Be Kind, Rewind

Yog is, plain and simple, a Kaiju film. It doesn't pretend to be anything else, there's nothing odd about it, it's very straight forward. But that doesn't mean its box art is exempt from being laughed at because WOW does this thing look like crap. Yet another installment in the "We let our child draw this" series, this cover art for Yog is downright awful. Actually titled "Space Amoeba", and only retitled for the American release in 1971, Yog might be one of the few movies I've covered with no decent title whatsoever. I mean, "Space Amoeba" is just as generic as "Yog, Monster From Space", and the fact that they tried to title the film after one singular character when it's full of kick-ass Kaiju creatures really tells you how very little the American film industry knew of foreign film at the time. The film is somewhat notable, however, for it being the final film with special effects work done by Toho special effects studi...

It feels good to go back to your roots, the place you came from, like with this blog and how it started with just god awful horror movies. And nothing says "god awful horror movie" than a terribly drawn cover and puke green box coloration.  Demon Queen is a movie of such little notariety that Letterboxd has a single sentence for its synopsis. That's what you call a good time. From the screenshots on the back, it's incredibly clear right from the get go that we're dealing with renegade movie makers here. This is clearly not a studio backed project, because, even in 87, when this thing was birthed, with the gruesomeness of horror becoming a mainstream staple of cinema and a somewhat respectable genre finally, studios wouldn't back this sort of thing. Just look at what's there and you'll understand why. It's just a bunch of brutally murdered women, horrors favorite subject to violence, and someone with their face melted off their skull. A pretty cool ...

"So Joel, you wanna go take a fake cryptid photo and try to fool people into thinking it's real?" "Totally dude! Let's go pull a faux Bigfoot, that'd be rad." And thus, the cover for this movie was born. And boy is there a lot to love about this, in a really genuine way. It's still bad , don't get me wrong, but it's the enjoyable sort of bad rather than the anger inducing sort of bad. Let's pick this one apart piece by piece, shall we? We'll start with the cover, which looks like a bad attempt at fooling some local yokels that their livestock is in danger thanks to the sudden appearance of a swamp beast of some sort, just so you can weasel them out of their land and then build a mini-mall where their farms once stood, because, ya know, you're a villainous real estate agent from an 80s movie.  My personal favorite part of this box, however - and it's a very minor thing - is that they put "science fiction" on the spine...

I'll give this movie on thing...never before have two words melded so well together besides Miami and Horror. I mean, they just go hand in hand, right? But honestly guys, there's a lot in this one to dissect, so strap in. First off, let's just...look at this. Let's just take a moment, and take a very long gander at the artwork on the front of this box. You got your standard hero with a gun, balding bad guy in a suit with a gun, hot scantily clad girl, a boat with another guy with a gun, a helicopter chase and then finally some sort of evil alien creature glaring over them all. There's a LOT going on here. That isn't to say it's bad. It's actually pretty sweet, to be honest. It's painted, it's not photos, it's well done, the coloring is good, the layout is good, it's just a lot to take in though. Then you got the classic Miami font, with the "horror" part of the title crumbling, which is a nice touch, and I like the powder blue c...

    Boy do I have a doozy for you guys this time, folks.   This is a movie called, as the gigantic font taking up half the fucking front cover will tell you, "The Alien Dead". Let's just start with the fact that that's a terrible ridiculous title that really doesn't even remotely suggest what the film is about. Are the aliens dead? Are the aliens simply raising the dead? Really incoherent. And while the font itself is pretty alright, it's the collage box underneath it that really nets this cover a spot on the blog. This thing is just....oh man, it looks bad, guys. It looks like something an 8th grader would make in their graphic design class. But, like, back in the mid 2000s, before everyone was a bona fide graphic design artist like today. The unusual thing about this one is how we get the same familiar "no context collage" that we usually get on the back, but this time it's on the front . Subverting expectations, I see. Then on the back, we...

  I don't know about you, but this thing scares me. When I shut my eyes at night, all I see now is Beezbo's face on the black of my inner eyelids. He haunts me everywhere I turn, and there is no escape, no reprieve from the ethereal horror that is goddamned Beezbo the...whatever the living fuck he is. Bear? Space bear? He kinda looks like a bear right? But like a mutant space bear, or like a bear from the Ferangi homeworld. Now, I'd like to be clear here, I always take the time to try and find full box art for you guys. Unfortunately, or in this case perhaps fortunately, I could not track down the back box art of this thing, and maybe that's for the best, because who the hell knows what was on it and if it's even safe to view. I honestly, upon seeing this thing, expected my face to melt like in an Indiana Jones movie. There's not a lot going on visually, exactly, and it's not necessarily horrendous. It's no Invisible Strangler, that's for su...