Ghana Movie Posters

Just stumbled upon these gems (some possibly from the book Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana and Ghanavision) and figured I'd share...

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In the 1980s video cassette technology made it possible for “mobile cinema” operators in Ghana to travel from town to town and village to village creating temporary cinemas. The touring film group would create a theatre by hooking up a TV and VCR onto a portable generator and playing the films for the people to see. In order to promote these showings, artists were hired to paint large posters of the films (usually on used canvas flour sacks). The artists were given the artistic freedom to paint the posters as they desired - often adding elements that weren’t in the actual films, or without even having seen the movies. When the posters were finished they were rolled up and taken on the road (note the heavy damages). The “mobile cinema” began to decline in the mid-nineties due to greater availability of television and video; as a result the painted film posters were substituted for less interesting/artistic posters produced on photocopied paper. (Author: Assemblyman-eph)

Alien (1979; Ridley Scott)
Looks inspired by the American ad art for Alien: Resurrection.

Child's Play (1988; Tom Holland)

Eaten Alive (1980; Umberto Lenzi)

Evil Dead II (1987; Sam Raimi)

The First Power (1990; Robert Resnikoff)

Not sure what entry this is, but clearly influenced by Part III's poster.

Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood (1988; John Carl Buechler)

Hell Serpent: Zuma II (1987; Ben Yalung)

Night of the Demons (1987; Kevin S. Tenney)
May have been used for the 1994 sequel instead, despite title.

Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986; Brian Gibson)

Re-Animator (1985; Stuart Gordon)

The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988; Wes Craven)

Spirits (1990; Fred Olen Ray)

The Hidden (1987; Jack Sholder)

The Kiss (1988; Pen Densham)

The Return of Swamp Thing (1989; Jim Wynorski)

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There are many more where these came from, but they're either for movies too recent to be covered here or films whose titles I'm unfamiliar with. Undoubtedly, films were retitled there, but I haven't been able to match some of the art with the movies. If I can find additional information to help match up the other posters, I'll add them on here.

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Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby (1976) (TV)

...aka: Look What Happened to Rosemary's Baby

...aka: Rosemary's Baby II

Directed by:

Sam O'Steen

I tried my best to put Polanski's 1968 masterpiece in the back of my mind before viewing this long-forgotten follow-up, but even accepting this on its own terms and within its own network TV limitations, it's still a complete failure as both a sequel and a stand alone film. Badly written, badly acted, horribly dated and completely lacking in both suspense and chills, it's no wonder no one's ever bothered resurrecting this unnecessary, embarrassing relic. Eight years after the events in the original, Rosemary Woodhouse (an annoyingly shrill, consistently hysterical Patty Duke) is still living in the same apartment house raising "Adrian" in the company of the same coven of elderly Satanists headed by Roman (Ray Milland) and Minnie (Ruth Gordon) Castevet. She flees with her child, takes refuge in a church during a storm, hops on a bus the next day and heads out west toward Hollywood to try to get some money from her estranged, backstabbing husband Guy (George Maharis). While on a layover in Nevada, Adrian (or as she calls him, Andrew) kills two children who pick on him. Rest stop whore Marjean (Tina Louise) helps them hide, but is possessed and tricks Rosemary onto a hell bus, which conveniently removes her from the rest of the movie.

Years later, a now twenty-something Adrian (Stephen McHattie) is still living with Marjean, who now owns a successful casino. Adrian's an annoying moody rebel who's always in trouble with the cops for speeding in his black sports car and wants to be a rock singer (groan). On his twenty-first birthday, Uncle Roman and Aunt Minnie show up with some cultists and give Adrian some strange concoction to drink. He then jumps up on stage and starts gyrating around like a spandex-clad Jim Morrison with his face painted up like a mime (!) Outside, Adrian's best bud Peter (David Huffman) is killed when Guy picks up a fallen electric wire off the ground and electrocutes him. Adrian collapses and, blamed for the death of his friend, awakens in a hospital for the criminally insane where a doctor named Ellen (Donna Mills) tries to help him overcome his amnesia with hypnosis sessions. The film then seems to turn into a love story (complete with a ridiculous 'bird woman' hallucination cut in during their little hotel romp... don't ask!), which is actually little more than a cheap set-up the predictable twist ending.

It's divided into three segments; "The Book of Rosemary," "The Book of Adrian" and "The Book of Andrew;" getting progressively sillier as it goes along. The subtle creepiness and expertly modulated suspense of the original is completely absent here, the director gets uneven work from usually dependable actors and employs clumsy voice-overs from various characters and screenwriter Anthony Wilson attempts to ape the black humor of the first and fails miserably. Great actors Milland and Gordon, for instance, are given little to do other than sit around and bicker ("Would you shut up!") and during most of the cult scenes background extras annoying chant "Hail Satan... Hail Adrian... Hail Satan" over and over again. Third-billed Broderick Crawford appears in just one scene as a sheriff.

How many sequels to extremely famous horror films can you name that have never been released to either VHS or DVD in their home country? Obviously someone out there would prefer to keep this one buried, and I can't say I blame them. In Europe (the UK I think), it was released on the Arena label during the 1980s, but other than that I'm not aware of any other releases.

★1/2

Strangeness, The (1980)

Directed by:

Melanie Anne Phillips

A young couple are killed after an earthquake unleashes something inside an abandoned, multiple-level mine. Later, rumors circulate around about some gold possibly being located inside, prompting wealthy contractor Myron Hemmings (Rolf Theison) to organize an expedition to see if the mine is worth sinking money into. Writer Dan Flanders (Mark Sawicki), his photographer wife Cindy (Terri Berland), grizzled Aussie spelunker Morgan (Keith Hurt), geologist Angela Platt (Diane Borcyckowski), guide Geoff Calvert (Dan Lunham) and his assistant Tony Ruggles (Chris Huntley) are all on board. The seven descend into the mine and their rope is mysteriously cut, trapping them inside. Unfortunately, the greedy contractor didn't bother to inform anyone at his company about the expedition, so no one knows they're even there to come to the rescue. As they search for a way out, there are mysterious and powerful gusts of wind and a slimy, tentacled creature (which has something to do with an Indian legend) shows up to pick them off one-by-one.

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A very low-budget, very uneven regional production, but one with some merit. The mine setting; a labyrinth of dark catacombs illuminated only by lanterns, helmet lights and flares, creates an effective horror atmosphere that becomes increasingly more claustrophobic as the film goes along. In that regard, and the general idea of people trapped deep underground due to a selfish, foolish member amongst them, the film reminds one of the recent hit THE DESCENT (2005). Also making this worth a look are some good stop-motion special effects (created by Ernest D. Farino and actors Huntley and Sawicki) used to bring the monster to life... Nevermind the fact it essentially looks like a giant, mutant female reproduction organ! Farino also contributed some great opening credits to the film and I was actually taken by surprise at the order in which the characters are picked off. Unfortunately, some other important areas are less successful and keep this from reaching its true potential. With better dialogue, more convincing acting and tighter pacing this would have been a fine sleeper.

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Filmed in 1980 but not released until five years later, it's one of just a handful of 80s horrors directed by a woman, who ironically used the male alias "David Michael Hillman" and also co-wrote, co-produced, did the score and edited. The original American VHS release was through TransWorld Entertainment. Code Red released it on DVD in 2009.

★★

De dødes tjern (1958)

... aka: Lake of the Damned, The

... aka: Lake of the Dead

Directed by:

Kåre Bergstrøm

Norway hasn't produced many horror films over the years. A few cross-over hits, such as Dark Woods (2003), Next Door (2005), Dead Snow (2009), its 2014 sequel Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead and the Cold Prey (2006-2010) series have come out here semi-recently, but before that their genre output was nearly nonexistent. As a matter of fact, a Norwegian horror keyword search over on IMDb only brings back three titles made before 1990. Lake of the Dead (also released as The Lake of the Damned) is one of these. In fact, it's the earliest Norwegian horror film listed and may actually be the very first horror film produced in that country. While fairly well regarded on its home turf, the film isn't very well known here in the States at all, but it really should be. Lake is a very well-made, intelligently-written and stunningly photographed mystery that keeps you guessing and makes unnerving use of its picturesque outdoor locations. One hopes the 2012 DVD release from Sinister Cinema - the first time the film has been available with English subtitles to my knowledge - will finally get the film some much overdue attention.

After a brief prologue, mystery novelist Bernhard Borge (Henki Kolstad), his wife Sonja (Bjørg Engh), critic Gabriel Mørk (André Bjerke, who also wrote the novel this is based on), psychologist Kai Bugge (Erling Lindahl), painter Lillian Werner (Henny Moan) and Lillian's fiance Harald Gran (Georg Richter) all decide to take a train trip across country to visit Lillian's hermit brother Bjørn (Per Lillo-Stenberg) at his secluded woodsy cabin. When they arrive, Bjørn is nowhere to be found. Lillian, who seems to have an extrasensory link to her sibling, feels anxious and senses danger. Local legend has it that a hundred years earlier Tore Gråvik, a peg-legged madman with an incestuous bent, took an axe to his own sister and her lover before drowning himself in a nearby lake. The lake is now rumored to be cursed by Gråvik's spirit. Upon the discovery of Bjørn's diary, it's revealed that Bjørn was either being haunted by Gråvik's ghost or has simply lost his mind.

The characters speculate about what's actually going on and what became of Bjørn; some favoring the rational, others leaning toward the supernatural. As one character reads a passage from Bjørn's diary, another character envisions the events, which are chillingly done with some odd stop-motion work of a bird perched on the rooftop and a faint phantom rising from the lake and chasing Bjorn through the woods back to his cabin. Various complications arise in the story (Lillian is caught sleepwalking, a member of their group is eventually found murdered...), but it's best not to give away too much here because it's as much a story-driven piece as it is a visual one.

Excessive talk might turn off certain viewers, but the dialogue is well-written and the character interactions and relationships are interesting. From a visual standpoint, it's often breathtaking. The sense of complete isolation in the forest is effectively eerily and the lake itself, dotted with lily pads and often shot glimmering in the moonlight, begins to take on an ominous feeling after awhile. In some ways I was reminded of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), which also contrasts the beauty in nature to more sinister goings-on. Unlike Picnic, though, we eventually do get an explanation to what's going on.

Director Bergstrom also made a second horror feature; the elusive anthology Klokker i måneskinn (1964), which has never been released in the U.S.

★★★1/2

Borei kaibyo yashiki (1958)

aka:
Black Cat Mansion

aka:
Mansion of the Ghost Cat, The

Directed by:
Nobuo Nakagawa

Tokyo-based doctor Tetsuichiro Kuzumi (Toshio Kuzumi) decides to move to a small town with his ailing wife Yoriko (Yuriko Ejima), who's suffering from tuberculosis. Eager to get away from the hustle and bustle of city life, and thinking the fresh air and solitude will do his wife some good, Tetsuichiro decides to move into a large mansion owned by Yoriko's family, which has been uninhabited for years and is rumored to be haunted. He opens up his clinic there and begins seeing local patients, but his wife keeps seeing visions of a black cat and an old, white-haired woman lurking around. Their dog is killed and the old woman attempts to strangle Yoriko several times. The doctor and his brother-in-law Kenichi (Hiroaki Kurahashi) go to a priest for help and learn that the home is cursed. The priest then relates a story going back many years to the former occupants of the home.

The period scenes involve samurai Lord Shogen (Keinosuke Wada), who's basically a prick who abuses his power and tries to kill anyone who angers him. A young man named Kokingo (Ryûzaburô Nakamura) is hired to teach the Lord a game called Go but is killed after calling out Shogen for cheating. The Lord later rapes Kokingo's blind mother, Lady Miyagi (Fumiko Miyata), who returns home, curses the entire family and then kills herself. Using the guise of Shogen's elderly mother (Fuji Satsuke), the spirits of those wrongfully killed enact their revenge against the Lord, his son (Arata Shibata) and servent girl Yae (Noriko Kitazawa). The only one spared the wrath is faithful servant Saheji (Rei Ishikawa), who apparently moved on to start his own family. Guess who Yoriko and her brother are descendants of?

Though not nearly as dramatically strong as the director's other supernatural tales, this manages to seperate itself by sandwiching the period-set revenge story in between one set in contemporary Japan. One thing that's not the least bit diminished is Nakagawa's visual eye. There is a lot of great, innovative camerawork on display here, which is very sophisticated for the time. The film opens with one continuous unbroken POV shot of someone with a flashlight walking through dark hospital corridors, finding a corpse on a stretcher, going up some stairs and then closing in our protagonist. There's also an amazing shot that follows a stream of tricking water to darkness, rises up through some brush to show a crow on a tree branch and then dips back down to slowly follow characters through a gate, pushing branches out of the way as it goes. Another visually striking scene involves a montage illustrating Shogen's descent into madness as he's seen furiously swinging his sword around while bold colors flash behind him. Strangely, the contemporary scenes are all shot in black-and-white with a slight blue tint, while the period scenes are done in a muted Eastmancolor.

The presentation of the possessed grandmother is pretty memorable, too. She takes on a cat like appearance (with fangs and pointy ears that spring up from beneath her crazy white hair) and cat like behavior (clawing people, lapping up blood and eating raw fish). How she's able to reel her victims in, so the speak, is exaggerated mimicry influenced by kabuki theater choreography.

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It was adapted from a Sotoo Tachibana novel by Jiro Fujishima and Yoshihiro Ishikawa, who'd later go to write GHOST CAT OF OTAMA POND (which Ishikawa also directed).

★★★

Vampire Hookers (1978)

...aka: Cemetery Girls
...aka: Ladies of the Night
...aka: Night of the Bloodsuckers
...aka: Sensuous Vampires
...aka: Twice Bitten

Directed by:
Cirio H. Santiago

American sailors Tom Buckley (Bruce Fairbairn) and Terry Wayne (Trey Wilson) are looking for a wild time while on leave in Manila. They get drunk, gets into a bar fight, are tricked into eating unborn duck by some locals, encounter some transvestites in a disco club, try to pick up some hookers and almost get mugged. Another sailor, Taylor (Lex Winter), wanders off with one hooker named Cherish (Karen Stride), and doesn't return. As the two men look into his disappearance, Tom is led to a big cemetery and ends up finding a secret stairway leading to an underground crypt where worldly, Shakespear-quoting vampire count Richmond Reed (John Carradine) resides. Richmond uses his three attractive female vampires; Cherish, Suzy (Lenka Novak) and Marcy (Katie Dolan), to lure men there. His tubby, retarded henchman Pavo (Vic Diaz) also wants to become a vampire but hates the taste of blood and has a bad case of flatulence. Meanwhile, Terry tries to locate his buddy.

Embarrassing, juvenile horror comedy derives most of its humor from terrible dubbing, which admittedly is pretty funny at times. The rest is a series of pea-brained gags, fart jokes, awful one-liners ("Coffins are for being laid to rest... Not for being laid."), hammy overacting and a neverending, slow motion scene where Tom beds down with all three hookers at once. That scene provides plenty of nudity by the female stars, the sets in the vampire lair are pretty good and there's a great theme song ("They're vampire hookers... and blood is not all they suck...") over the end credits, but that's really about it.

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Cirio Santiago had a very long career as a producer and director that lasted over fifty years until his death in 2008. He was involved in the productions of well over 100 films (mostly action; including 20 for Roger Corman) and owned and operated his own movie studio (Premiere Productions) in Manila. Screenwriter Howard R. Cohen went on to make the equally unfunny SATURDAY THE 14TH horror parodies. Emmett Alston, who'd go on to make the awful NEW YEAR'S EVIL (1981) and the very fun DEMON WARP (1987), was the production manager.

Many cheap-looking prints of this one are floating around. Your best bet is going with the 2008 BCI Eclipse release. It's a nice quality print and they've paired it with the Paul Naschy film COUNT DRACULA'S GREAT LOVE (1972).

★

House That Would Not Die, The (1970) (TV)

Directed by:
John Llewellyn Moxey

Competent, but very forgettable, made-for-TV haunted house/ possession tale, based on Barabra Michaels' novel Ammie, Come Home. Ruth Bennett (Barbara Stanwyck) and her beloved niece Sara (Kitty Winn) move into a very old country home that belonged to a distant, reclusive relative that Ruth hardly knew. Things look up for both ladies as they quickly find potential romance; Ruth with next-door neighbor Pat McDougal (Richard Egan), a college professor, and Sara with Stan Whitman (Michael Anderson, Jr.), a college student. Pat's sister (Mabel Albertson) gets permission to bring psychic Madame Sylvia (Doreen Lang) over to the home for a seance and soon after several of the characters start behaving strangely. Sara freaks out during the seance and tries to strangle her aunt later that night, but can remember nothing by the next morning. Pat becomes violent and sexually aggressive. A painting falls into the fireplace, sudden gusts of wind open and close doors and a male voice can be heard calling out from the garden...

Ruth and company begin researching the history of the home and eventually uncover a few dark secrets hidden in the family closet. Around two-hundred years earlier during the Revolutionary War, a general and his daughter lived there. The general, a traitor siding with the British during the war, was threatened to be exposed by the girl's soldier boyfriend after the general forbids the two to marry. So what horrible things happened to the three of them? Whatever it is, it's likely located right behind a boarded-up door in the cellar. Sara is periodically possessed by the girl and wants to expose the secret, while Pat is sometimes possessed by the general, who tries to make sure no one finds out what really happened.

The cast is fairly decent, but the storyline is incredibly predictable and the chills just aren't there for the most part, though nostalgic viewers who saw this one as kids seem to look at it through rose colored lenses. One senses Henry Farrell (WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?), who adapted the book, may have had to tone things down a lot for the tube, as there's some hinting toward childhood sexual abuse here. Stanwyck, who also appeared in William Castle's THE NIGHT WALKER (1964) and the TV-movie A TASTE OF EVIL (1971), injects some class into the proceedings for what's it worth. Winn (billed as Katherine Winn) would go on to win the Best Actress prize at Cannes for PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK (1971), play Ellen Burstyn's personal assistant in THE EXORCIST (1973), appear in the 1977 flop follow-up, EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC and then basically threw in the towel on her acting career to raise a family.

Released to VHS by both Worldvision and Guild Home Video, but there's no official DVD release. Aaron Spelling was the producer and it was an ABC "Movie of the Week."

★★