first name Guy) who were responsible for many classic posters from 1960s through to the 1980s. MoviePostersGallery.com has a gallery of posters by him, as does cinemaffiche.com. I’ve been unable to find anything in the way of a biography online so please get in touch if you have more information.

I’ve always found it interesting that Deckard (Harrison Ford) is given a very stylistic representation on the poster whilst the other two characters are displayed using photographs. It’s also slightly bizarre that the studio decided to promote a tie-in to win a Volkswagen Polo – talk about a mismatch of content and product!

One interesting thing to note is that the book tie-in shown in the bottom right corner features artwork by Drew Struzan. The design was proposed for the American one sheet but the production team ultimately went with John Alvin’s illustration instead. Drew would later be asked to design the poster for the release of the final cut in 2007.

The other Blade Runner posters I have collected can be seen here.

British artist Brian Bysouth is responsible for this great design for the classic fantasy film Highlander that spawned several sequels and TV series. It’s significantly more interesting than the dull US poster. This Bysouth design can also be found in a one sheet format.

During my interview with Brian this poster was discussed:

I like it because of the amount of detail you can see, much like your painting for Highlander.
Thank you, I was pleased with that one. It was an enjoyable job and, fortunately, when asked to do a design for that type of film I was usually quick to identify what the key image should be. Phil Howard-Jones, the advertising director at EMI, who I did the work for, liked it very much and eventually he kindly returned it to me.

The trailer for the film can be seen on YouTube.

An exciting montage on this Japanese poster for the 1974 re-release of Thunderball, Sean Connery‘s fourth outing as the legendary spy. The plot sees Bond on the trail of two nuclear bombs stolen from a British Vulcan bomber by Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), an agent of Spectre, which takes him to the islands of The Bahamas. Spectre requests £100million in uncut diamonds with a threat of detonating the bomb over a major city and Bond must track the weapons down before time runs out. The gorgeous Claudine Auger plays Domino, Largo’s mistress and an eventual ally of Bond; to my mind one of the better Bond girls.

The film features a series of groundbreaking underwater action scenes and a number of memorable gadgets, including a jetpack used in the opening sequence. Viewed today, however, the final section featuring a fight onboard Largo’s runaway jet-powered boat is completely cringeworthy as it uses sped-up footage with badly matched rear-projection that was meant to give the feeling of speed. Whilst it may have been acceptable in 1965, time has not been kind and it now looks unforgivably poor. I count Thunderball as one of the weakest of Connery’s official Bond films.

With that being said, the advertising campaign and accompanying artwork used for the British and American releases was arguably the best of any in the series, and Robert McGinnis and Frank McCarthy‘s wonderful designs and illustrations are quintessential Bond.

This montage appears to have been colour-tinted by hand, as evidenced by the bronze Aston Martin seen between Domino and her giant spear gun. The image of Connery with the large, silenced pistol was previously used on a Japanese poster for From Russia With Love.

This Japanese B2 for Terry Gilliam‘s time-travelling fantasy Time Bandits features unique artwork exclusive to the poster. The 1981 film is one of the director’s best, in my opinion, and features typically brilliant imagery combined with a great cast, including a few surprising cameos.

The film follows 11-year-old Kevin (Craig Warnock) and his adventures with a troupe of time-travelling dwarves who are on the run from their master, the Supreme Being. As the gang use a special map to hop through holes in the universe and into different time periods they soon realise that their journey is being controlled by a sinister force. It’s not long before they are forced to confront Evil and save themselves from certain death. The ending of the film, which I won’t spoil, is brilliantly bonkers.

According to IMDb, in 1996 Terry Gilliam and [screenwriter and actor] Charles McKeown collaborated on a script for Time Bandits 2, bringing back most of the original cast, with the exceptions of David Rappaport and Tiny Ross who had passed away a few years before, and owing to Jack Purvis being paralysed from a car accident, his character was written to be in a similar state. But following the death of Purvis, the project was shelved indefinitely.

I’m unsure who is responsible for the artwork on this poster and there are no signatures or any other identifying marks. If you have any ideas please get in touch.

The excellent, unusual trailer is on YouTube.

Unquestionably one of the truly great British horror films, Clive Barker‘s Hellraiser launched an enduring franchise and established the character of Pinhead (or ‘Priest’, as Barker prefers him to be known) as one of horror’s most beloved villains. Based on the 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, Barker made the decision to both write the screenplay and direct the film after being disappointed with how two of his earlier scripts had been treated by other directors. The story begins as seedy hedonist Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) purchases a golden puzzle box from an antiques dealer in Morocco believing it holds the key to the ‘ultimate sensual experience’. On returning to his London home, Frank opens the puzzle box and is promptly torn apart by massive hooks controlled by a group of horribly scarred and mutilated humanoids known as the Cenobites. The lead Cenobite (Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley) twists the box back to its original shape and they pass back into their realm with Frank’s remains with the room returning to normal.

Sometime later, Frank’s brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and his second wife Julia (Clare Higgins) move into the same house assuming that Frank is in jail in some exotic location. Larry’s daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) declines the offer to move in with her stepmother and chooses to find her own place. When Larry accidentally cuts his hand and drips blood onto the attic floor it somehow reaches Frank in his prison in the other realm and starts to resurrect his body (in a stunning special effects sequence). Later that day Julia finds Frank in the attic and the pair rekindle an affair they had started some years before. Julia agrees to help Frank to fully resurrect himself, which can only happen through blood sacrifices so she begins to seduce and bring back random men to the house before bludgeoning them to death for Frank to consume. Kirsty begins to suspect something is afoot and soon she is having her own encounter with the Cenobites who are displeased to learn that one of their prisoners has escaped and is on a murder spree.

What makes the film stand out is the excellent script by Barker which prevents the characters from being the usual one-dimensional death fodder usually seen in horror films, particularly those being released towards the end of the 1980s. The production, costume and makeup design are all excellent, with all of the Cenobite designs being particularly memorable. There’s only one stop-motion animation sequence at the end of the film that belies the productions low budget and the film stands up extremely well today. Although the series is up to its ninth film instalment, Barker never directed another and was only producer on the first two sequels. After the fourth film (1996’s Bloodline) the series became a straight-to-video enterprise and quality dropped significantly from then onwards.

This US one sheet, designed by Pulse Advertising, features a great image of Pinhead holding the puzzlebox, alongside a very memorable tagline. The lead Cenobite would be front and centre on posters for the film used around the world, as well as all theatrically-released sequels. To see more posters designed by Pulse, check out this page on IMPAwards and the posters I’ve collected that were designed by them can be seen here.

Diamonds are Forever is the seventh film in the long-running James Bond franchise and was the last official (EON productions) film to star arguably the greatest actor who played the spy, Sean Connery. After appearing in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service actor George Lazenby decided to leave the franchise, apparently on the advice of his agent, and the producers considered a few other actors before the then head of United Artists (David Picker) declared that he wanted Connery back and money was no object. The Scottish actor, who had previously declared he would never return to the role, demanded an unprecedented fee of £1.25m (equivalent to £23 million in 2013) and was also granted backing to produce two other films of his choice. After both sides agreed to the deal the casting was announced and Connery then donated his fee to set up the Scottish International Education Trust, which allowed artists from the country to apply for funding without having to leave Scotland.

The story starts out with Bond apparently killing his arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld in revenge for the death of his new bride at the end of the previous film. The spy is then sent to investigate the mysterious murders of diamond smugglers and the theft of thousands of the precious stones. After following the trail from Amsterdam to Las Vegas, picking up a partner in smuggler Tiffany Case (Jill St. John) along the way, Bond discovers that two quirky assassins called Mr Wint and Mr Kidd (played memorably by Bruce Glover and Putter Smith) have been killing other smugglers across the world and are stockpiling diamonds for a mysterious benefactor. When Bond tracks the diamonds to their destination in a remote desert facility, he discovers that his arch enemy Blofeld is still alive and is using the diamonds to create a space laser capable of destroying targets on earth. The super spy sets out to stop the maniac’s plans and prevent him from holding the world to ransom with his new weapon.

This Japanese B2 features a montage that is unique to the poster and it includes images of Tiffany Case (on the left) and Trina Parks as the inept assassin Thumper (partnered in the film with ‘Bambi’) who is notable as being the first African-American actress to appear in a Bond film. There is also a small part of the artwork from the American one sheet that was painted by Robert McGinnis.