Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1971 dystopian sci-fi, A Clockwork Orange, was met with controversy as soon as it was released in 1971, despite being a hit with UK and US audiences and earning box-office profits several times its original production budget. Unfortunately for UK audiences, the film was withdrawn from distribution in 1973 at the insistence of Kubrick himself following a number of death threats that were apparently received by the director and his family. These threats had been the result of the film being implicated, or at least referenced, in several high-profile criminal cases, including one in which an elderly vagrant had been kicked to death, mirroring an infamous scene in Kubrick’s film.

Despite being freely available across the rest of Europe and in the US, the film remained out of UK cinemas and, during the 1980s, off British video rental shop shelves. When the legendary London cinema the Scala Film Club decided to show the film in 1993 they were sued by Warner Bros at Kubrick’s insistence. The studio won the court case and the cinema club was effectively bankrupt, with plans for expansion quickly shelved. The club produced its last ‘what’s on’ calendar in May 1993 and the Scala converted to a music venue towards the end of the 1990s.

When Kubrick died in 1999 the ban was relaxed and the film was finally made available on VHS and DVD. A limited cinema run also took place and this quad was produced at the time. It uses part of the original artwork that featured on posters for the film around the world, which was painted by the renowned British artist Philip Castle. The final one sheet for the film is one of the most iconic posters of all time, with the same painting being used to promote the film all over the world, and it continues to be used to promote the film to this day. The original UK quad features more of Castle’s artwork and a more muted colour scheme, but features the same tag-line.

Born in London in 1943, Philip Castle’s design career has seen him working on album covers for some of the biggest names in British music, including Wings, Mott the Hoople and Pulp. His skills were utilised for the famous cover for David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, which saw him airbrushing over a photograph by Celia Philo. He also worked on the cover for the legendary computer game Elite. In 1987 Kubrick and Castle would collaborate once more on the poster for Full Metal Jacket, which again proved to be a seminal piece of work. There’s an interesting interview with Castle available to watch on YouTube in which he discusses his work with Kubrick.

This page features several examples of his brilliant work and there are multiple images tagged on Tumblr. The posters I’ve collected by him can be seen here.

This is the UK quad for a rather obscure 1980s slasher flick that is known by various names around the globe, including Island of Blood and Scared Alive, but was released in the UK as Whodunit? Directed by William T. Naud (here credited as Bill Naud), whose IMDb profile shows him as not being very prolific, the film is apparently based unofficially on Agatha Christie’s mystery novel And Then There Were None. The Wikipedia page for the film describes the plot thusly:

A film crew and a motley collection of thespians set out for an island that will be the perfect location for their next feel good, light hearted, comedy picture. But unfortunately someone has other ideas and destroys their mode of transport before finishing off the surviving cast and crew (wearing a skull-like mask) with the aid of a chainsaw, machete, and nail gun, all to a sick sado-masochistic type song (that this homicidal psycho has a fetish for). This psychotic murderer also has an accomplice, a fellow crewman who is skilled in the art of booby traps, rigging a shower to rain battery acid and scalding swimming pool that boils alive anyone who falls in.

It appears only to have been released on VHS here and in the US and no DVD is forthcoming. Judging by the handful of reviews on IMDb it might be a while before we see this one appear on blu-ray.

This quad bears a line crediting the design to the British design agency FEREF-James The Partnership, who were (and still are) a London-based agency creating advertising for the film industry. The original line up featured five designers and artists who had worked together at other agencies and decided to form their own and the name FEREF derives from each co-founder’s first initial. They worked on hundreds of posters during the 1970s and 1980s and employed many of the most talented artists to work on the posters, including Brian Bysouth (who eventually joined the company full time). It is believed this artwork was by the FEREF regular Mike Vaughan, who painted plenty of posters during the 1970s and 1980s.

One of several copycat zombie films made following the success of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, this effort by Italian director Bruno Mattei (under the pseudonym Vincent Dawn) shamelessly features many of the same types of characters and situations seen in the earlier films (SWAT team, zombie kids, hostages), and even uses sections of Goblin‘s score for DotD.

It sounds like the production was something of a nightmare, with botched filming and script-altering that rendered much of the film’s plot incomprehensible. The film features several sections of documentary footage taken from other productions and the original script apparently had a much grander scope:

In the first draft, Claudio Fragasso had followed the idea of an entire Third World made up of an army of zombies against whom the armed forces of the industrialized nations would have had to fight. However, the script had to be altered considerably due to budget limitations.

This quad features artwork which Sim Branaghan, author of the great book British Film Posters: An Illustrated History, believes to have been adapted from the original Italian poster. Ted Baldwin, who was the regular illustrator used by distributor Mircale Films, is likely to have made several changes to adapt it to the quad format.

Here’s the original trailer.

The next non-poster addition to the site is this original program (brochure) for Stanley Kubrick’s legendary 1971 film Clockwork Orange. I believe that it is from the film’s original release, although (frustratingly) it is not dated to confirm this. It would likely have been given away, or perhaps sold, at particular performances or cinemas and features a short write-up on the film, a cast-list and then a series of quotes alongside imagery from the film.

The cover displays British artist Philip Castle‘s iconic illustration of Alex (Malcolm McDowell) that was used to promote the film around the world, and the brochure also features images of other illustrations that Castle painted for the film (the illustration of the glass and teeth, for example) that were not printed as posters. The lurid pink colours make some of the text hard to read and it’s an odd design choice, although I expect it was intended to convey the ‘shocking’ nature of the film itself.

If anyone has any definitive information as to when this program would have originally been used to promote the film please get in touch.

Writer/director and B-movie legend Larry Cohen is responsible for this 1982 horror film that harks back to the popular ‘giant beast’ monster movies of the 1950s. Commonly known as ‘Q: The Winged Serpent‘, or simply ‘Q’, the story is set in New York City and follows two police detectives (played by David Carradine and Richard Roundtree) investigating a series of brutal sacrificial slayings in which victims’ hearts and skins have been removed. They are also struggling to explain the mysterious deaths of people snatched from high up on rooftops by what is reported to be a flying lizard.

At the same time, a luckless hoodlum called Jimmy Quinn (played with gusto by Michael Moriarty) is on the run from murderous mobsters and discovers a giant egg hidden in the crown of the famous Chrysler Building, which apparently belongs to the deadly creature. It becomes apparent that the cult behind the sacrificial murders has managed to resurrect an Aztec god known as Quetzalcoatl, a flying lizard with huge talons and a taste for human flesh, and the detectives must battle to stop both the cult members and defeat the beast before New York City is lost.

This quad was designed and illustrated by the late, great British artist Tom Chantrell whose dynamic and colourful work featured on hundreds of posters over a forty year period. It features the Chrysler Building, a famous New York landmark that also appears on the international one sheet, painted by Bob Gleason. Note that the lady in peril is wearing quite a bit less on this quad than she is on the one sheet – Chantrell always had an eye for adding extra bits of titillation to his artwork.

Tom Chantrell sadly passed away in 2001 but last year his widow Shirley launched his official website, which showcases his work and features a great biography written by Sim Branaghan, author of the must-own book 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 he 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 Chantrell on this site and you can read an exclusive interview with Shirley by clicking here.

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.

After eight films and close to 150 posters (according to the IMPAwards), this poster for the first film in the Harry Potter franchise is the only one I’m happy to add to my collection, and features art by the incomparable Drew Struzan. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that it was originally intended to be the first in a series of Struzan designs; Drew was told he’d be doing a poster for each of the subsequent films. This design is featured in his must-buy book ‘The Art of Drew Struzan’ and he talks about the plans:

Hearkening back to Back to the Future and Indiana Jones, they wanted a consistent technique and style they could perpetuate through a series of posters. I watched the movie on a monitor, got the stills – it was everywhere. I’d never read the books, but fans felt the movie poster captured the spirit, the mystery and sense of adventure.

We were going to be treated to a new Struzan poster for every film release, but this was not to be and the studio changed its plans:

Warner Bros. got a new head of worldwide advertising. And whenever you get a new guy, he wants to flush everything approved by the prior regime.

A hugely disappointing move since Drew was (and is) the perfect artist to capture the magic and fantasy of the Harry Potter films, yet the studio felt photographic images were the only way to sell the films to the public. Drew was as disappointed as the rest of us:

I had been preparing to live with Harry Potter for six movies; I was really getting into it. At the point they killed me, I couldn’t let it go and went ahead and painted the finished version of the sequel for my own satisfaction. I had to complete it.

The Art of Drew Struzan features his design for the second film and it’s another superb poster, as expected. We can only imagine what the rest of the posters would have looked like, if only the studio had stuck with their plans…

British film website The Shiznit has collected all of the posters together and rightly awarded best poster of the series to this one.

British director Gareth Edwards’ excellent Monsters was one of the best films released in 2010 and transcended a micro-budget to become one of the freshest entries in the sci-fi genre for several years. The film is set slightly in the future and several years after a NASA probe crashed back to earth infected with alien life. Half of Mexico had to be quarantined off as the creatures grew and took over the area, and the US military patrols the borders. Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is a US photojournalist who is hired by his boss to escort his daughter Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able) from the safe part of Mexico back to the States. The pair are forced to head through the quarantined zone despite the threat of the creatures who are moving across the country on their yearly ‘migration’.

The film was shot entirely on location by a tiny crew, using prosumer cameras and, aside from the two leads, the majority of the characters were played by non-actors. The dialogue was improvised around a loose scene outline and the results were edited whilst the crew was on the road. Gareth Edwards had previously worked as a special effects editor and spent four months designing and creating all of the effects himself, once again using off the shelf equipment and software. It’s a superb achievement and well worth a watch, but don’t go in expecting some kind of fast-paced, gory creature-feature as some cinema-goers were, back in 2010.

This striking US one sheet teaser was designed by Gravillis Inc. and features Whitney Able in a gas mask with a reflection of one of the creatures in the visor. Because the poster is so dark it’s hard to photograph without losing some of the details so check out the original digital file here.

The original trailer is on YouTube.

Juggernaut was directed by Richard Lester, perhaps best known for his work with The Beatles on two of their early films (A Hard Days Night and Help!), and features an all-star cast in the style of other 1970s disaster movies such as Earthquake and The Towering Inferno (both released in the same year). The story sees a luxury cruise-liner targeted by the titular terrorist who has covertly planted barrels of high-explosive onboard and is making his ransom demands from a secret location on the mainland. Omar Sharif plays the captain of the ship who, along with the ship’s entertainer Roy Kinnear, attempt to keep the hundreds of passengers calm as a bomb squad led by Commander Fallon (Richard Harris) parachutes in to try and defuse the devices. Back on dry land Anthony Hopkins‘ police superintendent, whose wife and children are onboard the ship, leads the hunt for Juggernaut before the time runs out.

The production hired an actual cruise ship, the SS Hamburg, which had recently been sold by its German owners to the Soviet Union and renamed the SS Maxim Gorkiy. The livery on the side of the ship was temporarily painted over and the ship renamed as the Britannica. Hundreds of extras were then hired with the promise of a cruise around the North Sea, although they were warned that the ship was likely to head into high seas to increase the drama of the film’s external shots!

The artwork on this 30×40 is by the late American artist Robert McCall who is perhaps best known for his work as a conceptual artist for the likes of NASA and several Hollywood productions, including Tora, Tora, Tora and Star Trek. Born in 1919 in Columbus, Ohio McCall graduated from the city’s School of Fine Arts before heading off to join the Airforce at the outbreak of World War II. Upon his return from service McCall carved out a successful career as a cover artist for publications such as Life Magazine, and before long he was painting for the U.S. Air Force. Around this time the artist also began a successful cooperation with NASA, which lasted for decades and saw him painting giant murals in buildings such as the National Air and Space Museum. In the 1960s McCall also began working with the entertainment industry as a concept artist. He sadly passed away, aged 90, in 2010.

Arguably his most famous film poster work is the set of illustrations he painted for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some of his NASA paintings can be seen on this website and many of his other sci-fi artworks can be viewed via this Tumblr link.