ONE GOOD TAG DESERVES ANOTHER

Oh fuck.

In case you were wondering about the axe talent of these humpbacked hillfolk:

The tagline-as-title is a delicacy, and they nailed it here with LEFT FOR DEAD.

It's no mystery why the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) format has legs. Scrap up some inbred mutant retards who'd rather torture beautiful women than have sex with them, and I assure you you'll put pervs in seats, given your gore-game is tight.

The Massacre's campy, 80s-baby brother:

Wes Craven responded to the competition in 1977:

Every once in a while a poster like this can cause me an ineffable sense of guilt. Despite the obvious exploitation of a man with Hypohidrotic Ectodermal Dysplasia, this poster just looks so innocent when compared to 21st century horror.

In the case of this 2006 remake, you've got a total barf-fest on your hands, and there's really no jokes in there to keep your corn-n-twizzler combo down. Actually, I took a girl to this movie on a first date... Yes, my little idiots, you've correctly surmised there was indeed no second date.

ME AND GHOULIO DOWN BY THE SCHOOLYARD

Literally the laziest tagline I've ever seen. I hope you understand that's saying a lot.

A logical solution.

The trailer also flaunts taglines like They get an A in Mayhem and They put the "Animal" back into "House".

Not even the inevitable scene where the Ghoulies crush 200 beers could get a laugh out of me... except for the last 3 seconds: "Nightcap anyone?" I played that like 20 times.

Classic form for a death scene. A+!!

Finding this poster was like excavating for a dinosaur.

A little black magic, a little black leather... and a lot of black humor.

These are actually just pictures of me from last New Year's Eve.

TAGLINE PROPHECY

Where Sanity Ends... And Murder Begins. We're all waiting, Gary.

So tempted to just say "Peep Slater pushin that whip at the end", but I will respect him as Mario Lopez, the actor... Few can recover from a Busey-Bomb like A Crack In The Floor.

AHEAD OF IT'S TIME

Not even a sequel. I do like The Doctor Blew It as a tagline though.

There's actually an interesting story here (not involving double-domed antics):

Before starring in 'The Thing with Two Heads' Roosevelt "Rosey" Grier was a professional football player for the Los Angeles Rams. After his football career ended he was a bodyguard for Senator Robert F. Kennedy during his 1968 presidential run. He was guarding the senator's wife Ethel when the senator was assassinated. Grier grabbed the gun and broke Sirhan Sirhan's arm.

Bobby riding with his boys in '68. Rosey Grier is second from the right.

Also, note the ratings on those posters. One says "GP", the other says "PG". This is because The Incredible 2 Headed Transplant was released in 1971, before the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had decided to address the "General Audience" notion of GP. The Thing With Two Heads was released in 1972, after the MPAA had replaced the GP rating with PG in an attempt to clarify a film's content: Parental Guidance Suggested—Some material may not be suitable for pre-teenagers.

But then, in 1984, moms everywhere threw down their neon fanny-packs containing their kids' halftime oranges and teamed up with batshit wielders of the cross to go ham on Steven Spielberg, who had released two questionably PG films that year: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Gremlins. I think the PG panthers were just ready to pounce on Steven after he slipped this shit into Raiders Of The Lost Ark:

But then, Steven calmly suggested that the MPAA adopt a PG-13 rating, and everyone was happy... except 12-year-olds, who refused to eat their mothers' halftime oranges in protest.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN LAST ('AVE A CIGAR)

You can kind of hear the kid saying "What about, 'A Whole New World Awaits'?" ... "What, you mean like... Aladdin?" ... "Oh yeah."

I like this poster for a few reasons. One of them is not that is says "From The Director of 'Titanic'" (the trailers just remind you he made Terminator 1 & 2). But I've finally decided to manually inhibit my anti-hype feedback loop on Avatar. The image above is part of the key. What they're saying here is "Listen, this isn't, like, that Beowulf 3-D deal... this is that new shit." The beauty of course is in the eye of the blue beholder, an eye that shows a true-to-life reflection of her environment. James Cameron has marked this aspect of the art direction as one of the "revolutionary" components to the film (another assumedly being a 3-D experience that actually pays off in spades).
And it's not that I'm on board for a computer animated revolution; Anyone who knows me knows I despise the stultifying effect CGI invariably has on me -- I just like to see real shit blown up! But I'm an idiot, and I just can't help respecting this kind of balls-to-the-wall, big-budget aplomb. It would seem that Jimmy likes to sit at increasingly high-stakes winner tables. And why not? James Cameron is like the Johnny Chan of Hollywood high-rollers.

This poster holds the other, related part of the key to my hype-encrusted heart: It's not about humans and green screens/smoke and mirrors anymore... it's about integration. At least I think that's what they're saying. They've rather elegantly shown you the transformation element of the storyline, while calmly heralding a new age of animation.

Jesus I should be paid for this.

YOU JUST DON'T SEE GALL LIKE THIS ANYMORE

That's probably the best pun of my idiot career, so I'll make this post light. Besides, what can you say other than "Roll tape".

It's No Act. Mmmmm... I question you. I believe this must be about Act VII in the Comedy of Errors that is your life, Steven. "These are the 'Jects, you know... these are the Projects"... Bad Lieutenant.

Did you catch Lawman's own tagline? "It's not a job... It's an adventure!" No Steve, it's a fucking job, and it's exactly that mentality that makes people like me despise the police.

Woah... I'm losing it.

LEFTOVERS

The tagline goes a long way in describing exactly what's going on with this movie. I'll only explain that the Blood Freak is originally a "beefy, nomadic", God-fearing biker dude, who finds himself seduced by pot and boobs and, in conjunction with some chemically-spiked turkey fed to him by his poultry farm employers, this turns him into a turkey-headed killer who can only survive by murking junkies and sucking their skag-ridden blood. This film is said to have been "edited by Helen Keller".

ONLY THE BLOOD OF DRUG ADDICTS CAN SATISFY THE THIRST OF THE BLOOD FREAK MONSTER!

This is actually cover art for an album by the band Blood Freak. Needless to say, these guys like to go fucking ham on some death-core metal. Their singer has one of the greatest doom-gurgles I've ever heard, featured fully on "Kill Kill Kill".

50 WAYS TO LEAVE YOUR TAGLINE

IT'S OUR 50th POST!

Admittedly not the most inspired theme for a post, but hey, we're 50: it's time for brainfarts and tapioca.

This one doesn't have a tagline, but, we get the idea. Anyone want to offer their own? I was thinking something like: Ever tried to motor-boat some 36 Z's?

Alright 50, I'll admit you've totally destroyed your proper share of careers. But what's going on here? Is that even New York? Oh wait, I get it. That's an un-Photoshopped picture of modern-day Detroit.

So you have to choose between holding on to your baby, or holding onto your Desert Eagle... Looks like you figured out an ingenious compromise.

Imagine having to win over the girl of your dreams... Every friggin' day. I like this tagline because it says everything you need to know about Happy Madison Productions. Also, you can actually hear Adam Sandler saying "friggin" in one of his two Adam Sandler voices. 

In light of recent events, namely the experience of finding with surreal ease the clip shown above, I've decided to create an altar, a Cyber-Shrine, to the Almighty Omnipotent Internet, which I will pray to exactly 5 times a day, while facing Google Headquarters, also known as the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California.

TRANSMORPHANS and the OLIVER TWIST ENDING

On Thanksgiving, I had the pleasure of catching this "cult sleeper" with Archduke and Dan the Commie. I was amused to hear Orphan invited a public backlash from adoption advocates:

"We are concerned that in addition to its intended entertainment value, this film will have the unintended effect of skewing public opinion against children awaiting families both in the United States and abroad," said a letter to Warner Bros. CEO Barry Meyer from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute.

Warner Bros. may or may not have  added a pro-adoption message at the end of the film when it came out on DVD... That was at least the bone they originally threw to the orphan loving coterie.  When we On-Demanded it, there certainly wasn't an "ADOPT NOW" in the credits.

But what's really dope about this movie is the character Max, who is the biological, deaf daughter of our protagonist parents. As you can imagine, there's a lot of interesting possibilities for manipulation and suspense when you have to communicate in sign.

When a kid's this cute, you're gonna barf if she gets hurt. When the kid's deaf, you're ready to take a bullet to the brain for that mute little tyke. So Orphan didn't make me want to adopt, but it did encourage me to have a surrogate child by the mother of Max. I'LL PAY ANYTHING!!!!

Videogum.com was offended not only by Orphan's Photoshop fuck-up of a poster (which really does make a good movie look cheap and trite), but also by the dud taglines. They responded with this:

I think Girls Are Made From Sugar And Evil might be the only winner here, but the idea's right. And look what made an appearance! From our second post, the worst tagline ever:

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL!

Eli Roth's trailer for Thanksgiving was sublimely thouroughbred, serving a potent slew of tasty taglines like, This year there will be no leftovers. These posters were made to solidify the image of Roth's Thanksgiving as a lost Grindhouse classic of the holiday-slasher breed.

Eli has hinted at turning this into a full-length feature. But would that be self-defeating?

CAN'T STOP... WON'T STOP

My dad is a tagline toreador. In response to the announcement that he was victor in our "Make Your Own" contest, he offered an alternate for Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. And so, this Thanksgiving I give thanks to my prolific patriarch in the form of this Award Certificate, featuring his new tagline:

And I might as well post my own tagline for Harley now:

One burns leaf... One burns rubber... And they'll both burn in hell.

EAT LEAD, FROGGIES!!!

The guy who ad-libbed that famous line (which should have made it's way onto a poster at some point) is "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, the World Wrestling Federation legend. Roddy left the WWF at his peak in 1988 to parlay his popularity into a Hollywood career. Don't ask me why They Live was a box office bomb, and The Scorpion King solidified Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's position in Tinseltown... that's just the nature of The Ring.

Roddy starred in two films the year he left wrestling. One of them was this:

Those frog costumes are incredible.

But, by 1992, Roddy was back in the Royal Rumble to fight for the big belt. Watch his expert beef-libbing here:

And there will probably always be a place for Roddy in the world of Wrestling. His website tells me that he hosted WWE RAW at the Garden just last week. After the premiere of Darren Aronofsky's recent stunner The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke said he only felt like they had succeeded the moment he saw Rowdy Roddy Piper in tears after the film.

PARTY'S OVER!

Some things won't stay down... even after they die.

I hope everyone gets to eat something they love this Thanksgiving.

Despite the fact that a priest does indeed rip every auxilliary body part from one man's torso before being impaled by a gravestone, this clip does no justice to the true extent of gore explored by Peter Jackson in this film (Yes that Peter Jackson, idiots).

Now, I know I reminisce a lot on this blog, but first viewings of shocking visual events are far more significant to me than "Straight-'S' for Satisfactory" report cards of yore. I remember my brother was working on some kind of montage-commentary on "Violence" for a film class in high school... which of course meant gathering your boys together to rent some really gory shit-- and by extension, letting your little brother see some really gory shit. Selected scenes for presumed "discussion" included the now infamous "Marvin" sequence from Pulp Fiction, perhaps a clip from Robocop, but most surely in attendance was this bit of lawn-mower mayhem from Dead Alive:

The original title Dead Alive clearly did not fly with European distribution, where I suppose Braindead was a safer bet... In any case Spain came through with a tagline that was quite to the point: Tu madre se ha comido a mi perro = Your mom ate my dog

Technical Sidenote: For anyone who's ever wondered what "MIDI" means, all of the music you hear in Dead Alive is MIDI, meaning it was composed and recorded using computer software, no real instruments.

COMIN' STRAIGHT FROM THE UNDERGROUND

Hard to see there, but the great Bruce Campbell is totally in Maniac Cop 1 & 2 -- as the hero though, not the anchovy-pizza-faced killer. Actually, this dude plays the Maniac Cop: 

Crow T. Robot of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew once remarked: "My God, he's a catcher's mitt with eyes!"

Glad to see you guys wouldn't quit a winner.  

Samurai Cop boasts some YouTube clips that are just too good to be true, capturing that perfect, "one-take only" feel of one-dollar Grindhouse beauty. And look who's back! Robert Z'Dar was clearly on a roll by 1989.