Recent film ads are under the microscope by censorsBY EMIL TIEDEMANN
Is it just that we're more sensitive and excitable as a society, or are today's movie posters simply more explicit and graphic? As of late there's been an abundance of film ads that have been banned by advertising watchdogs from the U.S. to the UK, citing reasons of the glamourization of violence and/or sexuality.
After some extensive and exhaustive research--actually, I mostly just Googled!--I discovered that before this current decade the most disconcerning poster was for
John Glen's
For Your Eyes Only (1981), which cries tame by today's standards. The ad for the James Bond feature was eclipsed by the exposed derriere of a Bond girl standing with her legs spread apart, in front of a gun-clinching
Roger Moore. After complaints arose over its sexual nature the studio (United Artists) superimposed garments and relaunched the retouched print.
That was nearly 30 years ago, and a lil' ass barely even gets noticed these days (see this year's
The Unborn poster), but graphic designers haved upped the anti, testing the waters with visions of gore, torture, erotica and crime. Most avoid absolute censorship, but the most contentious of them have experienced a backlash in specific regions, depending sometimes on religious beliefs or recent affairs.
Below (in alphabetical order) are the goriest of the gory, the raunchiest of the raunchy, and some others that will make you scratch your head, lost to how inoffensive they actually are. These are the 21 (I like that number!) most "controversial" movie posters of all-time...they just all happen to be of my time, within a stretch of the last seven years! For all you aforementioned sensitive folk, you might wanna look away, although they aren't all that bad. See for yourself! (Click on any of the images to view a larger size.)
Ali G Indahouse (2002)
Before
Sascha Baron Cohen unveiled his Borat and Bruno alter egos, the British comic introduced us to the hip-hop-styled Ali G and this hit film based around the infamous character. But it was its poster that made headlines in his home and native land, pulled from the public after 109 complaints surfaced over the provocative image, featuring Ali G using his finger to cover a woman's ass crack in the same fashion that a traditional bikini bottom would. Although the every-day bikini you see at any beach actually reveals more than this ad did, the Brits just couldn't stomach its suggestive positioning and the tagline, "Vote Ali G, da panty tax."
All My Life (2009)
Despite gracious reviews in Australia, the States, and across Europe,
Maher Sabry's Egyptian gay feature
All My Life was heavily criticized by Arabian Muslim and Christian organizations throughout the Middle East, but its promo ad was banned altogether. Featuring a nude man draped across the cover, the ad apparently outraged folks in all Arabian nations, upset over the R-rated film's plot, which swarmed around the tribulations of a 26-year-old gay accountant-slash-dance student from Cairo.
All My Life was not, and probably never will be, released in North American theatres.
Captivity (2007)
Baring images of supposed torture, kidnapping and murder, the prints promoting this U.S./ Russian thriller were quickly yanked from New York taxi cabs and L.A. billboards after outraged citizens complained. "To be honest with you, I don't know where the confusion happened and who's responsible," said
Courtney Soloman of the After Dark distributing company that took the bulk of the reprimanding, claiming that "wrong files were sent to the printer." Co-distributors Lionsgate Films were "unaware" of the lurid advertising campaign and promptly put a stop to it, replacing the poster with the current "ant farm version," featuring star
Elisha Cuthbert.
Choke (2008)
The movie didn't exactly win over critics, but even before people
didn't go see this
Clark Gregg film, its poster unimpressed would-be audiences. Although never officially banned,
Choke's ads raised some eyebrows over its image of a silhoutte'd (not a word, I know)
Sam Rockwell halfway through swallowing a high heel'd (also not a word) woman, recalling the infamous
Hustler magazine cover from June 1978, featuring a woman going into a meat grinder. The "dirty-minded satirical psychotic comedy" bombed at the box office, but had little to do--I'm sure--with its campaigning faux pas.
Coco Avant Chanel (2009)
Currently underway in international theatres,
Anne Fontaine's biopic of legendary French fashion designer
Coco Chanel errupted the officials that screen ads in the bus and train stations of France. The uproar was simple--actress
Audrey Tautou sitting down with a lit cigarette in one hand, resembling Chanel herself, famous for smoking some 50 sticks a day. "Cigarettes are banned on our entire transport system," stated a Paris Metrobus spokesman to the UK's
Telegraph, "and there is no reason why we should be giving them free advertising through this film poster."
Creep (2004)
On the grounds of "taste and decency," or lack thereof rather, the United Kingdom barred the filmmakers of the horror flick
Creep (directed by
Christopher Smith) from promoting it in the London Underground metro system. Funded by the UK Film Council,
Creep's posters featured a bloody hand scrapping down the window of a train carriage. "It's a bit ludicrous," cried producer
Julie Bain. "This is fiction, not documentary. It's not based on real events--if it was, we are all in trouble." The ban was swiftly lifted by the Advertising Standard Authority (ASA), but not before the film's producers replaced the images in mainline stations.
Dying Breed (2008)
"It's disappointing and frustrating to have the poster censored by Adshel [the company that specializes in bus shelter advertising]," said
Dying Breed's writer-producer
Michael Boughen. "The poster will be seen in cinema foyers, press ads and online, so it's going to be in the public domain." Designed by
Jeremy Saunders (
Samson & Delilah), the promos envisioned a pie baked with human body parts, spilling out from the side. The Australian horror-thrasher's graphic artwork was banned from public view throughout the country, and the film flopped at the box office, perhaps as a result.
Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2005)
Although the real crime was this movie being made in the first place, it was one of its various poster ads that had parents protesting. Posturing star
50 Cent with a microphone in one hand and a gun in the other, the billboards had to be removed at the expense of Paramount. "The poster thing surprised me," admitted an initially-enraged
Jim Sheridan, director of
Get Rich. "People were complaining about a gun when nearly every American film is promoted with guns...it feels crazy to be talking about cardboard guns when there are so many real ones." The ad was retouched (pictured), though another one made the DVD cover.
Hostel Part II (2007)
T&A has always been a key marketing tactic for thrasher films, but in its promo ads? Not a chance, which is why the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) blantantly denied approval for the original poster for
Eli Roth's disasterous sequel to 2005's
Hostel, which also used risque visuals to sell itself. A nude
Bijou Phillips--one of the film's stars--stood sideways on the prints, holding a decapitated head at her hips...need I say more?! As for the movie itself,
Hostel 2 didn't even make half the monies the original grossed two years earlier, but made enough to inspire another sequel.
Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009)
It wasn't the lesbian vampire killers' cleavage that angered censors, but rather the title
Lesbian Vampire Killers itself that pushed it from public transport. Billed unsuitable for children the title was also called "sexually offensive" and was apparently likely offensive to lesbians! "The film title is linked to horror, sexuality and violence while as a combination are felt to be inappropriate...to be viewed by all ages on the transport system," stated CBS Outdoors, the firm handling the UK transport's ads. The
Phil Claydon-directed comedy-horror was released in the UK last March, and in Australia last week.
Righteous Kill (2008)
Recent local affairs set afire a debate over the launch of the ad campaign for this
Robert De Niro-
Al Pacino crime thriller. It had been just three years earlier, in July 2005, in which Brazilian national
Charles de Menezes was shot and killed by police at Stockwell Tube, a metro station of the London Underground. Monitors thought it was in poor taste showing the posters at the same Stockwell station, in light of a gun image and the tagline, "There's nothing wrong with a little shooting as long as the right people get shot." Lionsgate obliged and removed the ads.
The Road to Guantanamo (2006)
The only documentary on this list is
Michael Winterbottom's feature that tells of three British detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base detainment camp in Cuba. Actually billed as a "docudrama,"
Guantanamo's brutal realism leaked onto its own posters, featuring a man hanging by his handcuffed wrists, with his head covered by a burlap sack and then a blindfold tied around his eyes. "The image that ran afoul of the MPAA is tame by the standards set by the amateur photographers of Abu Ghraib," commented
The Washington Post. The MPAA claimed it depicted torture.
The Rules of Attraction (2002)
One of the earliest troublemakers was
Roger Avary's
The Rules of Attraction, which bared 14 pairs of beanie babies in various sexual positions (doggie style, military, oral...you name it!), with a tagline that read "We all run on instinct." Lionsgate Films, which seems to be behind many of the banished artwork, had to pull the posters and replaced them with something other than "copulating toys" doing the dirty. The movie itself recieved the most destructive rating by the MPAA, NC-17, until Avary returned to the editing room and made the necessary cuts to "upgrade" to an R-rating.
Saw II (2005)
It seems somewhat petty, but a couple of decaying severed fingers (representing the
II in the title) was enough to upset members of the MPAA, which deemed the graphics "unacceptable." The cencorship organization--formed in 1922--divulged, "Materials for the film
Saw II [that] display dismembered fingers...is unacceptable under Advertising Administration Standards." Lionsgate--which distributed the film, its original, three sequels, and another one to come--re-designed the poster, simply hiding the finger's stumps, and sat back as the $4 million horror film earned more than $147 million worldwide.
Shoot 'Em Up (2007)
"Just another family man making a living," read the action movie's tagline, which had the ASA tagging it themselves, as offensive and insensitive towards families affected by gun crime. The posters also featured leading man
Clive Owen pointing a gun in the direction of the viewer, and an additional ad with co-star
Paul Giamatti following suit (pictured). The film's distributors, New Line, also launched a "guerilla marketing campaign" that included a fake website that advertised riot helmets for babies and bullet-proof strollers, as well as a scripted YouTube viral video of someone shooting the stroller--baby in tow--with a submachine gun! Can you say overkill?!
Snuff-Movie (2005)
The premise behind
Bernard Rose's gothic horror film
Snuff-Movie is enough to upset mainstream moviegoers, but before it ever got that far, Lionsgate Films had to put out some fires with the poster that promoted its UK arrival. Rose's own wife appeared on the print, nude and nailed to a giant cross, in the midst of an approving crowd. The ad was--unsurprisingly--banned from press, outdoor advertising and even cinema websites, "despite poster approval from the director...and his wife," stated the agitated Lionsgate company.
Snuff-Movie, about a reclusive widower who kills off a group of actors at his countryside mansion, failed to make an impact with audiences anyways.
Teeth (2007)
The most bizarre film on the list is
Mitchell Lichtenstein's black comedy-horror feature
Teeth, about a teen girl (
Jess Weixler) who discovers that she has a set of teeth inside her vagina! That's right, in her vagina! So you could only imagine how advertising for this story could invite some explicit ideas, and explicit they were! Roadside Attractions approved a poster that resembled an X-ray of the teen girl, with a set of vag chompers clearly in view near the bottom of the picture. As expected the ads were pulled and replaced with a safer image of Weixler nearly fully immersed in bath water.
Thirst (2009)
South Korea's Media Rating Board, which had only recently become more strict with its censorship, banned the "provocative and disturbing" poster for
Park Chan-wook's
Thirst film, which told the story of a priest who accidentally turns himself into a vampire during a medical experiment. The ads for the Korean horror-drama featured the priest (
Song Kang-ho) being strangled by a naked woman, positioned to resemble the figure of a bat. The original poster remained as is overseas, but an edited version appeared in Korea, with the woman's legs airbrushed out. The film itself went to No.1 domestically earlier this month.
Wanted (2008)
Britain's ASA quickly denounced the movie posters for
Timur Bekimambetov's blockbuster action film
Wanted, over its gun images and a tagline that suggested life is better as a high-paid assassin ("six weeks ago I was just like you...and then I met her...and my world changed forever"). "We acknowledged most viewers would understand the posters reflected the content of an action film," admitted the ASA. "However, we considered that because the ads featured a glamorous actress, action poses, several images of or related to guns and aspirational text, they could be seen to gamourize the use of guns and violence. We concluded [they] could be seen to condone violence by glorifying or glamourizing the use of guns."
Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006)
Goran Dukic's
Wristcutters is set in a "strange afterlife way-station that has been reserved for people who have committed suicide," and so when it came to designing prints to promote the award-winning feature, they kept it simple and used a yellow warning sign that featured the animated image of an arm with a red line through the wrist. It was not exactly graphic, but just blatant and suggestive enough to have parents protesting its release, claiming that it glorified suicide. The poster's background featured numerous similar images of other ways people take their own lives.
Zack & Miri Make a Porno (2008)
Just before
Zack & Miri was to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the MPAA slapped its distributors (The Weinstein Company) with a major greivance, forbidding them to promote the
Kevin Smith comedy with its current poster, which featured stars
Seth Rogen and
Elizabeth Banks giving each other head...kinda. Others had issues with "porno" being in its title, which had Weinstein issue a new poster that featured the two stars chillin' in a meadow, with the tagline "A poster for everyone who finds our movie title hard to swallow." The new campaign also included the slogan "Seth Rogen & Elizabeth Banks made a movie so outrageous that we can't even tell you the title."
Now, although these were perhaps the 21 most controversial movie posters of the last decade (since nobody seemed to care before that), there have been others that have also blurred the line between acceptable and downright explicit. In 2007 the MPAA rejected the poster for
The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Fox Atomic), because it showed one of the mutants from the film pulling away a body in a burlap sack, with a hand clinching the sand below. Fox flipped the body over to bare the feet instead, as to avoid images of a living person being dragged away to their death.
The following year, in 2008, the big screen adaptation of the hit HBO TV series
Sex and the City ran into some obsticles in the Israeli cities of Jerusalem and Petah Tikva, where Forum Films had to pull ads because of the word "sex" in the title. That same year
Jed Weintrob's horror flick
Scar was criticized for glorifying knife violence, as well as for its plot description, as a "slash-tastic killer thriller" in which "the blood flies off the screen."
The latest "art" to get the axe was South Korea's
Cadaver (a.k.a.
The Cut), distributed by IFC Films, which is planning a limited release across North America. The print features a gloved "surgeon" with one hand draped across a nude woman's right breast and a scalpel slicing across the left one, which ignited concern across the board. The producers of
Cadaver, which has gotten little attention online (and off), also issued several stills from the movie, featuring medical students performing their first dissection.
Well, I guess that about sums it up then...the long arm of the law slapping their censor stickers over the artwork of the cinema, deciding what we can stomach as a society. This time next year there's sure to be a whole new batch of outlawed movie posters that the MPAA, the APA, and all them other condemning acronyms have deemed unacceptable on our behalf. Until then, take in what was not meant to be, and gimme your feedback!
It's been 16 years since Sam Raimi touched base with the dark side of cinema, bestowing upon us the third--and so far, final--installment of The Evil Dead trilogy, with 1993's Army of Darkness. Since then Mr. Raimi has redirected his attention on an overlooked western (The Quick and the Dead), an Oscar calibre drama (A Simple Plan), a regrettable baseball feature (For Love of the Game), and an awkward supernatural thriller (The Gift). Oh yeah, and those Spider-Man movies, too! And now, after what seemed an eternity, the evil genius has relapsed, returning to what he does best...over-the-top loathing crossbred with insidious hilarity.
Set to a script penned by Raimi and his older brother Ivan, the 99-minute film starts us off in 1969 with a young Spanish boy riddled with a demonic curse that culminates in his inevitable path to the infernal underworld. We then skip ahead to present day and are introduced to Christine Brown (White Oleander's Alison Lohman), a conventional nobody who works as a loan officer at a bank. Gung-ho on landing a potential promotion, Brown makes an uncharacteristic decision that triggers an old, grisly woman (pictured left) to summon a curse upon her, one that layed dorment for the last 40 years.
