Dan Dorman on Film

You never realize just how good a Hammer movie is until you see someone try to imitate one.

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

not surprisingly, Bob Dylan is actually a better actor than all of these people:

I'm Not There. (2007)

I think we all know the score. Bitch.

I love this girl! She plays with passion and she doesn't take shit from Mormons. You can see the BYU players egging her on.

Oh, and by the way -- San Diego State kicked BYU's asses for the championship win 1-0 yesterday.

I just acquired a new poster today. It's an Italian photobusta from the 1968 film The Blood Beast Terror with Peter Cushing. I love photobustas and have several displayed throughout my home. Photobustas are actually very similar to US lobby cards, except they are much larger in size and are printed on thinner paper than lobby cards. US lobby cards were usually produced in sets of eight, much like photobustas. A US lobby card usually measures 11"x14" whereas a photobusta commonly measures 18"x26". Just like lobby cards, you would find the name of the film, the stars, production company etc printed along with a unique image from the film on each one in the set. Some images were obviously more desirable than others (just like with lobby cards) making some of them more valuable depending on the particular one. The great thing about photobustas (besides their often colorful graphics) is that they are usually not too expensive. The downside is, they can be hard to acquire due to the fact they are foreign posters.

The Blood Beast Terror isn't a particularly notable film. In fact, it's a downright shitty film. Cushing plays a police detective trying to track down a giant moth that is killing people. Cushing wasn't even particularly fond of it. In fact, he was quoted as saying it was his least favorite film of the 91 feature films he appeared in. I'm not sure if it was his worst film (that honor might go to Tendre Dracula) in my humble opinion but it is pretty bad. Despite this, I have always been fascinated by the British quad poster for the film. Quads are the UK equivalent of the standard US theatrical one-sheet poster that you still see in the lobbies and halls of movie theaters to this day. A British quad generally measures 30"x40" which is about the same as a 27"x41" US one-sheet only it is printed horizontally and not vertically. Here is a pic of the British quad poster for The Blood Beast Terror:

The only reason I liked it so much was because of the image of Cushing in that hat. The rest of the poster is bloody awful (as you can see). The downside of collecting quads is they are usually pretty expensive and can get a little outrageous in price from time to time. Even a quad for a crappy movie like this one goes for quite a lot on the collector's market. This is why I was so excited to finally find the BEST of the Italian photobustas for this film -- the one featuring the same image of Cushing from the British quad:

Needless to say, I snatched it up for far less than the British quad would have cost me and I saved a hell of a lot of wall space in the process.

"Film industry has become the ally of the food industry. Films need to be simple because people go to the movies to digest what they’ve eaten just before. And you can’t scare them, otherwise they fart..."

- Alejandro Jodorowsky