These Insane Bootleg Movie Posters Will Make Your Day
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Cedric Voets
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- June 25, 2018
During the '80s, Ghana saw the rise of the "Ghanaian Mobile Cinema," reverse drive-ins where instead of you driving to the movies, the movies would drive to you. Enterprising Ghanaians would throw their VCRs, TVs, and bootleg tapes in a van and tour villages, showing movies from around the world. But as the business started to boom, competition rose, and so bootleg cinemas resorted to bootleg marketing -- more specifically, delightfully lurid hand-painted movie posters.
Unable to call Warner Bros and ask them for ten glossy posters for Aliens, these mobile cinema operators had to commission their own. So they'd sew together two flour sacks (which conveniently had about the same dimensions as an actual movie poster) and then pay a local artists to paint the most eye-grabbing advert they could for a movie they'd never seen on a burlap sack. The results never disappointed.
But for those of us perhaps not as familiar with West African cinema as we'd like to be, the real prize lies in their interpretations of famous Hollywood pictures, like a cool blaxploitation Sister Act ...
... or a much more culinary-themed Indiana Jones:
These are just a few of many masterpieces collected by Brian and Heidi Anne Chankin, who own the Deadly Prey Gallery in Chicago, named after the movie poster that started Brian's obsession. The gallery's collection can currently be found on Instagram, so people not from Chicago or Ghana can finally gaze at the wonder of the Ghanaian Hard Boiled until their eyes inevitably start to bleed.
Sadly, Ghanaian Mobile Cinemas have all but died out, and with them the greatest art genre in human history. But Brian and Heidi Anne weren't about to let all that talent go to waste, so they are commissioning the same Ghanaian artists to keep making posters of their favorite movies, clearly granting them the same creative license / total ignorance of the subject so they can turn Space Jam into a buddy cop movie starring a gun-wielding Michael Jordan ...
... or White Chicks into the third Matrix sequel ...
... or the family classic Mrs. Doubtfire into something with way more murder:
Deadly Prey Gallery
If Netflix showed these posters instead of their boring tiles, we'd never stop clicking.
For more attempts at witticism and his personal recipes for toilet wine, do follow Cedric on Twitter.
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