Crappy Cover Art: The Groomsmen

I did a previous post on the botched cover art for the 1999 DVD release of Ghostbusters 2, which serves to segue-way into a series on crappy cover art that I've been wanting to do ever since I wasted my life worked for Hollywood Video between 2003-2004.

Granted, there are already whole sites and blogs devoted to such atrocities, but I'm done donating content to other sites and blogs without getting credit for it.

Today's entry is the 2006 indie film The Groomsmen, starring Edward Burns (who also directed), Jay Mohr, Donal Logue, John Leguizamo and the late Brittany Murphy:

It doesn't take a graphic designer's eye to see this is a horrid photoshop hackjob. Without the budget to do a proper publicity photoshoot for the cover art, the designer throws together a collage of movie stills of the cast and from somewhere on the web rips off a photo of Brittany Murphy -- who, in the film, actually has brown hair, not blonde.

Worse still is how Murphy's face was pasted over some other woman's body, and her head placed so far off-center that it makes it look like her shoulder is growing out of her chin. And you can bet that's not Edward Burns' body either with the way his neck looks slightly broken at that jaunty angle.

Also note the tagline: "Till Death do we PARTY!" ...and the beer bottles that Jay Mohr seems to be waving in the air (which also never happens in the film).

This is a deliberately misleading attempt by marketing to make this movie more interesting and appealing to consumers by promoting it as a type of frat sex comedy.

But it's no comedy. And there's no sex in it. Heck, there's nothing really frat-like about it either. And without the barrage of F-bombs dropped throughout the film, it probably wouldn't have even merited the "R" rating. In short, it's a fairly heavy character-driven drama, although it has humorous moments. And it's kinda slow too, but that's not to say it was a "bad movie" because the cast's performances were solid and I did enjoy the film overall (like at least 3 out of 5 asterisks).

I bought this movie at a clearance sale for a buck -- didn't know anything about it, but it had a good cast which also included the late Brittany Murphy and that was enough for me. But if I'd bought it at retail price or rented it because I was expecting a frat sex comedy -- as advertised on the cover -- I would have been sorely disappointed.