Maniacal Movie Poster Monday #16!

After enjoying Thor in theaterth thith weekend...er, theaterS thiS weekend...I thought we'd take a look at our usual three movie posters for the week with a superhero theme in mind...but maybe not quite so mainstream or high quality...




The Three Fantastic Supermen  (21st Century Distribution, 1976)

This Italian flick made the rounds of American theaters in 1976, but the movie had actually been made in 1967 in Italy! Now that's exploitation!




Mister Superinvisible  (K-Tel International Corporation, 1973)

Yes, you read correctly - this 1970 Spanish Disney rip-off with borrowed star Dean Jones was brought to America for release by K-Tel three years later - the same K-Tel that gave the world all those music compilation albums in the 70's. The same K-Tel owned by Mr. Ron Popeil, inventor (or at least distributor) of the Pocket Fisherman and the Smokeless Ashtray back in the day, and the Ronco Rotisserie and the Solid Flavor Injector in the past few years! And boy did Ron and company want you to think this was a Disney movie, even going so far as to conduct a sweepstakes with a Disney vacation as the prize - all in the hopes that seeing the movie's title and the word Disney together in any way would make you believe Walt's company had something to do with this dubbed slapstick nonsense. Here's that poster as a bonus:

But after those two attacks hit America from foreign soil - we hit back. Boy howdy did we hit back!





KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park 
(aka KISS in Attack of the Phantoms) (Hanna-Barbera Productions, 1978)

It seems kiddie production company Hanna-Barbera had a deal to make movies for NBC TV in the 1970's. Somehow, they company execs managed to pitch this flick to the members of KISS as "A Hard Day's Night meets Star Wars." The movie is many things. It is neither of those or any combination of them. It is a big goofy TV movie level flick where the band members are superheroes thanks to four magical talismen they own, which either very coincidentally match up with their makeup personas, or which gave them the ideas for the makeup personas. But I almost sorta digress. Ace Frehley can teleport himself and others. Peter Criss has cat-like powers. Paul Stanley can shoot a laser beam out of the eye surrounded by the star makeup. And Gene Simmons can breathe fire and fly like a demon/dragon sort of thing. They are hired to play a concert at a theme park, but run afoul of the evil Abner Deveraux (the great Anthony Zerbe, doing more for the flick than it does for him) and his evil robot doubles of the group. Eventually the world is made safe for neverending replays of Rock and Roll All Night and Beth. As actors, the band members flounder to a one. At least there's lots of KISS music to fall back on, right? Nah, not that much, really. Thankfully for domestic KISS fans the movie aired on NBC as promised on Saturday October 28th, 1978. Sadly for European fans we sent this over as a feature film so they could, you know, pay money to see it and stuff. I think this may be where America started to be hated in the rest of the world.



And three times - that's the kind of superhero movie they just don't make any more...




Thank goodness!




Til next post, you Can Poke Me With A Fork, Cause I Am Outta Here!