The Rules of Attraction (2002)

You’re adapting a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, you’ve got a cast that includes some of the hottest young actors around, and you want to make sure that the movie is advertised as effectively as possible – what do you do? Well, the answer’s obvious: you fill your poster with images of stuffed toys engaging in various sexual activities and positions.

This kind of exploitative approach is usually reserved for exploitation movies but The Rules of Attraction was a low-budget ($4m) indie movie that featured well-known stars, a director who helped Quentin Tarantino come up with the story for Pulp Fiction (1994), and was an adaptation of a novel that had already garnered a fair degree of notoriety. With all that going for it, the decision to have fourteen pairs of rutting toys on the poster must have seemed like one of the best, most transgressive, and cool, ideas ever.

And it is. It’s arguably one of the most arresting posters ever created, so much so in fact that it was banned in the US and replaced by the poster below.

Much better, eh? So this was the poster that US audiences saw at theatres, while Canada and the UK were deemed able to deal with the audacious nature of – gasp! – toys giving each other a good seeing to. (It’s always a strange thing that the US has such a hard time dealing with sex but seems okay with all kinds of violence.) And in its own way, the poster being banned worked a treat, giving the movie an added boost at the box office.

Of itself, the poster is a humorous mix of fluffy indiscretions in a range of bright colours against a pale green background that at first seems off-putting but actually works when it shouldn’t. And its tag line is more subtle than expected, reflecting both the toys’ antics and some of the character motivations in the movie. (It’s a shame about the quotes, though – definitely not reflections of the finished movie.)

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to let me know.

NOTE: This is the last Poster of the Week for a while, as it makes way for a new format that will begin next week. To everyone who has taken an interest in the various posters I’ve looked at over the last six months, thank you very much, and I look forward to renewing this strand later in 2015.