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I probably shouldn’t tell you about this online cult movie poster gallery, but I’m going to anyway
09.15.2016
05:41 pm
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Candy’ (USA/Italy, 1968) by Averardo Ciriello
 
Collecting movie posters can be a rewarding hobby—and even a lucrative one, too, if you view your collection as an investment that you’d be willing to sell later in life, after it has appreciated in value.

That’s what I try to tell my wife all the time! She’s never amused and resists my “charming rogue”/“Honey, can I spend some money?” puppydog act with a stone-faced sternness that makes me dribble away, chastened every time I run into her office with my laptop asking her to “Hey, look at this!” Because what she knows—and you don’t know—is that I really, really, really like buying movie posters. I have a lot of them. A lot a lot of them. Not hundreds upon hundreds, but certainly several dozens upon dozens of them. And the sad fact is, even with some of the beauties that I’ve amassed over the years, I have framed exactly one of them (a nice Magic Christian one-sheet that hangs in my office) while the rest have remained rolled and folded in my closet, safe, but unseen and under-appreciated.

See that nifty Italian 2-panel poster for Candy painted by artist Averardo Ciriello, above? I stumbled across that looking for something else a few days ago. And now it’s mine. I just didn’t tell my wife that I bought it. She’s probably finding out about it the same way you are. (I knew that if I asked, that she’d only say no. So I didn’t ask her!)

I got it via a Los Angeles-based high end poster gallery known as the Westgate Gallery. You can find their online presence at Westgategallery.com.

After the Candy poster was safely MINE ALL MINE I wrestled with the idea of sharing the Westgate Gallery and its wonderful wares with our readers. This is the kind of thing where you don’t want to tell too many people about it and spoil it for yourself. Yes it’s that good. Westgate Gallery—named after the Westgate Cinema, a porno theater in Bangor, Maine known to the proprietor during his obviously wayward childhood—is probably the single best-curated—and not at all picked over—high end movie poster gallery to open in recent years. Launched a bit over a year ago, the Westgate Gallery specializes in posters of Horror, Italian Giallo films, 70s and 80s “Golden Age of XXX,” classic cult films and basically exploitation films of any genre.

Westgate Gallery‘s poster concierge Christian McLaughlin, a novelist and TV/movie writer and producer based in Los Angeles, is obviously a total maven of mavens when it comes to this sort of thing. You couldn’t even begin to stock a store like this if you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for in the first place, and if you want a quick (not to mention rather visceral) idea of his level of expertise—and what a great eye he’s got—then take a gander at his world-beating selection of Giallo posters. He’s what I call a “sophisticate.”

Right now the Westgate Gallery’s flash sale has been extended through January 9th. Every item in stock is 40% off the (already reasonable) list price with the discount code “BF40” at checkout (that’s almost half off if you are bad at math.)

The selection below is only a very tiny sliver of what’s for sale at Westgategallery.com. In fact, 99% of these are culled solely from the horror and retro porn posters sections simply because I didn’t want to hip any of you motherfuckers to THE ONES THAT I WANT in the cult classics and Giallo sections.


Jean Rollin’s ‘Shiver of the Vampire’ (France, 1971)
 

Grave of the Vampire’ aka ‘Seed of Terror’  (USA, 1972)
 

The Pit’ aka ‘Teddy’ (Canada, 1981)
 
Many more macabre and sexy exploitation posters from the Westgate Gallery after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.15.2016
05:41 pm
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Sleaze up your crib (almost free) with this treasure trove of worldwide classic B-movie poster art
06.24.2016
09:42 am
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I think it’s fair to say that most of the staff here at Dangerous Minds has an appreciation for lurid B-movie poster art. It’s a topic we enjoy posting about from time to time. I’m a huge fan, especially of ‘60s-‘80s exploitation and horror posters. Over the years I’ve amassed a decent collection of original one-sheets, picking them up cheap here and there at flea markets and junk shops. Unfortunately eBay and the collector’s market has really made it difficult to find classic exploitation paper in the wild. Nowadays if you’re looking for, say, an original Ilsa, She Wold of the SS poster, you can expect to pay no less than two hundred bucks online. It’s a hobby that can get expensive quickly.

If you’re not stuck on the notion of owning an original, and have access to a decent printer, you can decorate your dwelling from floor to ceiling with classic horror, erotic, grindhouse action, and kung-fu poster images taken from one sheets, half sheets, daybills, locandinas, and quads from all over the world.

I recently discovered a site called Wrong Side of the Art, which apparently has been around for years, yet under my radar. This site is a treasure trove of cult and trash poster images with an emphasis on high-resolution—meaning that if you have a good printer you can have rather nice prints of hundreds of classic poster titles. Of particular interest are the foreign posters… those are always the coolest.

My printer will go up to 13"x19”, so I was able to print off a few decent-sized prints before my toner went bye-bye. I’m not sure how the image quality maintains on larger prints, but if you have access to a poster printer, give it a shot and let us know how it works out. I was able to print these just now:
 

They look especially impressive in person
 
Wrong Side of the Art is one of those sites that makes me truly appreciate the Internet. There’s so much cool, well-curated stuff there that you can easily get lost for hours scrolling through classic Italian Giallo, Japanese Pinku, and good ol’ American women-in-prison prints. There are hundreds of titles and the quality is the best I’ve seen online. The amount of work that’s gone into maintaining this site for the benefit of B-movie fans is apparent and should be applauded. Thank you Wrong Side of the Art!

Here’s a brief gallery of posters you can find high-res prints of. The site has hundreds more. Go there now. It’s seriously one of the best things on the Internet.
 

 

 

 
Many more after the jump…

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Posted by Christopher Bickel
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06.24.2016
09:42 am
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Wild Sex! Gore! Monsters! It’s the twisted, sick and nasty ‘Blood Island Trilogy’!
10.06.2014
11:20 am
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dsfjkah
 
There I was, 1971, ten years old, bored, and flipping through the newspaper when BAM! It hit me like a ton of bricks! The exact thing my ten-year-old eyes dreamed of seeing: A huge half-page ad with a giant grotesque monstrosity ripping its own head off printed in blood red ink! Dripping red letters screamed BEAST OF BLOOD! I was an avid monster magazine reader then (and now) and even made a slew of my own monster mags. This ad was so very important to me that part of it was used as the entire back cover of “Monster Journal” a one-off handmade on loose leaf paper by a couple of ten year olds (one of them being me, natch). The monster ripping his own head off was the centerfold.

Luckily I somehow still have it. Here’s the front cover, centerfold and back cover:
 
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Having misbehaved, I was punished the whole week this movie played in our neighborhood theater and I never got to see it, cementing it even deeper into my psyche, as it became my own demented folklore in my personal history. That I had to wait at least fifteen years—and for VCRs to be invented—to see it may be hard for young people to grasp in these days of consumer enlightenment, but such was our world back then, and believe me, the rewards were truly that much more rewarding when it took you that long to find something.

Not so strangely enough, this is exactly what these now 54-year-old eyes still dream of seeing. I have been buying a lot of DVD’s of late and was missing one of the “Blood Island” films so I bought a box set that came out called The Blood Island Vacation on Amazon. The so-called “Blood Island trilogy” has quite a convoluted past. Even the box set has four films in it. There are at least three or four other films that also fit into this trilogy.

The Blood Island saga begins in 1959 with Terror is a Man (later retitled Blood Creature, of course).  It borrows its basic plot from The Island of Dr. Moreau—an obsessed scientist on a secluded island experiments with changing animals into humans. But the film is anything but a cheap rip-off. Terror is a Man is surprisingly intelligent, stylish and suspenseful, and from the same creators/directors/producers as the “Blood Island” trilogy: Eddie Romero, Gerardo De Leon and Kane Lynn. But let’s deal with the three main films to start with.
 
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Brides of Blood (1968) begins the way all of the “Blood Island” films do, with our hero John Ashley (long time Hollywood B movie favorite starting out in fifties monster and juvenile delinquent films, graduating to sixties beach party films, doing quite a lot of weirdo flicks in the Philippines in the seventies, and then winding up producing TV shows like The A-Team, etc.), some hot chick with a specific reason for going to the island, some natives and the ships captain all sailing out on a steam ship to the dreaded island. This first film co-starred the ample real life stripper/actress Beverly Hills and 1930’s-1950’s B movie star Kent Taylor as her scientist husband (Kent Taylor was apparently the inspiration for the name of Superman’s alter ego Clark Kent).

They arrive on Blood Island and are met with the usual hostile/fearful islanders. Something weird is going on. Why are these people here? Everyone has their own concept of the monster in this film but to me it looks like a big burnt deflated Michelin Man with fangs and ummm… lipstick?
 
tuktck
 
The big gimmick for Brides of Blood was the wedding ring give-away. Theater managers were encouraged to order hundreds of plastic wedding and engagement rings to give to every unmarried female in the audience.  Hemisphere Pictures even made a special trailer to advertise the rings. I actually have a set of them that were still in the press book for the film that I bought many moons ago. The marketing and advertising for these films is amazing. Wild trailers, including deranged narration from demented doom comedian Brother Theodore on the Mad Doctor of Blood Island trailer (see below), gorgeous posters done by world-class artists (paperback book cover artist icon Charles Copeland on Mad Doctor of Blood Island and Beast of Blood, comic artist Gray Morrow on Brain of Blood) etc.
 
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You can read a great and funny review of Brides of Blood from BadMovies.org here. The whole film can be watched for free on Hulu here.
 

 
More ‘Blood Island’ after the jump…

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Posted by Howie Pyro
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10.06.2014
11:20 am
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‘Acid, Delirium Of The Senses’: Sixties Italian LSD exploitation at its finest!
05.08.2014
06:05 pm
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Part psuedo-documentary about the Italian counterculture and drug scene (Dr. Humphry Osmond appears as himself) and part straight up LSD exploitation film, Acid Delirio Dei Sensi (“Acid, Delirium Of The Senses”) is an obscure Italian cult movie directed by Giuseppe Maria Scotese. The plot involves some free-livin’, free-lovin’ hippies who get mixed up with the Mafia.
 

 
Acid Delirio Dei Sensi is one of those films best known for its poster art—some examples here—which is highly collectible and molto expensive. The little-seen film itself, however is surprisingly decent.
 

 

 
If you click on subtitles, an English translation will appear. Buy Acid Delirio Dei Sensi on DVD at ModCinema.
 

 
Thank you, Daniel Gibson!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.08.2014
06:05 pm
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Forget ‘Reefer Madness,’ 1938’s ‘Sex Madness’ is your new favorite moral panic film
02.13.2014
11:48 am
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movie poster
 
Premarital sex! Lesbians! Syphilis! These are the the threats of Sex Madness, the most unintentionally hilarious moral panic film I have ever seen! And I watched Reefer Madness in a fit of herbal-induced giggles, if you catch my meaning, if you get my drift…

The plot is charmingly anachronistic, (if you can forget all the shame, damnation, and sometimes prosecution that has historically befallen less-than-respectable sexual practices). Paul Lorenz, our resident protagonist and “concerned citizen” fears the growing threat of “social diseases”—perhaps my favorite euphemism of all time. Meanwhile, additional plots serve to support his wholesome concerns. A New York burlesque show sets the stage for the aforementioned debauchery.

Most compellingly though, is the storyline of Millicent Hamilton, a good girl from a small-town who came to New York after winning a beauty contest. Poor Millie caught syphilis on the “casting couch,” and hopes to be cured by the time she returns to her sweetheart, Wendell. “Wendell”—now that’s the sort of name you can take home to mother.

Though it’s tempting to reduce the fervor of Sex Madness to puritanical pearl-clutching, in 1938, the US was still battling a syphilis epidemic that physically and mentally ravaged the populous. As with most STD outbreaks, a fair amount of shame, naivety, and pseudo-science contributed to the spread of the disease. Yes, Sex Madness is mostly prudish scare tactics and moral condemnation, but it also emphasizes that syphilis can be cured with legitimate treatments, warning the audience of the quackery that pervaded the time.

Of course, making a movie on these scandalous subjects risked censure at least, prosecution at worst, since the Motion Picture Production Code quite plainly forbade such filth on celluloid. Even the word “sex” could be grounds for action! Attempting to skirt potential repercussions, the film was released multiple times under different names, including such titillating titles as Human Wreckage, They Must Be Told, and Trial Marriage. It’s also possible that it was released multiple times to trick audiences into seeing it more than once—and with such prurient titles, wouldn’t you?
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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02.13.2014
11:48 am
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Celebrate Thanksgiving with a John Waters double-bill: ‘Mondo Trasho’ & ‘Multiple Maniacs’

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Happy turkey day my American chums!

I have to admit, as a Mick living in Limeyland, I don’t fully understand what Thanksgiving is all about. All I know is that it’s as American as apple pie, as the Detroit Lions or the Pittsburgh Steelers, as right-wing Christian nut jobs or cheapo exploitation cinema starring 300lb drag queens.

So on this turkey day, come worship at the altar of the Pope of Trash. Because nothing strikes me as being more American than the work of cult auteur John Waters. What’s more fitting to watch on Thanksgiving than two of his very early, very cheap shocksploitation classics?

Sure, these films may represent a way of living and a segment of the US population that America is not too comfortable sharing with the rest of the world (see also: Honey Boo Boo Child) but it’s an integral part of America nonetheless, and worthy of as much celebration as turkeys or pancakes with bacon with maple syrup (I’ve tried that one, I wasn’t impressed.)

So here’s an early-John Waters double bill to sink your teeth into, starting with 1969’s silent Mondo Trasho, (it’s got a great soundtrack though) and followed up by 1970’s ever-so-slightly higher budget Multiple Maniacs (it’s got sound!)

Even now, over forty years on, these films have the power to shock. Mondo Trasho kicks off with a live chicken being killed (kind of of fitting for Thanksgiving?) and Multiple Maniacs climaxes with Divine being raped by a giant lobster. In between you will find all kinds of depravity, though looking back it’s funny how innocent all this depravity seemed. There’s no real rage or unhappy-ever-after bleakness on display, everyone involved always seemed to be having too much fun!

Some people would say these films are hard to watch, and you know, they might be right. That doesn’t mean the films are not worth watching. In fact, some other people would say that John Waters’ films are so good that they are all worth watching in row, back to back, non-stop for 24 hours. Who would be crazy enough to attempt such a thing?!

Mondo Trasho, 1969
 

 
Multiple Maniacs, 1970
 

 
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! xx

 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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11.22.2012
09:00 am
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‘K-11’: the most brutal cell block of all?
07.05.2012
09:15 pm
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image
 
K-11 is a new film directed by Jules (mother of Kristen) Stewart, about a prison complex in LA for homosexuals and transgender inmates. It looks brutal, exploitative, and I can’t wait to see it.

The trailer is pretty self-explanatory: a record producer ends up in jail, charged with killing a cop, after he blacks out. The prison is the titular K-11, and there he must navigate a murky world of mixed genders and shifting loyalties in order to survive. (Hmm, maybe I should go into b-movie copy writing?)

Yeah, it sounds corny, but it looks pretty well shot and the cast is decent (though some actual trans actors wouldn’t have gone amiss, and I would love to have seen Kristen Stewart in this, as was originally cast - perhaps she was slated to play Mousey, the prison’s tough bitch queen?) But you know what really surprises me about this? For a subject that looms so large in the American subconscious, it’s surprising that there haven’t been more films about homosexuality in jail.

Even HBO’s mighty Oz was disappointing in that respect (if pretty much perfect in any other.) Sure, two of the main male characters fell in love (or did they?) but the show failed to explore the prison’s gay subculture, in the way it did the Nazis, Nation of Islam, Latinos, etc. Gay characters were only shown flitting away campy in the background, or as facilitators for other characters’ story lines.

K-11 is hardly going to be perfect, but for films about gay life behind bars, it’s a start:
 

 
Pardon my ignorance, but are US prisons really segregated by sexual orientation and transgender identity?

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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07.05.2012
09:15 pm
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Everything is Perfect Until the Music Stops: ‘Disco Fever,’ 1978

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While looking up a suitable image for last night’s post on disco by Simon Frith, I came across a film called Disco Fever, a disco-exploitation oddity from the same year as the article, 1978.

As a fan of both disco music and cult cinema I was surprised to never have heard of this, and now I’m wondering if any of our readers have seen it? In case your memory needs jogging, it stars Casey Kasem and some dude called Fabian, and a lot of the action seems to revolve around a discotheque which is onboard a jumbo jet. Here’s the original trailer for further investigation (this film may just be so bad it’s good, or it may just be so bad): 
 

 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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02.29.2012
12:37 pm
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Grindhouse, Rocksteady & Andean Women Wrestlers: Oakland Underground Film Fest opens this week

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The crew that hooked up the Bay Area premiere of the fantastic blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite returns to put on another wildly diverse Oakland Underground Film Festival for 2010. Screenings run from Sept. 23 through Sept. 26 at the Grand Lake Theater on 3200 Grand Ave. and the Linden Street Brewery on 95 Linden St. Check the Oakland UFF site for details.

The Fest features indie and DIY film, video, and projection-art based in the O, with special emphasis on local filmmakers, social justice, urban life, the environment and non-traditional filmmaking. Films on tap in the 2010 fest include Elijah Drenner’s survey of exploitation film American Grindhouse and Stascha Bader’s Jamaican music doc Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae.

One of the intriguing docs in this year’s lineup is Betty M. Park’s Mamachas Del Ring. It depicts the pressures of hustling in Bolivia’s lucha libre circuit on indigenous champion female wrestler Carmen Rosa and her crew of petticoat-and-bowler-hat-bedecked maulers.
 

 
After the jump: trailers for Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae and American Grindhouse
 

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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09.20.2010
10:20 am
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