What’s wrong with this poster? If you said “everything,” you’re right!

December 31, 2008 on 3:44 am | In Comics, Movies, Weak Attempt, advertising, ebay | No Comments

Roger Corman is a filmmaker. He’s made more films than most directors, with his patented “work with no budget, film in three days, get the film out in a week, take in nothing but profit” attitude. The imdb lists over 380 films with his name in the production credits. The majority of his films, such as “Fast Charlie…the Moonbeam Rider” and “Night of the Cobra Woman” are quickly forgotten, but comic fans will know him immediately for butchering the Fantastic Four franchise, way before Jessica Alba could get to it.

His version of the FF movie wasn’t even straight to video, it was straight to flea market bargain bin. Made for less money than the big budget Fantastic Four film spent on catering for a week, the film was quickly buried with no theatrical run. However, posters were released.

One is now being sold on eBay, so if you want a piece of forgotten movie history, place your bids now.

There is a LOT wrong with this poster. Corman’s slapdash approach to filmmaking applies to his approach to designing posters as well. First off, the image quality, especially around the logo, really is that bad. Like, community-college-logo-for-credit bad. Plus, there’s no need to repeat the word “four”, if you have a giant “4″ in the background. The FF comic book got away with just using the word “four” and the new releases just go with the numeral. Roger Corman has, in essence, given us the Fantastic Four Four.

The tagline is the real offender here. “Part muscle, part elastic, part fire, part invisible. Together, it’s clobberin’ time!” Let’s diagram that sentence a little. “Muscle” and “fire” are both nouns. “Invisible” is an adjective. “Elastic” can be both an noun and an adjective, it’s unclear which it’s supposed to me. You can’t really put all of them together in one sentence. It just doesn’t work.

I guess the first three work, if you’re talking about parts of a whole. But the invisible thing? No, not at all. One of these things is not like the other, and it’s “part invisible.”

Bad, bad movie poster.