15 Wildly Misleading Movie Posters from Around the World
Sometimes a movie poster perfectly conveys the spirit of the movie it's advertising, effectively capsulizing every reason you should see the film into a single engrossing image. Other times, poster designers get handed the title of the film and a note that says "Use your imagination" in their mother tongue. That's the only possible explanation for these ...
Return of the Jedi -- Russia
Who can forget Return of the Jedi, the classic tale of the one-eyed purple Nightmare-Gonzo and the green goblin who took off his winking aardvark mask? This list is full of posters with no clear correlation to the movies they supposedly represent, but at least you can tell what dimension they're supposed to be in. But this one takes place in a world in which the characters are two-dimensional chalk sketches layered on top of one another, while the shooting stars from every NBC "The More You Know" segment in the '90s converge to do battle in a three-dimensional sky.
Actually, two-dimensional characters stacked on top of each other in an awesome three-dimensional universe? Maybe they did know what franchise they were trying to draw after all.
Jaws 2 -- Poland
You should already know by now that Polish movie posters are insane. But we've never seen the essence of Polish jokes so perfectly captured in a piece of art. Picture it: The designer of the submarine screen door comes in with an assignment to draw the poster for a movie titled Jaws 2 that's about a shark. The Polish poster designer stops painting Wite-Out on his computer screen and asks how a movie about one shark could be called Jaws 2. After an all-night brainstorm session, they arrive at the above diagram of one shark with two jaws and join their 30 colleagues in charge of spinning around the guy who holds the light bulb that needs screwing in.
Admit it: She's still hot, even with a terminal case of Terminator abdomen. Unfortunately, Angelina Jolie is never caught off-guard while stripping down to reveal her amazing cyborg breasts. In fact, it doesn't feature Angelina Jolie at all. Surrogates takes place in a futuristic world where humans remote-control androids to live their lives for them so as to avoid any harm or imminent death. The movie tanked, presumably because the studio couldn't figure out a way to monetize the sighs of disappointed men.
This Spanish poster for The Godfather was based on an early draft of the script, in which a young Michael Corleone must choose between a life of managing his family's world-renowned spaghetti restaurant and his dreams of becoming a world champion chess player. Needless to say, not much of this original draft made it into the final film, although the knight chess piece did spark one pretty good idea in the minds of the screenwriters.
Either that, or Spanish people are super racist and decided that their fellow Spaniards would know that this wasn't a movie about chess if you put a forkful of spaghetti on there, since Italian people don't possess the mental faculties to play anything above checkers.
Saving Private Ryan -- Poland
This poster was clearly designed by someone who stopped watching the movie as soon as the first character was killed and misunderstood the realistic violence to be an insult. At least they deleted the word bubble coming out of his mouth that said, "Uh look, I'm the stupid idiot who got shot in the head like DUHRRR." Either that, or the Polish release of the film is an alternate Lord of the Rings tale in which Gollum joins up with the Allies and promptly discovers that Normandy was a lot like Mordor, only with way more brain bits flying about.
People always talk about thinking outside the box like it's a good thing. And here we see the other side of the coin: ideas that are just way too outside the box, otherwise known as stuffed animals fucking in different positions. In case you haven't seen The Rules of Attraction, it's a cross between American Psycho (based on a novel by the same author), a Tarantino movie (stylized camera angles, nonlinear storytelling) and Dawson's Creek (Dawson is the star, for some reason), and it has nothing to do with teddy bears eating pussy.
We have to imagine that thousands of people with strange stuffed-animal fetishes were disappointed. But not as disappointed as the thousands of children who had no way of knowing what those adorable animals were doing to each other.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan -- Germany
Captain Kirk? Spock? Fuck those guys (you too, Scotty) -- Star Trek is all about the Chekov.
The Big Lebowski -- Poland
Once again, the poster designers of Poland have betrayed their habit of only watching a single scene of the film they're trying to capture. In this case, we get a crazily detailed Bayeux Tapestry devoted to the 90-second scene in which Walter and the Dude visit a boy named Little Larry's house and mistakenly beat the shit out of his neighbor's red sports car. We can tell they've seen that portion of the film because all of the characters are meticulously labeled and vaguely look like themselves. They've even reproduced a single snippet of dialogue -- the neighbor shouting "I just bought that car!" a line that is delivered during the neighbor's only 15 seconds onscreen.
This brings us to all the reasons they've clearly not seen a single frame of the rest of the film: The neighbor character getting the only speaking line on the poster for a movie in which he only has one speaking line. Depicting Little Larry as a sinister figure pulling the strings in a vast conspiracy, even though this is the last we ever see of him. Most baffling of all are the failed attempts to depict the major characters who don't appear in the scene: Maude, who is played by Julianne Moore, and not The Nanny-era Fran Drescher, as the poster suggests; Donny, who is not, as the poster would indicate, a tiny green red-headed alien; and the hilariously ass-backward Yosemite Sam-like appearance of the Buddha-like Cowboy. This is essentially the movie poster equivalent of telling a lie that just keeps building on itself until you don't know what you're saying anymore. Maybe just stick to drawing the first crazy Rorschach inkblot of madness that pops into your head upon hearing the title, Poland.
Young Frankenstein -- Poland
Attaboy, Poland. Young Frankenstein is a Mel Brooks comedy starring Gene Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein's grandson and Marty Feldman's crazy eyes as Igor. So naturally the Polish, for no other reason than being the Polish, decided that the best representation of this wacky comedy was a hooded figure with half of his face skin peeled off and (his own?) mechanical hand forcing the remaining half to grin and bear it. Is that supposed to be Igor? Does Poland have a vendetta against crazy eyes or something?
Planet of the Apes -- Romania
This poster for Planet of the Apes promises squid-handed ape monsters with Michael Jackson's fashion sense, barrel-chested leading men in Victoria's Secret poses and flame-haired women orgasmically calling out Charlton Heston's name. But we suppose they had to include some realism in there somewhere -- after all, is there any other way for a woman to call out Charlton Heston's name?
Raging Bull -- Poland
Raging Bull is about Jake LaMotta's inability to reconcile life inside and outside the ring, and this poster at first appears to be an accurate, if overly symbolic depiction of that struggle. The boxer in the foreground is trying to free his arm from the existential monkey trap of boxing. Like the monkey in the trap, with its fist clenched around a delicious banana, LaMotta can't unclench his fist and leave behind the prize of his life as a fighter. It works on multiple levels, really, since Robert De Niro's performance is as close to an angry, stupid ape as you can come without crossing over into full retard.
But then you notice the little bits of matter flying out the back of the hole in the middle of the opponent's face and you realize that what they've actually drawn here is a boxer punching an awesome hole through the head of the other boxer. Because the movie is full of awesome violence, and that is an awesomely violent thing for one boxer to do. While it may lack the existential dread of our initial interpretation, it more than makes up for it in face punches so violent that they go through the back of the face's fucking head.
While one might reasonably assume from the title that it's some kind of soft core skin flick that would be right at home on late night cable, Sex, Lies, and Videotape is actually two solid hours of people talking about sex. However, this Polish poster featuring a nude woman/camera hybrid seems to promise a much more porntastic movie, one inspiring many a mid-movie "bathroom break." That is, until you really think about the videotape that would be produced by sex with that lady: an extreme close-up of James Spader's grunting, sweaty O-face.
Gone With the Wind -- Poland
To symbolize the Civil War era love story that's been ranked the No. 4 greatest movie of all time, they've gone with an electric fan with hearts in place of the blades, thus capturing the fact that it's a love story that has "wind" in the title. Unfortunately, someone told them that Southern women would carry fans around with them to church or the courtroom to hear racist verdicts handed down in those hot, pre-air-conditioning days, and their minds immediately imagined these Southern belles walking around their tiny Southern towns with big industrial-strength electric fans, dragging what must have at least seemed like a curiously impractical tangle of incomprehensibly long wires behind them.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- Poland
Our memory of the alien from Close Encounters might be a bit foggy, but we're pretty sure he was more your typical big-eyed "gray" and less E.T.'s stoner cousin. Look at the smug look on that funky fresh alien's face. He clearly just punctuated a wacky alien rap by hilariously sharting the wall behind him with whatever's spackled back there. At least we now know what Slimer from Ghostbusters looked like before he died.
The Exorcist -- Poland
According to Poland, The Exorcist is about Satan taking a liquid poo into the cranial cavity of a naked little girl while being all like "Oh, that? I wasn't even trying to aim there." Either that or he's sucking her brains directly into his asshole, which is what takes place in the sixth circle of hell, if we remember our Dante correctly.
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For more things that our foreign friends didn't quite get right, check out 9 Foreign Rip-Offs Cooler Than The Hollywood Originals and 6 Insane Foreign Memes That Put Lolcats To Shame.
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