Review: Gone to the Movies

The Wizard of Cocks! Hotferatu! Night of the Horny Dead!…This collection of gay mock film posters is the kind of joke that could wear thin rather quickly, but in the hands of Portuguese artist HvH, it only gets funnier with each entry. Provided the reader knows the originals, I guess.
HvH has taken well-known films from the whole history of cinema and turned them into something that looks like high-grade gay porn, but with humor. He obviously had fun imitating the posters down to the typography used (and with actors names, taglines, etc.). While some posters turn out to be simply hot and sexy, others acquire a camp quality that’s priceless (like his version of The Sound Of Music, for example). I’d almost wish he didn’t show so much naked cocks, so as to be able to show the book to more people. As it is, even if your mother is a film buff, you might not want to give her a copy (yeah, I’m thinking of my own mother). Anyway.

So, in this book, you get about 60 parodied film posters, done in HvH’s very recognizable style, which lends itself very well to the kind of big, bold art often used on film posters. I particularly like his Scarface (or Straightface, as he calls it), which is even more iconic than the real one. Of course, the art on contemporary sci-fi/horror films is already iconic (or tries to be), so sometimes, you don’t feel like HvH has parodied anything (like his Aliens vs Predator page, with its somber colors and limited palette), only that he’s pushed it to its logical conclusion–and I won’t even comment on the version of 300, a film adapting a graphic novel that managed to be both homoerotic and homophobic. That one was a bit too obvious. The Jurassic Park one is totally cute though, showing a dick with little hands that looks like it’s begging to be turned into a stuffed toy.

Gone to the Movies is the kind of book that should be given to friends, if only to see if they have the necessary film knowledge to remain one’s friends. I scratched my head a couple of times, by the way…
The artists had a blog, as does the publisher. You can find the book at Amazon.