Movie Posters from Africa That Are So Bad, They're Good

Summary

What do you get when you cross Hollywood, VHS tapes, and a bag of flour?If you were in Ghana in the late 1980s or 90s, the answer was pure, chaotic brilliance, hand-painted movie posters so wild, so bold, and so anatomically impossible, they’re now considered collectible art.Welcome to the world of Ghanaian movie posters. They’re gory. They’re vibrant. They’re often hilarious. And they’re unlike anything you’ve ever seen.The Birth of a Bizarre Art FormBack in the 1980s, Ghana was in the midst of a cinematic revolution. While most of the Western world had access to video rental shops and cable channels, in Ghana, things worked a little differently. Imported VHS tapes were shown at mobile cinemas — makeshift screenings often set up in open-air markets, community halls, or anywhere a crowd could gather.Enter the travelling cinema operators, armed with a television set, a generator, a VCR… and a bag of posters that didn’t actually exist. See, most of these movies came without any promotional materials. No glossy posters. No slick advertising. So what did they do?They hired local artists to paint them.Often working with nothing but word-of-mouth summaries or bootleg VHS covers as reference, these artists let their imaginations run completely wild — and the results were absolutely glorious.Painted on Flour Sacks, Fuelled by ImaginationThe posters were typically painted on used flour sacks, sewn together and primed for colour. These weren’t just any flour sacks either — they were durable, easy to roll up, and ready for reuse.And the designs? Let’s just say they didn’t rely too heavily on accuracy.Sylvester Stallone often had twice the muscles.Freddy Krueger was sometimes joined by snakes for no apparent reason.Terminator had glowing eyes, extra arms, and sometimes a bazooka, just for good measure.It didn’t matter if the movie was a romantic comedy or a horror flick — there was always blood. Always at least one exploding head. And if you were lucky, a helicopter bursting in...