MovieChat Forums > Angel, Angel, Down We Go (1969) Discussion > Alternate ad campaign for ANGEL ANGEL?

Alternate ad campaign for ANGEL ANGEL?


I was a little kid when this movie first played theaters in Augusta, Georgia, and the radio ads for it were so creepy that they still haunt me. (It played under the ANGEL ANGEL title; I never knew it was also called CULT OF THE DAMNED until very recently.) What REALLY freaked me out, though, was a very unsettling newspaper ad.

The ad ran on a quarter page of the newspaper, in the lower left quadrant, and it showed what looked like a partially dissected/decomposed/eaten corpse. The body was apparently male, lying on its back. Standing over it was a Charles Manson-ish guy dressed in dark pants and bare-chested, with his hands held out as if he were going to rip another piece of flesh off the corpse.

This scary image gave me nightmares for WEEKS! In my feverish teenage mind, the movie ANGEL ANGEL certainly must have been about cannibals who tore humans apart with their bare hands.

What's baffling to me now, as a middle-aged adult, is that now I CANNOT FIND any record of this version of the ad art for this movie. I've even got a copy of the extensive original pressbook, and the scary images I recall so vividly are NOT in it. (There are several alternate ad schemes, but none with a gruesome corpse in the foreground.)

My question: Does anybody else recall that gory art, and does anyone here have a copy of it, or know where I can see it again?

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Could you be confusing this with GUYANA, CULT OF THE DAMNED, a film about the Jim Jones mass suicides?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080833/posters

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The above poster may be right, perhaps the ad was for GUYANA. What you describe sounds vaguely like the ad for this film when it was retitled Cult of the Damned. AIP tried to imply that the film had some connection to the Manson murders when it recut and retitled the film. The original ad for Angel, Angel (in the few places it played, year before it became Cult of the Damned) was a picture of a globe with a big screw jammed in it. The ad line was "Peter Bogart Stuyvesant has a message for the world." The intent seemed to be to tap into the hip nihilism of Wild in the Streets. When that didn't work, the film became Cult of the Damned.

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No, the first poster is right-saw the ad or the poster in a film book about ''B'' movies, years ago. The whole campaign was switched when it was re-released as ''Cult Of The Damned''. It was a deliberate (and unsuccessful) attempt to cash in on the Manson tragedy.

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That exact poster is now on EBAY. The film was re-released in New York (in 1970) under that title, (billed as the second feature to ''The Vampire Lovers''). It never played there as 'Angel, Angel, Down We Go''.

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The film only played Seattle as CULT OF THE DAMNED.

It had been previously advertised as ANGEL ANGEL, DOWN WE GO in a Fox Evergreen Theaters magazine that was given free to theater patrons. The magazine listed upcoming film releases.

In fact, when CULT OF THE DAMNED opened, I had no idea that it was actually ANGEL ANGEL, DOWN WE GO.

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