Punching Day: South Asian Movie Posters (Patreon)

Once, long ago, there was a comedy website that only wanted three simple things: to make people laugh, to teach them a few things, and to surf a tsunami with Kurt Russell. It succeeded in two of those goals, before getting piledriven into the dirt by corporate scavengers. Some of its archives have been deleted, some of them have been corrupted, and some just suck. You decide which one this is. It’s…

Movie posters today are boring. They’re just an endless parade of floating heads hovering above explosions and that is somehow nowhere near as awesome as it sounds. But they used to be amazing - a movie poster used to be an artistic outlet for serial bombers to vent the explosive murder-pressure building up in their skulls. Look at South Asia back in the day: India and Pakistan weren’t worried about top billing, or storytelling, or not blatantly lying about the movie. They were worried about one thing: Is there enough sasquatch on this poster? If not, where could there be more sasquatch? If so, no there isn’t.

Khatarnak

Khatarnak!

In waves of fire he comes, the two-headed Sasquatch of hell! One head Kenny Rogers! One head Will Ferrell doing a Kenny Rogers impression! They’re turning Pakistani Mister Sinister into Stretch Armstrong with their outsized hands! You’ve heard of Bigfoot -- this is the other one!

This monster is not in Khatarnak! It’s a metaphor. For how life can really tear you apart like a two headed country yeti, if I had to guess.

And yet there is an actual monster in Khatarnak: It seems to be a Nazi cyclops!

That one’s probably not a metaphor, or at least it’s one that you interpret at your own peril.

Gunmaster G-9

The name of this movie is Gunmaster, just like the next dog I adopt. Gunmaster looks a bit like Neil Diamond at an intervention. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to Gunmaster you -- but that’s a classic Gunmaster ploy to get you to lower your guard while his girlfriend, Lady Gunmaster, sneaks up behind you with her Gunmaster Mini.

Gunmaster G-9 promises us an exploding city, a romance based on shared Gunmastery, and the re-animated corpse of young Vince McMahon -- a feat of booking that would require not just murder, but also necromancy and time travel. Blow your budget on CGI dinosaurs all you want, Hollywood - smart money has always been in black arts and flux capacitors.

Anmol Moti

Anmol Moti asks the viewer a question: When you strip us of all our little affectations, aren't we all the same? Aren't we all just... being molested by a wall-eyed octopus? I mean really, deep down? We wrestle with our brothers, forgetting that we are molested by a wall-eyed octopus. We smirk at our knives, both mustachioed and mustacheless, but we’re both being molested by a wall-eyed octopus. We try, in vain, to batten down our enormous titties and yet we are still molested by a wall-eyed octopus. And that wall-eyed Octopus’ name? Loneliness.

It’s a metaphor.

Oh wait, that was Khatarnak. My bad, this one’s about an actual groping octopus.

The Burning Train

The title of this movie is The Burning Train. It is about a burning train. Its poster is of a burning train. This movie does not make many promises, but it delivers on every single one of them (contains burning train).

You will believe... a train can burn.

And you will understand... it’s a lot of fun to dropkick burning train passengers from a helicopter.

Zanjeer

Zanjeer packs it in: We’ve got the classics -- bloody forehead, girl with poorly held weapon, money zombie, Elvis murder -- but you have to look closer for the real meat.

See it?

Beside the man dressed in Steve Irwin’s tuxedo, under his arm -- that is a dude murdering somebody with a motorcycle chop to the neck. Imagine that. Imagine how hard this movie rules when you have to hide motorcycle karate in the poster like Where’s Waldo Visits the Thunderdome.

Sultan Rahi's Anything

Sultan Rahi was a prolific Lollywood action movie star, and you might remember him from such roles as Pakistani Mister Sinister, and later, as Pakistani Stretch Armstrong -- but it hardly matters. He could star in posters alone, and I would still tattoo his name on my belly just to watch it get bigger over time.

Look at that poster. God damn your eyes, you look at it: It doesn’t need to pack every inch with tiny vignettes trying to stab each other. It needs only one man using two knives to scramble the short term memory of two lions.

Find me something - anything - that can compete with that and I will show you... another one of Sultan Rahi's posters.

There are plenty!

Here he is, cosplaying bathtime Ken Masters and firing snakes instead of hadoukens. It's like he took all of my childhood aspirations and married them to my deepest fears, and then starred in a movie about it.

Take note here, furries. You want to join the animal kingdom? This is how you fucking do it. You don't sew a teddy bear costume with a dickhole; you steal a tiger’s body with your face. This way you get all the tiger upsides -- the claws, the muscles, the power -- and you get to keep the mustache.

Jaani Dushman

Look at that traumatized wolfman. Something didn’t just happen to that wolfman, it’s happening to him right now and nothing in his sheltered wolfman life has prepared him to deal with the emotional impact of it. That is a wolfman watching his wolfwife being assaulted and realizing he’s not the hero he thought he was.

Now, the rookie move here is to focus on PTSD woflman. The pro move is to wonder about that black and white photo haphazardly spliced into a color poster. The expert move is to zero in on this guy:

Dude is acting the fuck out of this poster!

When they posed for headshots, the photographer had to ask him to tone it down a little. He was all: "Hey listen, Jeet, I appreciate your passion here but it's uh...it's a bit much. Can you dial it down some? I mean, you're supposed to give me 'determined' in this shot. Like, you're 'determined' to beat this monster. But you're giving me 'eat.' Like, 'I am going to eat this wolfman.' I can… I can see it in my head- the look on the werewolf’s face as it realizes what you want. It didn’t know fear, it had no experience! It was like a child!"

"...Jeet, all I see is blood, all I taste is wolfman flesh. Jeet, all I feel is your hunger. Jeet, I just realized it. Haha, you don’t chew with your teeth, do you Jeet?"

"The eyes. Jeet… you’ve been eating me all this time.”