Sharksploitation Slicks As Art.

 In the last few years, there has been an explosion of B movie slick/ digital promotional art depicting totally false content. With the lack of an industry standards board in the internet age, Fake everything seems to be the norm for digital movie promotion. Sensationalism is king. Outrageous depiction to the point that you are left thinking, this person should actually be made to watch the movie they are designing for?

 Here are the things I believe are contributing to this phenomenon.

1) The rise of competing channels on U tube offering old movies with new slicks. I guess they are trying to entice the millennial subscribers with 4K colour saturated bright and shiny promotional promises. But who gets fooled by this? The upside though is I can now view every last one of those 1950’s sci fi movies.

2)  Hollywood movies with foreign language dubs. They smack of the illegal and I am cautious of them. But with their usual movie title name change and over the top promotional art I am struck by FOMO. Will this be a movie I had yet unheard of? Example: Piranha Sharks, Only German or Spanish versions are streaming currently.

3) The original promotional material just wasn’t sexy enough. Maybe we can pass it off to a new audience if we tweak it a lot. Example: Burt Reynolds, Shark 1969.

4) In some cases, they are just plain bad movies trying to lure the unwary. Just imagine Shark Huntress with plain and truthful packaging say, depicting a scene from this dreck. Example: No, I refuse to promote in any way Shark Huntress.

5) Art tools like Co-pilot make it so easy to create outrageous art with little understanding of how this impacts movie promotion or with any consideration of the original creator's intent.

But I do love a lot of them purely for what they are. So, my nominations are 

Ghost shark, Atomic Shark, Attack Of The Monster shark, Avalanche Shark, Sharks Of The Corn, Ice Sharks, Mako, Raiders Of The Lost Shark, Sharktopus, Sharkula, The Last Shark, The Reef Stalked, The Shallows.