The Art Of The B Movie Poster — The Art Of The B Movie Poster(book)

The Art Of The B Movie Poster is a colourful & often garish large format coffee-table book. It takes in a host of largely obscure, often lurid & provocative movie posters from the early exploitation genre of the 1940’s & 50’s. Through to the 1960’s, the 1970’s, and a few from the 1980’s.

The book comes in the form of a nicely presented hardback edition, taking in over three hundred pages. In all the book takes in total of one thousand posters- with a blend of full page presentation for single stand-out posters, to six to eight individual posters per page.

The book is broken up into sub-genre selections, taking in Moral Panic, Action, Horror, Sci-Fi, and Sex. Each section runs  between forty-to- around seventy pages, with the largest sections been sex & horror.

Each section is sub themed- so for example in the horror part of the book we move from Poverty Row( which takes in cheapy 30’s & 40’s films), Bela B’s( taking in early Bela Lugosi films). Onto Birth Of The Living Dead,  Carried Away( films featuring distressed or unconscious women been carried away by various ghouls/ fiends/ monster). Through to  Mexican Horror, Gimmicks, Karloff The Uncanny( Boris  Karloff movies), and beyond.

In each sub-section you get a short write-up about the subgenre, and each main section of the book opens with a three to four page overview on the said exploration genre. It’s fair to say this is picture book first & foremost, though  along the way you do pick up some interesting history, facts, and information.

On the whole I found The Art Of The B Movie Poster an enjoyable romp though exploration movie art. And even as a  long time fan of the form,  I found a whole host of posters I’d never seen before. So it’s well worth picking up if you a fan any form B movie/exploration movie- as there’s a lot of ground covered- so there’s something to please everyone.