Movie Posters from Africa That Are So Bad, They're Good
61 comments
·October 26, 2025mrec
fullshark
I smiled at this, then immediately wondered if it was a knowing parody, then immediately wondered if was AI generated and got sad.
dfxm12
Look up deadly prey gallery, the website hosting the picture. They commission some OG artists & some new artists to make new posters specifically in this style. It's legit. This one is signed by Nana Agyq.
donatj
I had the exact same human experience.
Reubend
These are wonderful. They're so full of character. But I must imagine a "screening" on a TV would be a terrible experience to watch. I guess if you had never been to a full movie theater, you'd never know what you were missing out on.
Arubis
It’s a much more communal experience. Less screen, sure, but a lot more audience participation
decremental
[dead]
wingerlang
I grew up with VHS tapes on CRT screens. It was totally fine, I watched more movies back then than I do today.
edge17
Yea, also often the movies were cams from people that recorded in the theater so you can see the audience walking around etc.
Quality hardly matters when the real treasure was getting the movie in the first place.
inglor_cz
In Czechoslovakia ~ 1988, video players were rather expensive and complicated to acquire, so we as kids watched movies from cassettes together as well, at the homes of the few who were rich enough to afford them.
One of those parents was a truck driver who was able to cross the Iron Curtain and always smuggled something interesting back.
edge17
My best movie experiences were probably watching hard to acquire bootlegs in the pre-digital age. The barriers were just so much higher, half the excitement was just getting a crappy copy.
ggambetta
I had Star Wars in VHS, with the most ridiculously awful Spanish subtitles you can imagine. I wish I still had it, or had some pictures at least :_)
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duxup
Tons of life in these.
newobj
if they're so bad they're good ... they're actually just good. probably because they capture something increasingly rare: the human and personal touch of an artist who's not straight jacketed by "safe mode" marketing, editorial norms, analytics, blah blah blah
amelius
The combination of cruelty and bad perspective reminds me of art from medieval times.
sota_pop
All of the ones with Arnold are actually good.
5-
bonus: soviet star wars posters: https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/collecting/star-wars-poste...
(the bbc seem to have lost the body of their original article)
RRWagner
No comments here about the odd non-standard "say yes to say no" sliders for data collection and selling? I've only seen this a few times in privacy settings windows but enough times that I'm now wary of just assuming that gray means opt-out.
latexr
Not sure what you’re seeing, but I’ve seen that particular window several times (and no sliders). Very easy to “Disagree” or “Reject All”.
Anyway, those are usually avoided in comments unless they are particularly egregious, because as per the guidelines:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
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gjm11
The text claims "Always at least one exploding head" and the number of exploding heads in the 20 posters shown is zero. It lists a number of "favourites from the genre" not one of which is actually shown. The text, as you might surmise from the previous two points, has the definite scent of LLMs about it.
The net effect of this is that, while I can look at the pictures and admire them (if that's the word) I have no idea whether I can trust anything in the actual text, since any given claim might just be an LLM confabulation.
(Which is too bad, since on the face of it it seems quite interesting, and probably many of the things the LLM has generated are in fact true.)
Less of this, please.
zahlman
Agreed, and "definite scent" is underselling it. I didn't even attempt any deep analysis; I just skimmed a bit and found this bit and noped right out:
> The 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.
LLM writing tropes that are so bad, they're good.
mock-possum
Yeah it’s sadly obvious this is llm-generated
latexr
And six of the seven links in the “sources” are dead. For an article published last year. I searched them in the Internet Archive and didn’t find a single match. And we’re talking CNN, BBC, The Guardian, amongst others.
xeromal
The robinhood one is fantastic.
NoboruWataya
That and the Terminator 1 one[0] are genuinely great IMO.
[0] https://static.wixstatic.com/media/d5cc5f_5c451a5882264776a4...
xeromal
Yeah that one hooked me as well
daveguy
The Robinhood one is a direct copy of one of the original movie posters. The others are a lot more interesting, imo.
ChrisMarshallNY
Looks like MOBA needs to add a new wing: https://museumofbadart.org
softfalcon
The Kevin Costner Robin Hood one is really well done though
How could they leave out the classic Paddington one?
https://deadly-prey-gallery.myshopify.com/cdn/shop/files/D18...