They Came From the Marquee!

A few slices of 1970s drive-in, nabe and grindhouse craziness — movies I loved and love from my final high school years and all my college years.

They literally don’t make ‘em like this anymore — not the movies, and sure as shooting not the ballyhoo. This was when movie one-sheets really grabbed your eyeballs!

The single most effective one-sheet in this gallery? The Hills Have Eyes poster so arrested and seized my attention when it popped up in the marquee poster frames at the Baker Theater in Dover, NJ (where I was attending the Joe Kubert School) that it immediately prompted me to cross Blackwell Street en route to picking up lunch and stare at that image of Michael Berryman as Pluto the cannibal for, oh, four or five minutes. “What the hell is this?” I wondered, and I was plunking my money down that very night to find out — with a bunch of fellow Kubies in tow. 

Now, that’s a one-sheet poster to die for, folks.

It’s no coincidence that American-International Pictures dominates this selection. They had the greatest showmanship and exploitation chops of any 1970s studio; alas, this was their final decade of existence, eventually succumbing to the economics of juggling blockbuster successes like The Amityville Horror and overpriced clunkers like (choke) Meteor.

These are all pretty self-explanatory, except for the Shaw Brothers classic Black Magic II / Gou Hun Jiang Tou, which was released here by World Northal as Revenge of the Zombies (1976) — and the cheating slip into 1980 with the final poster in today’s gallery. It’s a cheat not only because it was released here in 1981, but also because it’s the Italian promotional art from Anthropophagus, released (cut) stateside as The Grim Reaper and, briefly, under the title The Zombie’s Rage. It was and is a wretched mongrel of a movie, and the promo art gives away the ending of the movie — but still, shit howdy – what a poster!