SO PASSES THE CARETAKER OF DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES: R.I.P. FORREST J. ACKERMAN (1916-2005), FOUNDER OF "FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND"

It is with immeasurable sadness that I relay the news of the passing of one of the greatest influences on "monster kids" like Yer Bunche, the legendary Forrest J. Ackerman, a fount of knowledge on the subjects of sci-fi (a term he is credited with having coined), fantasy and horror and founder of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND (along with publisher James Warren). When I was a monster-crazed youth, FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND was just about the only game in town when it came to readily-available information about those beloved genres, and each issue was crammed with photos and articles that imparted as much story and behind the scenes poop as one could ever want, and introducing two fortunate generations of kids to the people who brought their favorite horrors to life.

My first issue fell into my hands when I had just turned nine and it featured the first in-depth articles I ever saw recounting the making of my my all-time favorite movie, the 1933 KING KONG, which I had seen in its uncut form for the first time on the big screen just a year previous, and for me the magazine was a revelation. In fact that issue may be the defining moment when my kiddish enjoyment of such movies metamorphosed into full-fledged mania and a desire to absorb as much about this wondrous field of creativity as I possibly could. So, crazy and geeky though it may sound, Forrest J. Ackerman was my Yoda when it came to the cinema of the fantastic.

My first issue of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND: after this, there was no turning back.

Would you believe "Forry" (as he was affectionately nicknamed) actually owned the Creature from the Black Lagoon suit, minus the head, hands and feet? Legend has it that he was passing by a house in California somewhere when he noticed the Creature suit among items left out to be taken away with the trash (!!!), so he rescued "Blackie" and added him to the unimaginable wonders that populated his home, fondly known to geeks everywhere as "the Ackermansion," a museum that I would kill to witness with my own eyes. Simply awesome, and definitely a repository for the things that dreams are made of.

I cannot thank Forry enough for his influence on me, and on behalf of all the grownup monster kids out there and for those who have no idea what they missed, I loved you, Mister Ackerman. Even though I never met you I always felt you treated me and your other readers like cherished friends and family, always respecting our intelligence and doing everything in your power to fan the flames of our fiendish fervor. You were one of this nation's (and the world's) living treasures, and your loss is a terrible blow.

The Japanese monster issue: another turning point in the life of the wee Bunche.

No lie, I feel like I've lost a great mentor, and in truth that's exactly what I've...we've lost. Stay strong, my fellow horror kids. Stay strong. Forry wouldn't have wanted you to cry; he'd want you share the joy he introduced us to, and that's about as good a goal as I can imagine.

I have tears welling up in my eyes as I type these words, so I'll turn this over to the Associated Press.

Sci-fi's grand old man, Forrest J Ackerman, dies

By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press Writer John Rogers, Associated Press Writer – Fri Dec 5, 4:02 pm ET

LOS ANGELES – Forrest J Ackerman, the sometime actor, literary agent, magazine editor and full-time bon vivant who discovered author Ray Bradbury and was widely credited with coining the term "sci-fi," has died. He was 92. Ackerman died Thursday of heart failure at his Los Angeles home, said Kevin Burns, head of Prometheus Entertainment and a trustee of Ackerman's estate.

Although only marginally known to readers of mainstream literature, Ackerman was legendary in science-fiction circles as the founding editor of the pulp magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. He was also the owner of a huge private collection of science-fiction movie and literary memorabilia that for years filled every nook and cranny of a hillside mansion overlooking Los Angeles. "He became the Pied Piper, the spiritual leader, of everything science fiction, fantasy and horror," Burns said Friday.

Every Saturday morning that he was home, Ackerman would open up the house to anyone who wanted to view his treasures. He sold some pieces and gave others away when he moved to a smaller house in 2002, but he continued to let people visit him every Saturday for as long as his health permitted. "My wife used to say, 'How can you let strangers into our home?' But what's the point of having a collection like this if you can't let people enjoy it?" an exuberant Ackerman told The Associated Press as he conducted a spirited tour of the mansion on his 85th birthday.

His collection once included more than 50,000 books, thousands of science-fiction magazines and such items as Bela Lugosi's cape from the 1931 film "Dracula."

His greatest achievement, however, was likely discovering Bradbury, author of the literary classics "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles." Ackerman had placed a flyer in a Los Angeles bookstore for a science-fiction club he was founding and a teenage Bradbury showed up. Later, Ackerman gave Bradbury the money to start his own science-fiction magazine, Futuria Fantasia, and paid the author's way to New York for an authors meeting that Bradbury said helped launch his career. "I hadn't published yet, and I met a lot of these people who encouraged me and helped me get my career started, and that was all because of Forry Ackerman," the author told the AP in 2005. Later, as a literary agent, Ackerman represented Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and numerous other science-fiction writers.

He said the term "sci-fi" came to him in 1954 when he was listening to a car radio and heard an announcer mention the word "hi-fi." "My dear wife said, 'Forget it, Forry, it will never catch on,'" he recalled. Soon he was using it in Famous Monsters of Filmland, the magazine he helped found in 1958 and edited for 25 years.

Ackerman himself appeared in numerous films over the years, usually in bit parts. His credits include "Queen of Blood," "Dracula vs. Frankenstein," "Amazon Women on the Moon," "Vampirella," "Transylvania Twist," "The Howling" and the Michael Jackson "Thriller" video. More recently, he appeared in 2007's "The Dead Undead" and 2006's "The Boneyard Collection."

Ackerman returned briefly to Famous Monsters of Filmland in the 1990s, but he quickly fell out with the publisher over creative differences. He sued and was awarded a judgment of more than $375,000.

Forrest James Ackerman was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 24, 1916. He fell in love with science-fiction, he once said, when he was 9 years old and saw a magazine called Amazing Stories. He would hold onto that publication for the rest of his life.

Ackerman, who had no children, was preceded in death by his wife, Wendayne.

THE GREATEST BAD MOVIES EVER MADE: CURSE OF BIGFOOT (1976)

In the glorious days of pre-cable TV wherein one could find any number of local movie shows, cash-strapped regional stations would occasionally fill out their film schedules with bottom-of-the-barrel and most likely public domain flicks that would be broadcast at Jesus o’clock in the morning and be viewed mostly by insomniacs or the heavily self-medicated. These celluloid stink bombs would mostly come and go, being run only once, but every now and then there would be one that stood above the pack and would be remembered for all time as a movie so mind-bendingly terrible that it was literally unbelievable, and in the days of my misspent East Coast youth no film exemplified this misbegotten breed like 1976’s CURSE OF BIGFOOT, a movie that ran with surprising frequency on New York’s WOR-TV (aka Channel 9) and became a minor cult classic to myself and several of my like-minded friends. We first witnessed its anti-spectacle in the late 1970’s and we’ve been devoted to it ever since, it being the first film I ever saw that lead to me to describe it as being so boring, worthless and bad that it somehow manages to transcend its own awfulness and become a thing of perverse fascination.

It’s probably impossible these days to convey to those who weren’t there for it just how much of the 1970’s seemed like everybody was stoned, including the president, and this perceived pot haze clouded pop culture with many strange fads and manias, among which could be counted “weird phenomena” stories of shit like the Bermuda Triangle, U.F.O.’s and other assorted strangeness that became mesmerizing after a few bowls of Indica. But the heavy-hitter of the genre had to be the nation’s fascination with Sasquatch, more commonly known as “Bigfoot,” a shaggy forest-dwelling specimen of cryptozoology who memorably teamed up with the Six-Million Dollar Man. I don’t recall exactly when the Bigfoot craze caught on but I do remember the country being inundated, seemingly overnight, with books, cheapjack horror movies, TV specials and pseudo-documentaries about the hairy bastard, and while I dig the idea of the missing link/nature spirit or whatever the fuck Bigfoot was supposed to be, I must admit that I never really got exactly why the creature was so popular. There was never much by way of concrete proof of its existence, the most famous example of which is the short out-of-focus 1967 film purported to be of an actual Bigfoot crossing a road that looks to me like some Amazonian woman in a rented gorilla costume; I say “woman” because in the famous out-of-focus still shot of Bigfoot taken from the film it looks like Bigfoot’s rockin’ a decent rack.

The alleged real-life Bigfoot from the famous 1967 film. Is it just me, or does it look like Bigfoot's sportin' titties?

But whatever the case, Bigfoot became an indelible part of the Seventies zeitgeist and low-budget filmmakers were only too willing to crank out shitty flicks to cash in on the craze and rook moviegoers out of their hard-earned greenbacks. None of the Bigfoot movies were any good, in fact most of them were downright terrible, but not one of them even begin to approach the nadir of quality that is CURSE OF BIGFOOT, a work that appears to have been cobbled together from a poorly-made and totally-unrelated-to-Bigfoot attempt at a horror film, a scene taking place in a classroom that looks worse than one of the educational flicks they used to run in health class, a staggering amount of seemingly random stock footage and, last but certainly least, what meager footage was available from an apparently unfinished 1958 would-be monster movie entitled TEENAGERS BATTLE THE THING. A true oddity, the film was not inaccurately described on the Internet Movie Database’s “user comments” section with the headline “A Sasquatch could make a better movie,” a sentiment I share after having sat many times, slack-jawed in disbelief, through this sole effort of director Don Fields.

NOTE: as of this point, this review becomes an in-depth examination of CURSE OF BIGFOOT's anti-grandeur, so if you want to see it for yourself and save the threadbare surprises I advise you to stop reading right now and get your hands on the DVD or check it out in chapters on YouTube.

The legs of Bigfoot as seen during the pre-credits sequence. Note the stunning cinematography.

The film opens with a glimpse of the distant past that wouldn’t have passed muster on IT'S ABOUT TIME as a narrator “ominously” fills us in on a strange creature that would kill cavemen for no apparent reason. That creature was known as…(Wait for it!)…Bigfoot!!!

Oh, shit! It's Bigfoot!!!

Suddenly, in what is unquestionably the film’s only almost-exciting moment, a monster meant to be Bigfoot runs face-first and full-tilt into the camera and mauls an unseen caveman to death (unseen save for an arm with crepe hair crudely glued to it, that is), causing chocolate syrup to run down a boulder in a poor substitution for stage blood. The titles then roll and list a cast of non-stars (such as Ken Kleopfer, Ruth Ann Manella, and Bill Simonsen as Dr. Bill Wyman) as the camera for some reason delights our eyes with what appears to be elementary school documentary footage of Native American cliff-dwellings and caves which has squat to do with Bigfoot.

The film then shifts to a nigh-interminable sequence featuring a nighttime scene in which a woman scolds her dog for barking at what she assumes is some wild animal but is in actuality the slowest-moving, most nondescript and bogus-looking monster in recent memory.

Exactly what the fuck is this monster supposed to be? Anybody?

The monster lurks in the bushes or aimlessly shambles along while the camera can’t make up its mind as to whether it wants to show us the monster, the dog, the woman or random shots of the house or the dripping spigot to which one would attach a garden hose. After what feels like a short suspense-free eternity, the monster finally makes it to within arm’s length of the woman and makes his move, but we don’t get to see what happens because the footage abruptly comes to a halt when it’s revealed that we’ve been watching a movie along with a classroom full of teenagers who have themselves been watching the pitiful horror movie; the film has been shut off by the class’ professor who states something to the effect of “Well, I think you all get the idea,” thus simultaneously leaving his students and the audience feeling distinctly gypped.

This teacher’s acting is smarmy to the nth degree and comes off just as vile and unctuous as any seventies-era gameshow host, only minus any shred of charm. Of far more interest (?) is the classroom full of students, comprised of a bunch of young actors whose faces betray the unmistakable look of being both bored and stoned, providing a screen image that in more artful hands would have been intentionally meant to comment on what was likely the mindset being experienced by the viewing audience.

The stoned and bored-looking students: an ironic comment on the audience?

Alas, the film does not give us time to consider such an artistic possibility and instead allows the teacher of what is apparently a myths & legends course to whip out a placard with an illustration of Bigfoot emblazoned upon it and expound upon the existence of the hairy bastard.

"And for those students who speak Ebonics, this here nigga is Bigfoot, muthafukkas!!!"

So begins a veritable Cannes Film Festival of stock footage meant to convey the search for Bigfoot, footage including incongruous shots of assorted radar arrays,

maps and shit,

light aircraft flying at an altitude guaranteed not to allow a clear look at anything other than miles of tree cover, let alone a Sasquatch,

and copious footage depicting the logging industry.

I shit you not; the fucking logging industry!!!

To further drive home his point — nebulous though it may be — the professor then regales us with the "true encounter" had by two gurk-gurks out driving aimlessly through the backwoods. After about three solid minutes of shots of their truck slooooooowly meandering over small hills and around trees, the yokels spot...Bigfoot!

The Hairy One casually saunters across the road and vanishes into the brush, causing the stunned (stoned?) drivers (about whom we know absolutely nothing) to stop the truck and get out to investigate. The pair consists of a dude who looks like a long-lost member of SCTV's MacKenzie Brothers

and a mulleted wonder who's pretty much the living embodiment of the mid-1970's burnout who hung around shopping malls, parking lots and fast food joints looking to score some weed or underage pussy.

The mid-1970's burnout, far removed from his natural habitat of shopping malls and parking lots.

These two veeeeeeeery sloooooooowly search the brush for any sign of Bigfoot, traipsing through brambles, random branches and such, wasting nearly ten suspense-free minutes during which time we get a brief glimpse of the monster's right foot that stiffly twitches.

The right foot of...Bigfoot!!!

Sadly, our intrepid explorers don't get to see that horrifying sight and instead continue to wander about aimlessly. Finally the burnout hears the sounds of his pal being horribly mauled — which is conveniently not depicted for the edification or entertainment of the audience — and runs to his friend's aid, but too late: the lost MacKenzie lays dead and the burnout reacts with less emotion than he would have expressed if he'd spilled his bong in the rear of his bitchin' customized van.

The lost Mackenzie Brother lays dead, viciously mauled by a rapacious Bigfoot...

...while his burnout pal reacts with a depth of emotion that fairly screams "Bummer, dude."
That sub-IN SEARCH OF re-enactment goes on for so long that you'll swear you'd felt your facial hair grow, an effect compounded by whatever intoxicants may be running rampant through your system. (Which reminds me that I neglected to mention that CURSE OF BIGFOOT should not be attempted without beers, hard liquor or copious amounts of weed within easy reach, although I'd make an exception to this rule in the case of my clean-livin' buddy Jared. Get ready for it, dude. One of these days I'm going to inflict this one on you!)

Before we're given a chance to regain our composure following that exercise in flesh-crawling horror, class resumes with the bored/stoned students identifying old woodcuts of mythic beasts while turning in performances that would have embarrassed the cast of Mrs. Gage's fifth grade production of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? But then things take a turn for the worse when the professor's special guest shows up, a creepy bespectacled guy who claims to have firsthand experience with a vicious Bigfoot, an event from some fifteen years previous.

"Kids, I had an encounter in the woods with Bigfoot, and...Hey! Stop laughing! This shit's serious!!!"

Following what's supposed to be an ominous lead-in (that isn't the least bit ominous) to the tale he's about to tell, the movie suddenly turns into a no-budget horror flick from the 1950's, complete with obviously different film stock and another opening narration, a jarring effect that not only makes the viewer think they've downed some off-date Piel's, but also leads one to conclude they've been trapped in a cruel cinematic Moebius strip that will randomly re-start the film over and over again for all of eternity, with each new beginning helmed by a completely new director.

Of far less interest than the patchwork incoherence/boredom festival/endurance test of the film's earlier segments, the 1950's mini-movie is merely a deadly-dull account of a teacher and his students discovering a mummified Bigfoot in a hillside cave and what happens when said critter gets loose. There's a little bit of dimestore mayhem before Bigfoot meets an untimely and uninteresting death by immolation, but before we're finally granted the mercy of the familiar words "The End" we're forced to endure scene after scene of some boring Eisenhower-era white folks wandering around some nondescript hills for what you'd swear was the entire running time of the U.S. version of BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ.

Can your heart stand the excitement?

Even when the monster goes on the rampage, not one single thing of interest happens, and when "The End" does finally pop up the film just abruptly comes to a complete halt. No cutting back to the anguished Bigfoot massacre survivor, no summing up from the professor, no comments from the class, no twist ending, no anything. The shit just ends and the viewer is left to sit in silence for a few moments, reeling from the cumulative boredom and confusion, but thankful that they didn't spend the cash to see it in the theater. Yes, you read that right: CURSE OF BIGFOOT was apparently actually released onto the big screen, probably to the drive-in circuit, a wasteland where the attendees were more often than not too concerned with getting stoned or fucking to care if the movie being shown was the cinematic equivalent to an empty McDonald's Big Mac container.

But believe me when I say I'd have loved to have seen this monument to how not to make a movie if it had played theatrically during my youth. Films of this ilk are best enjoyed with an unwitting audience of liquored-up grindhouse regulars who enliven such flicks with their non-stop barrage of often vulgar commentary and impromptu insinuation of themselves into the movie's events with observations such as "If I was in this movie I'd've kicked that muthafukkin' Bigfoot muthafukka right in the fuckin' nuts!" which would probably have been answered back with "You wouldn'ta done shit 'cuz Bigfoot would be too busy bonin' you up the ass!" We may not have seen it projected, but my friends and I had a field day with CURSE OF BIGFOOT whenever it aired on Channel 9, and just the other night myself and my friend of twenty-six years, Chris, sat through it yet again and laughed ourselves silly. There are those who slag off Ed Wood and his films as being the worst ever made, but at least Wood had a unique vision all his own and legitimate desire to make viable movies; CURSE OF BIGFOOT appears to have been cobbled together from spare parts with naught on its mind save ripping-off the moviegoing public, and it certainly succeeds at that dubious goal, and what entertainment can be garnered from its towering ineptness was almost certainly not intentional.

Bottom line: CURSE OF BIGFOOT is exactly the kind of film that should be considered when trying to define "the worst movie of all time," a flick lacking any of the things that make a movie legitimately entertaining in the first place, such as characters you care about in any way, thrills, romance, a coherent plot, gratuitous titties, graphic violence, talking dogs, anything. Being wholly without merit, CURSE OF BIGFOOT is recommended only for those who have worked their way through the Thirty-Six Chambers of Bad Moviedom and attained the Zen-like mastery needed to weather its complete and utter inertia. That said, I would also recommend it to those who think they may be ready to handle it; if you newcomers can make it all the way through CURSE OF BIGFOOT's eighty-eight minute running time you may find yourself among the growing legion of moviegoers who love it for a number of indefensible reasons, and may even find yourself attempting to lure the innocent down the path of ruin that you yourself have trod upon, becoming sort of a bad movie "pusher," if you will. A pusher just like Yer Bunche.

THE GREATEST MOVIE POSTERS EVER: LUANA (1968)

This West German/Italian co-production carries on the dreary tradition of jungle-girl movies that suck out loud, but when it was re-released in the early 1970's it was graced with a misleadingly awesome poster crafted by the great Frank Frazetta, perhaps the most influential fantasy illustrator of the past half-century. His archetypal covers for the 1960's editions of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories set the standard for how such stuff should look, luring the curious with images fraught with an air of explosive savagery and wild adventure to be had, elements that LUANA lacks in spades. But who cares? Sure it's another case of putting a Dior dress on a naked mole rat, but with a poster like this one there was no way I would have missed the flick had I been given the opportunity to see it on the big screen! In fact, that poster's so boss that even finally seeing the movie on DVD a couple of years ago did nothing to diminish my love for the one-sheet and I eventually bought one, setting me back by around a hundred-and-forty semoleans on eBay, but it was worth it. It's gonna look splendid when I get it framed and hang it on one of the walls here in the Vault. Umgawa!!!

COMING SOON!!!

Verda and the Robot represent for automatons everywhere. Word!

I've had the Robot from LOST IN SPACE on my mind for some reason, and while thinking about him I reaffirmed my belief that he's the greatest of all fictional automatons, robots, droids or whatever you may choose to call them. He was more human than nearly every other resident of the Jupiter 2, played the guitar, schooled young Will Robinson about "the female of the species," gave as good as he got from Dr. Smith (no mean feat that) and memorably got shitfaced on tequila with Chavo the space-Mexican. No doubt about it, Robot was the shit and I intend to examine him along with some of his metal sci-fi brethren and prove conclusively that none of them are fit to walk in his tread-prints, so get ready with your well-reasoned points of dissent.

THE GREATEST MOVIE POSTERS EVER: ORDERED TO LOVE (1961)

Despite my love of all things offensive, I have never been down with the whole "Nazisploitation" genre (with the exception of the unintentionally hilarious STORMTROOPERS USA), a cinematic niche that appeals to those who revel in the depiction of innocent young women being raped and tortured for the amusement of leering Third Reich vermin. Most of these odious works involve some sort of secret camp located in the middle of the hinterlands that specializes in forcing captured women to be unwilling sexual playthings when not being subjected to horrifyingly sadistic experiments from which there is little hope of rescue or escape, and every single one of these flicks is depressing and bleak to the point of making one feel like a hot shower and a good scrubbing may be needed after viewing (not that I expected a movie about nazis to be in any way a light romp, mind you). But while I may hate Nazisploitation, I do love its undeniably lurid imagery, be it on the covers of old mens' adventure magazines, trashy book covers or sleazy movie posters, as is obviously the case in point here. I've never seen the movie and don't particularly desire to, but that one-sheet would definitely get my attention had I passed by Norwalk Theater and seen it on display.

WRONG SIDE OF THE ART

Poster for WIDOW'S BOARDING HOUSE: SCENT OF ORGASM (1979).

By the way, in case anyone was wondering where I've been digging up the movie posters I've been running lately. let me state right now and with much gratitude that I've been cribbing them from the exhaustive WRONG SIDE OF THE ART, a blog where one collector shares his voluminous collection with the internet. He's got so many of them that I could never be accused of aping his site, but in the interest of admiring respect and the desire to alert you to a fantastic website I cannot urge you strongly enough to check it out. But be warned: there's so much fun shit on this site that one can easily get lost in perusing its myriad wonders, looking through genre after genre before realizing you've been at it for hours. TRUST YER BUNCHE, I speak from experience!

THE GREATEST MOVIE POSTERS EVER: OPERATION KID BROTHER (1967)

During the height of the 1960's James Bond craze it seemed like everybody and their sister was cranking out a spy spoof/knockoff in hope of siphoning off some of the 007 franchise's multi-millions, and the vast majority of them ate ass. But out of all of them none had quite the in-your-face-to-the-point-of-hilarity elephant cojones and outright shamelessness of OK CONNERY, aka OPERATION DOUBLE 007 (as memorably seen on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000) and OPERATION KID BROTHER. This Italian-made spoof of all things 007 was heavily influenced by the camp stylings of the Adam West BATMAN television series as well as the myriad tropes of the Bond series and it's much more entertaining than it has any right to be thanks to the presence of Bond movie regulars Bernard Lee (M) and Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny), as well as THUNDERBALL's villain, Adolfo Celi, and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE's hot leading lady Daniella Bianchi, making this the ultimate Bond spoof/ripoff. It's embarrassing enough that identifiable players from the actual series appeared in this nigh-incomprehensible mess, but the real kicker is who they got to play the Bond stand-in character. In the story the real 007 is unavailable to dive into the film's convoluted goings-on so instead the secret service recruits his younger brother, a celebrated doctor whose mastery of all manner of esoteric physical and mental skills would give even Derek Flint pause. And who, you may ask, plays 007's kid sibling? Why none other than spectacularly wooden non-actor Neil Connery, Sean's real-life younger brother, whose performance was presumably so awful that the filmmakers had his voiced dubbed over to make him sound heroic. No one, not even the Japanese, could have thought of so brilliant a gimmick for a Bond knockoff (and that's really saying something!). I mean, Sean Connery's brother?!!? It's so utterly mad that it's sheer genius, and the whole flamboyant train wreck is capped off with a poster that successfully mimics the design of a typical James Bond movie poster of the 1960's, essentially polishing a corn-filled floater turd. All that, plus a terrific score by legendary Italian film composer Ennio (THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY) Morricone.

THE GREATEST MOVIE POSTERS EVER: COCK OF THE AIR (1932)

What's not love with this one? If only it were actually about a gigantic flying penis...

COMING SOON!!!

For those in the know, this title is all the explanation required.

THE GREATEST MOVIE POSTERS EVER: NURSES FOR SALE (1971)

This one pretty much speaks for itself. I remember this playing at Norwalk Theater in the early 1980's, which leads me to wonder how many times it got re-released; it's a German flick that originally came out in 1971 and had its first U.S. screenings in 1977, and this poster features the image I recall from its newspaper ads during my misspent youth. Not very well executed, this poster nonetheless shows off some of the classic elements that make an exploitation movie poser work, namely a woman in peril getting her clothes ripped off by thugs, a fetish outfit (in this case the nurse's uniform) and a hot chick in the aforementioned fetish uniform armed with a blazin' machine gun. Even if the movie sucked, the poster's a whole lot of fun.