Awesomely Terrible Movie Posters

We love these awesomely terrible movie posters. They’re the work of artists from the West African nation of Ghana, where creating outlandish posters like this blossomed into an art form all its own that peaked during the 1980s and 90s, commonly referred to as the ‘Golden Age of Movie Posters’.

Although the title of each film is probably very familiar, the imagery in each poster might not be. That’s partially because sometimes the artists responsible for creating these posters hadn’t seen the movies themselves. Other times they simple allowed their awesome imaginations to run wild in effort to attract the biggest possible audience. They took impressive liberties with artistic license to add weapons, characters and scenes that didn’t exist in the actual movies. Painted on empty 50kg flour bags, the artists’ only creative restriction was the size of each poster, which was either the side of one bag or two sides stitched together.

Ernie Wolfe, an African art dealer who began noticing these movie posters in the early 1990s, said that the artists often have a very specific idea of the effect they were trying to create. “They are definitely very, very good artists and they paint exactly what they want,” he said. Wolfe admires their work so much that he has written two books on the genre – Extreme Canvas and Extreme Canvas 2. “Having looked at hundreds of them, you become aware of their individual hand, their idiosyncrasies and their brush strokes,” he added. Read the rest of this entry »