Liv does the unexpected

It's almost summer, which means Hollywood will release their onslaught of epic bangs, laughs and thrills from now until August. Some of it I'll enjoy, but most it will be very uninspiring. There's nothing worse than wasting three hours of your life in a dark stuffy room. I haven't been to the theater to see a flick since I started this blog. But I'm hungry for something new, something exciting and something very strange.

Around Christmas time I ran across the poster on the left for The Strangers. My first reaction to it was "great another B-Movie". But when I took a closer look I realized that it was Liv Tyler. What's Liv doing in a B-Movie thriller? Why is Liv Tyler crawling away? And why can't we see what she's scared off? These questions make it a pretty good teaser. The one question you can walk away with is the look on her face, she's scared.

The treatment is very reminiscent of "Grindhouse" and although I like it I'm very burnt out on it. The color is also interesting, the warm orange glow goes opposite to the expected which would be dark blue hues. So after seeing it I thought I have to remember The Strangers and we'll have to wait and see what comes next!

Here's the second. Now we get to see who's after Liv and it's immediately disturbing. Everybody has seen a knife and mask in a poster. But what's odd about it is that it reminds me of Child Play and a couple other B-Movie titles from the 70's. The look and the treatment are absolutely a throwback to that era.

The masks are really weird. They reminds me of masquerade balls and the scenes from Eyes Wide Shut. Heightened emotions hiding behind a solemn masks. It plays tricks with you.

I love the look. Back in the 70s they were stepping away from traditionally painted posters and moving to photos, but they didn't have computers to finesse it all together. They had to basically blow up a large film neg and type set the rest. The great thing about doing it like this was the unexpected nature of how it turned out. Type wasn't exactly straight, photos had hickies and dust particles. The color would either be over or under saturated. It was a very difficult process and one that computers completely obliterated.

So now we have two posters which seem to go back to the early 70's. The 70's were a very exciting time in cinema where a new generation came in and reinvented movies into what we have today. So does this mean that The Strangers is a throwback to then. Again I thought, lets see what they do next.

Today this poster was realeased and I immediately fell in love with it. At first glance it's Liv again alone in a dated room with something odd in he shadows. You rarely ever see a scene in a poster, why because it's asking the audience to do some homework. The composition is perfect, she's like a deer all alone in the open with a lion waiting patiently in the shadows. The guy in the shadows is a little unexpected. What you would normally see is Liv really big standing next to her costar or something. This is much more menacing.

It's also interesting that they chose the living room. If you think about it the living room is where you minds dumbs down from the day and it's a place of refuge. So to set the scene in there means that no place is safe. The art direction is also well done, the deer head, shag carpet, wood panel walls. It's my grandparents house where I went to as a kid. Again, something that I think of as being safe.

Normally I'm not crazy about these sort of films. But this looks really interesting. Judging by these three posters I think this film might be more than a B-Movie thriller. After reading the reviews and the trailer it looks like it could be the sleeper hit of the summer. Then again, this could all be the work of some damn good marketing so we'll just have to wait and see!