More Boris

Boris Vallejo is one the artists whose work keeps popping up here, as you may have already noticed. No other artist comes readily to mind that influenced the scene so heavily during the 80's. His work has been frequently used as inspiration, for countless video covers and movie posters, though, not all of them went about it as blandly as in this mash-up and blend.


















Thanks go to Videotopsy for this heineous British VHS cover to one of Amando de Ossori's Blind Dead movies.
Honestly I'm not sure if I'm more annoyed with the bad quality of the reproduction or more amused with how completly pointless and misleading the used illustration is.

New old Boris

Beautiful ad poster, using a Boris drawing to annouce the completion of the Taiwan/US co-production The Phoenix in '79. Accoding to imdb it took til '83 for it to find its way back to the US.


Boris also happens to be the one artist that seems to get copied the most often, with varying results ranging from Soavi's not as accomplished as could be but doubtless charming, stylish nod in La Chiesa:


















to video box art that leaves you wondering about the possible genre:

Could that be cloak & dagger porn?

Boris Vallejo

Welcome to round three of our artists spotlight week, today we have Boris Vallejo to offer.

One of the numerous online galleries of his work: http://hebuss.free.fr/
An old favoured of mine is his take on the Hyborian version of Red Sonja.

Art comparison

Excuse me for opening today’s blogpost with the album cover for Def Leppard’s Retro Active, there’s a point I want to make however. I love this poster art for The Descent, neat idea and a sure attention grabber, but I prefer the Leppard cover for a quite simple reason:
Same as the poster for The Descent it is a sure attention grabber, but where the former dissolves into it’s singular parts that do not hold up to a close view, the Leppard cover begins only to show the true cleverness of it’s execution upon closer observance.

Cabin Fever can be seen as a extension of the point made above, a beautiful design that holds up even at close range instead of revealing itself to be a simple gimmick without real visual depth. However, in this style I do slightly prefer the artwork for Premonition. It has a haunting quality and there’s a admirable elegance to how, with a few simple strokes the artist captured the essence of Sandra Bullock’s looks for this motive.

With a clever stroke of a brush artist Renato Casaro bridges the decades to form a link between Dino DeLaurentiis’ Flash Gordon and the earlier Barbarella. Kindred in spirit, fathered by the same producer.

Nightmares are all the same, as these two posters show, and fear can be a most sensual experience.

American Monster

Off the wall

Over the years a few especially treasured movie posters made it on my wall, the poster to American Monster (‘German’ title for Q-The Winged Serpent) is one of them.

Given,

"It's name is Quetzalcoatl... just call it 'Q'... that's all you have time to say before it tears you apart."

is only in its stupidity a remarkable tagline, and true, the movie will never make it in a Hall of Fame based on its cleverness, but I adore it no less. It’s funny, quirky, shot on a budget … in short, it’s the perfect kind of movie for me.

The poster itself is an obvious play on the famous King Kong end sequence:
A Blond woman captive for the monster? Check!
Aircraft attacking the Monster? Check!
A Landmark building? Check!

On a side note: The girl the Monster holds in it’s claw on the US poster, didn’t make it on the German poster. Mayhap they thought that to be to much for a rated Sixteen movie? *snicker*

Basic Instinkt

Today, advancing my movie poster calendar, I stumbled over the Poster Artwork for Basic Instinct 2 and I had to notice that it’s a formidable piece of work, far outweighing that for the first. I didn’t give the movie any notice due to the fact that I have yet to see a so called erotic-thriller that manages to be either, so I never noticed the poster when the movie came out.

However, I thought it would be nice to talk a little about poster art (how I miss the days when they made posters to sell a movie to the audience, these days there seems to go too little effort in most posters I see).
Too unfortunate that Basic Instinct proved to be such a disappointmnet, that poster would sure have sold the sequel to me.


The most eyecatching feature about that poster was to me that it's obviously heavily inspired by this famous Femme Fatal of artist Boris Vallejo, who is also known for creating some amazing movie artworks himself (the poster for the movie Razorback springs instantly to mind, or the posters to the Deathstalker movies).


There are other artworks out aswell, naturally, but those didn't catch my interest that much.



We have a poster that directly connects to the first part, but lacks something to me:















I can't place my finger on it, but same as with the poster artwork for the first movie this adavance motive didn't really catch my interest or stand out as remarkable in any way to me.
But that might simply be founded on my personal bias towards the first movie.


And the Christine Keeler version, one of the most copied motives it seems .