Editorials
Best & Worst of 2010: The Year’s Worst One Sheets
The task of selling a film is probably much, much harder than any of us realize, which is why posters meant to stir up excitement for upcoming releases are often so badly calculated. 2010 has been no exception, with a large number of god-awful (or just plain boring) one-sheets cluttering up the lobbies of multiplexes all across the country. Here’s B-D’s list of the worst offenders from the past year.
BEST ONE SHEETS | WORST ONE SHEETS
WORST ONE SHEETS OF 2010
Click any to see it larger
Posters listed in no particular order
Remember the posters from the first few movies? They were hand-drawn, imaginative, museum-quality works of art. As for the remake, I guess this generic one-sheet is the best they could come up with – a sentiment you could also apply to the movie itself. When it comes right down to it, simply throwing up an image of the “new Freddy” and calling it a day is just lazy marketing.
The problem with this poster is pretty simple – we have no idea what kind of movie they’re advertising. Judging by the soft blue light shining from above, this could very well be a tear-jerking drama about a…fucked-up mutant woman with a tail. The film itself was a boundary-pushing horror/sci-fi (albeit an uneven one), and this one-sheet should’ve done a better job at communicating that.
The issue here is the same as with the Nightmare on Elm Street poster – simply showing us an image of the villain is a really weak, uninspired way to sell a movie. Also, the movie is called Predators, plural, right? So where are the rest of them?
What is he firing that gatling-gun at, the ground? And why are they hiding the scarred half of Jonah Hex’s face? This poster is far too generic for the adaptation of a comic-book series known for its imaginative genre-mixing.
From quite possibly the two laziest filmmakers on the planet comes one of the most godawful one-sheets in the history of film advertising. From the looks of it, Fox just farmed this puppy out to a bunch of high school freshmen taking a “Beginning Photoshop” class. Hey, is that someone dressed up as Lady Gaga in the background? A-hardy-har-har!
While the other Piranha one-sheet made our “best-of” list, this one qualifies as one of the year’s worst. Talk about generic – this could’ve been the poster for any number of “killer underwater creature” movies from the last twenty years. Also, the tagline should’ve read “This Summer Fake 3D Shows Its Teeth”, don’t you think?
When you have a winning formula, I guess there’s no reason to mix it up. Still, seeing the same basic image on every single Resident Evil one sheet is getting a little tiresome. Also, I’d like to call for a moratorium on jagged shards of glass representing the 3-D experience on movie posters.
It’s soft-core porn meets Captivity in this awful, lowest-common-denominator one-sheet advertising the upcoming remake of the cult classic 1970 thriller. Pass the cheese.
It’s no wonder Case 39 failed at the box-office. After years of delays and overwhelmingly negative buzz, Paramount couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a decent poster. So what’s it about, exactly? A haunted house? An evil child? Killer luggage? Kinda hard to tell from the pedestrian imagery featured here.
Look, we made $100 million with the first one – do people really give a shit about the poster? Just slap a still from the movie on there like we did with the original! Gosh, this money smells good.
For a cult phenomenon like Hatchet, you’ve gotta give the uninitiated (and those who were only lukewarm on the first movie) a reason to see it. How is it different, etc.? This generic poster is a snooze that could’ve been used to advertise almost any other slasher flick released in the last 30 years.
The sight of Amanda Seyfried walking through a forest just screams “excitement!”, doesn’t it?
Cursed with a premise that’s about ten years too late, this movie follows a group of teens who are forwarded a chain letter (over that new-fangled email) and murdered one by one when they fail to send it along. So I’m just gonna take a guess that in crafting this head-scratching poster, the marketing team at the studio was attempting to hide the fact that the concept of their movie reached “horribly dated” status right around 2005. What other explanation could there be? So there’s a dude wearing pajamas…in chains…lying on top of a barcode…and the tagline is “The Art of Killing”. Ok, I give up.
As if the negative buzz surrounding My Soul to Take wasn’t already bad enough, Rogue had to go and release this incredibly shitty one-sheet to advertise it. Not that I can necessarily blame them – the film’s needlessly complex premise is nearly impossible to sum up in a single image. This poster is the equivalent of the entire marketing team throwing up their hands in frustration.
Here’s an idea: just copy the exploitative poster art used to market the original movie, except render it in B&W so people think it’s more artistic. Then print it. Easy breezy!
Based on this poster, we know the following about The Rite: 1) Academy-Award winner Anthony Hopkins is in it, and his eyes are really blue; 2) the movie has something to do with religion (hence the cross!); and 3) You can only defeat it when you believe (like “evil”, maybe)? Gee, I haven’t been this excited about a slot-filling religious horror movie since Lost Souls dropped back in 2000.
This is premiering on Lifetime, right?
From child-eating witches to village-burning dragons, fairy tales have always had a foot in the horror genre. That’s why it makes sense that, for every The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia, there are also darker and more adult-oriented stories about magical worlds inhabited by ravenous monsters and cruel villains.
Funnily enough, these sinister tales were precisely the ones that I gravitated towards back when I was a kid, and I was reminded of this while watching Netflix’s recently released I Am Frankelda, Mexico’s first ever feature-length stop-motion animation and one hell of an entertaining parable about the intersection between fiction and reality.
In honor of this special kind of horror-adjacent fairy tale, today I’d like to share this list recommending six Dark Fantasy films that horror fans might enjoy.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be defining Dark Fantasy as fantastical stories that don’t shy away from the more macabre elements that fuel classic fairy tales. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own grim favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
I’m fascinated by bizarre attempts at blockbuster filmmaking – especially when the resulting movies are somehow still fun despite their corporate-mandated origins. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is precisely one of these strangely compelling studio projects, as this surprisingly successful action-thriller boasts a lot of heart (and tongue-in-cheek humor) for a CGI-heavy creature feature.
Directed by Dead Snow’s Tommy Wirkola, Witch Hunters re-frames the classic fairy tale as an origin story for a duo of badass monster-slayers. Of course, it’s the flick’s anachronistic aesthetic and overall visual flair that make it stand out from other action-horror endeavors from around the same time.
5. The Wolf House (2018)
Made in the tradition of faux cursed films in the same vein as Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made, the eerie backstory to 2018’s Chilean animated flick The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo in the original Spanish) already makes it a nightmarish experience before the flick even really begins.
After all, the movie is presented to us as a faux propaganda film produced by the leader of a death cult (heavily inspired by the real life Colonia Dignidad), with this hybrid animated feature using complex movie magic to simulate a single uninterrupted shot as it tells the story of a lazy young girl who runs away from an isolated colony and encounters a creepy old house in the woods.
4. The Brothers Grimm (2005)
Out of all the Monty Python alumni, Terry Gilliam has had the most interesting career outside of the original comedy group. From fascinating canceled projects (such as his scrapped adaptation of Watchmen) to dystopian parodies that feel more relevant by the minute (1985’s Brazil), even his “lesser” films are still intriguing in their own way.
2005’s The Brothers Grimm is one such project, with this peculiar movie attempting to combine the comedian-turned-filmmaker’s unique visual style with a more blockbuster-oriented plot reimagining the titular brothers as con-artists rather than mere writers. The end result isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but it’s still a legitimately fun ride with plenty of memorable monsters and wonderful performances by both the late, great Heath Ledger and Matt Damon.
3. Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010)
2010’s Dante’s Inferno game may have a reputation as something of an unapologetic God of War clone, but I’d argue that the now-obscure game was aesthetically unique enough to deserve a bigger fanbase. However, while the title remains trapped on the seventh console generation, its highly underrated anime adaptation is a lot easier to get a hold of!
Animated by 6 different studios in order to make the 9 circles of hell feel unique from each other, this may not be a completely faithful adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s poem, but it’s still one heck of a great (not to mention gory) time that I’d highly recommend to fans of Netflix’s take on Castlevania.
2. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)
My personal favorite entry in the Underworld franchise, Rise of the Lycans, is a highly ambitious prequel that actually works better if you haven’t had the story spoiled to you by the previous Underworld films.
While the rest of the series features plenty of urban fantasy elements as the movies combine machine guns and modern environments with gothic storytelling, Patrick Tatopoulos’ prequel fully embraces its fantastical origins and tells a classic tale about a doomed romance between a werewolf and a vampire amid a medieval uprising.
And the best part is that we get a lot more Michael Sheen as the fan-favorite Lucian.
1. Solomon Kane (2011)
One of my personal favorite movies on this list, MJ Basset’s criminally underseen adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s other iconic warrior is thoroughly steeped in horror ambience and features plenty of memorable monsters. However, it’s also a classic origin story for a swashbuckling hero that wouldn’t feel out of place in a tabletop RPG.
While I’ve already written about how the film deftly combines both horror and fantasy elements without breaking the bank, I’ll never pass up an opportunity to recommend the bizarre movie where James Purefoy expertly plays a puritan John Wick.
It’s just too bad that we never got the other films in this intended trilogy.
You must be logged in to post a comment.