Fake Criterions – For Movies the Real Criterion Wouldn’t Touch

As much as we all love the Criterion Collection, you have to admit that there’s one genre that it has completely ignored – crappy movies, of course. Thankfully, a new site is helping us realize the dreams of seeing Criterion release absolute garbage.

Crappy movies are, by definition, crappy. That doesn’t mean that they’re not worth a bit of recognition, does it? A new blog called Fake Criterions shows that even the worst movies can look pretty good in a Criterion-style cover.

It’s a simple enough site, with just one image posted each day, but it’s blowing up. It’s even been named one of the 60 best new blogs on Tumblr along with, well, 59 or so other image-a-day sites. Still, it’s well worth the visit.

You’ll find plenty of great posters for horribly undeserving movies like ‘Biodome’, ‘Leprechaun’, and ‘Soul Man’. My personal favorite is Kathyrn Bigelow’s ‘Point Break’. Oh, and one more that I’ve included below to give you a taste of the greatness. See if you can guess what it is before you click to enlarge and read the title at the bottom.

8 comments

  1. They should do a mock-up of a Criterion edition of a Michael Bay movie. Something awful like Armageddon.

    Personally, my favorite on browsing the site was The Golden Age of Television Volume II.

      • EM

        Criterion might do well—by Criterion, as well as by film buffs—to put out editions of more cult films; “Death Race 2000” and the original “Night of the Living Dead” immediately come to mind. Granted, these examples are movies that already have had some DVD and/or Blu-ray releases with excellent supplements; it would be quite a challenge for Criterion to come up with an edition of either that was much more than an afterthought. Still, in general the cult film seems like a market segment which Criterion could tap into a little more.

        That said, I would hate to see Criterion follow my suggestion by neglecting some worthwhile but utterly under- or unexposed movies from Criterion’s more usual areas of cinema.

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