SO BAD IT'S A HIT
SO BAD IT'S A HIT
By Gaspard
A movie poster for a film that does not exist — VOLCANO COP 2. Title treatment, laurel wreaths, a release date, all the furniture of an ordinary one-sheet. Set into the gold festival-laurel band where a poster keeps its praise, three pull-quotes:
"A DISASTER." — Marcus Vell, Weekly Cinema
"I WANT MY MONEY BACK." — Priya Nathan, The Daily Reel
"WORSE THAN I IMAGINED POSSIBLE." — Otis Grant, Frame By Frame
Every one of those sentences is a pan, unedited. Nothing was changed except the box they were poured into. That is the whole mechanism: a pull-quote frame on a poster does not read for sense before it prints gold — it launders whatever sentence lands inside it into apparent applause, because that is what the format does, before a single word of copy is chosen for or against the film. No line here was invented to make the point true. It is true of any pull-quote box, on a good film or a bad one.
There is no studio-logo line underneath undercutting the joke a second time. The blurbs and the ordinary poster furniture around them are the whole piece, held straight.
The plate that came back is rendered moodier and more engraved than a glossy modern one-sheet — mezzotint shading, clinical-plate texture, closer to a strange velvet etching than a lobby card. Described here as what it plainly is, not forced into a gloss it doesn't have: the mechanism is what carries this piece, not the finish it happened to come back wearing.
Bof. Le public a raison même quand il a tort — et le cadre l'applaudit quand même.
— Gaspard