Bizarre Movie Posters From Africa That Are So Bad, They’re Good | Hacker News Reader

Bizarre Movie Posters From Africa That Are So Bad, They’re Good

dannydutch.com

50 pointsthunderbong24 comments

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This is just blogspam with clickbait title of things like:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/gh...

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190313-incredible-ghan...

https://twitter.com/ATRightMovies/status/1658839419112022016

https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/african-gaze-hollywood-bo...

Everything except real life is blogspam along some axis.

TFA goes straight to the point while the articles you linked are either paywalled or contain no images at all.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The text is lifted from the first article, the images (which are very much there) from the rest, with no attribution. The title is just made-up clickbait. Blogspam is regularly moderated off HN.

And now someone flagged it. Good job killing a perfectly fine discussion.

all HN links must have a minimum of 2 cookie banners and a pay wall

Half of these are just good, not 'so bad they're good'. The good ones convey the meaning of the film while being just odd enough to stick in your head. I imagine they'd be great for marketing.

I see several references to "video clubs" on the posters. Which makes me think that these weren't official movies shown in cinemas, but VHS copies shown in "video clubs". There was something similar in pre-1989 Romania - some people gathering around a large-ish TV set in some kind of small-ish venue to watch a badly dubbed pirated copy of a popular Hollywood movie which wasn't shown in cinemas. In the eighties, most new Western films weren't officially available in Romania, and certainly not action or horror movies.

Chuck Norris vs Communism is an excellent doco about that era https://youtu.be/znp1dNaPp3k?si=g3Ykl6n0LslXcdcy

Cindy Crawford looks odd: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/d5cc5f_9477f35409954b6386...

This one had me in tears for a good 10 mins. I can't tell if it deliberately "rough" or genuinely the artists skill level.

The latter.

I think I’ve seen that one before. In my worst nightmares…

The other persons depicted look odd too, but at least they still look like their original gender...

Gender is fluid, don't ya know?

They are not bad at all. Most of them are extremely well done.

They demand your attention, are easy to read and interpret, and are interesting expressions of artistic individuality.

I would strongly prefer those to the movie posters we have in our country in this day and age. But of course, that would be much too expensive and there is not even audience to appreciate that type of marketing.

I'd love to get my hands on some of these to hang in my apartment. People would be so confused.

Terminator 1 and Robin Hood are good good, not bad good

Suprisingly, Arnie looks pretty good in the posters for Terminator, Commando and Conan. The rest bear no resemblance to the originals.

Anyone knows of a theposterdb.com feed that has posters in this style+ I would love to use them for my collection

Cindy Crawford and Terminator 2's poster reminded me of early Stable Diffusion outputs.

I like them :)

I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just use the original posters. These are still in English so it’s not a translation thing. Are there licensing issues of the US artwork?

Whatever it was, I'm pretty sure it wasn't licensing issues - I guess the movies (or VHS tapes, going by the references to "video clubs" on some of the posters) themselves were pirated, so they wouldn't have stopped at the posters. It's probably more lack of access to the original posters, or lack of equipment to reproduce them (except via painting)?

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