Lobby Card Collection - Highlander (1986)

Phantasm Poster Gallery

"You think when you die, you go to heaven. You come to us!!"

Phantasm (Don Coscarelli, 1979) - US Poster

US Poster #2

French Poster

Japanese Poster #1

Season of the Witch (2011)

Dir: DOMINC SENA
Country: USA

Despite having shown genuine acting ability, and a genuine flair for quirky and peculiar characters, actor Nicolas Cage continues to make atrocious career choices. He recently crafted a wonderful performance as the corrupt New Orleans detective Terence McDonagh in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009). It came as a surprise to most because it reminded audiences that Cage did once possess something special. But films such as Raising Arizona (1987), Wild at Heart (1990) and Leaving Las Vegas (1995) are consigned to history. Only of use to Cage fans and film scholars. The latter always willing to drift into the mists of time for something interesting. For a certain generation Nicolas Cage is represented by films like National Treasure (2004), Next (2007) and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010). He is a man that will seemingly agree to appear in anything. This tends to be something actors do when their star has burned out. Cage can certainly afford to be selective, and is obviously cine-literate enough to know that one doesn’t pass up the chance to work with Werner Herzog. This only makes his decision to appear in something like Season of the Witch all the more perplexing. It is made worse by the fact that Cage is hopelessly miscast. I can’t think of a more inappropriate person to play a 14th century knight rallying against the hypocrisies of the Church.

Prehistoric Women (1967)

Dir: MICHAEL CARRERAS
Country: UK

AKA:
Slave Girls

The commercial success of the insipid She (1965) and the far more enjoyable One Million Years B.C. (1966) inspired the powers at Hammer to continue mining the rich landscape of adventure films set in the prehistory of lost worlds. The two films previously mentioned, were by the standards of Hammer, relatively big budget and lavish affairs. She had the commercial draw of Ursula Andress, while One Million Years B.C. had the draw of both Raquel Welch and Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion visual effects. Instead of maintaining these production standards however, Hammer showed predictable contempt for its audience with a thriftiness that ultimately destroyed the epic nature of future fantastical adventures. The inappropriately titled Prehistoric Women (aka Slave Girls - a more fitting title) was Hammer’s third ‘lost world’ film, and like the previous two was lead by a sex symbol - in this case the statuesque Martine Beswick. Beswick is by far the best thing about this movie. The name Michael Carreras attached in a creative role to any film is ordinarily a sign for me to press the eject button on my DVD player - and here he is both writer and director. With the exception of Maniac (1963), which in itself is hardly special, the directorial career of Carreras is an arid wasteland of incompetence. While Carreras is the primary reason for Prehistoric Women’s imbecility, it has to be said he is not the only reason. One of the most damaging decisions for the film was to shoot entirely on a soundstage at Elstree Studios. The usual brilliance of the Hammer technical team has vanished here, instead they contrive to create some of the most unconvincing jungle terrain you are ever likely to see.

She (1965)

Dir: ROBERT DAY
Country: UK

First serialised in 1886 H. Rider Haggard’s exotic fantasy adventure She provided just the right ingredients for the early pioneers of silent cinema. Adaptations of the durable tale appeared in 1908, 1911, 1916, 1917 and 1926. RKO raised the bar considerably in 1935 with a lavish version of the tale which cast Helen Gahagan as the eponymous immortal and Randolph Scott as Leo Vincey. This rendering still remains the most impressive thanks to excellent sets, costumes and optical effects. Thirty years later Hammer Film Productions were attempting to diversify their output further, and Haggard’s source material provided the company with the possibility to develop a strain of lost world/prehistoric adventure films. In 1965 Hammer were enjoying one of their most lucrative periods, and the evidence of this is illustrated by the increased budget and epic scale afforded to She. But this is Hammer’s interpretation of the word ‘epic’ and despite shooting in cinemascope the film never quite reaches the grandeur of the 1935 film, nor does it do full justice to the rich imagery of Haggard’s novel. But perhaps the greatest failing of David T. Chantler’s screenplay is that for large periods of the film very little happens. This has to be one of the most limp and lifeless epic adventures of all time; in short She is a crashing bore.

Warlords of Atlantis (1978)

Dir: KEVIN CONNORS
Country: UK

AKA:
Warlords of the Deep

The inconsistent and uneven Warlords of Atlantis was the fourth and final collaboration between producer John Dark, director Kevin Connor, and square jawed actor Doug McClure. The first three period set fantasy adventures The Land that Time Forgot (1975), At the Earth’s Core (1976) and The People that Time Forgot (1977) were all produced under the auspices of Amicus Productions and were based on works by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Warlords of Atlantis broke with this tradition in both its means of production and its writing. The screenplay was concocted by Brian Hayles who spent most of his career writing for British television. He contributed six serials to Doctor Who (The Celestial Toymaker, The Smugglers, The Ice Warriors, The Seeds of Death, The Curse of Peladon and The Monster of Peladon) and many of these adventures had strong socio-political allegorical undertones, this narrative dimension bleeds into the screenplay for this film. Hayles’ screenplay emphasises action over plotting and character development, and the result is energy and excitement at the cost of effective storytelling. The film also differs in its stress on science-fictional elements and in its interest in the future of mankind. However Warlords of Atlantis still celebrates unlikely feats of engineering and places its trust and support in the unshakeable symbol of the eccentric Victorian scientist. The result is a film that maintains the iconography of the Amicus pictures, but develops a series of themes that offer an altogether darker vision than that presented in the earlier films.