It's All Ruined!

The other day at work I was surfing doing research on Amazon, and I came across the DVD for Idle Hands, a movie probably best known for having a young Jessica Alba. I don't remember much about the movie, except that it was kind of a black comedy about dead guys coming back to life. What caught my attention was how crappy the DVD cover was to the original poster. I remember back when the movie came out in 1999 they advertised it on the back of comic books, and the distinctive poster design really caught my eye and stuck with me all these years.

I imagine there are legal issues of usage involved, but they sure went from good to crappy real fast:

DVD Cover

Movie Poster

Speaking of other downhill slides, the movie poster for the 2008 Day of the Dead remake (which I never saw, and did it even come out in theaters, or was it straight to video?) is kind of cool. But for some reason they traded cool for a big pile of turd with the DVD cover:

DVD Cover

Movie Poster

Sure, the DVD cover was a lenticular image of a vomiting zombie (which may be a real bonus for some people), but it really didn't improve on the original poster. Look at that drooling zombie. That's quality.

One last one - Dead Man's Shoes was a movie that came out in the UK in 2004, but from what I gather was only released on DVD in the US. It was a surprisingly good revenge movie, but I think they made a mistake with the DVD cover:

DVD Cover

Movie Poster

The DVD cover isn't that bad, but I really wish they could have reused the movie poster design since its got a lot more of a graphic punch. Incidentally, I like the horizontal format that they use for movie posters in the UK and Europe. Why can't we do that more over here?