Freerunner is a straight-to-video low budget piece of crap movie from 2011 but worst than that is has perhaps the worst dvd cover ever. It stars Sean Farris from Never Back Down as a freerunner forced to run FOR HIS LIFE when he and other freerunners have Running Man/Battle Royale-style collars put around their necks. The man orchestrating the whole thing is Danny Dyer who made a bit of a name for himself in British TV and cinema until he was finally able to cement his position as one of Britain’s top enormous douchebags. We just did an episode of Cinemosity where we talked about this awful movie and Danny Dyer’s role as the dastardly Mr. Frank. Anyway, while I was putting the post together for the episode I went looking for a Freerunner-themed image to add when I came across the UK cover for the movie and I was so inspired by its sheer dreadfulness that I felt the need to share it with you in painstaking detail. Here’s the cover, take in it’s horrendousness and then continue!
You might want to go back and read my plot synopsis for this movie. Yeah, freerunners, running for their lives, masterminded by Danny Dyer, yeah. So Sean Faris is the “hero” of the movie but he isn’t particularly well-known so the designer of the cover decided to go with Danny Dyer and Tamer Hassan, another bad guy from the movie. You only really ever see Dyer standing around chewing on a cigar and acting smug and Hassan has one scene where he beats up the hero and that’s about as action-packed as the movie gets for either characters. Hassan is a character actor who has had some small appearances in a number of major movies so I suppose he would be recognized by some folks however, this is the point in the story of this cover where things absolutely go all to hell. The most obvious issue is the two actor’s faces:
SO important they showed these two actors’ faces front and center, far less important was it looking like their heads are attached to their own bodies. I have’t seen a hack job this bad since the poster for Takers with T.I.’s gigantic head.
Anyway, before I get to the other major issue with this cover, why do these two men have glass exploding out of them? Must hurt!
Speaking of hurting, one of the only real references to freerunning can be seen there in the background behind the exploding glass and where the hell are they jumping from? Good luck to them wherever they end up landing, possibly onto huge pieces of glass.
But here’s my favorite part of the cover and perhaps the most bewildering:
What the hell are these guns that these two decapitated men are wielding? First we have Tamer Hassan holding what would appear to be an M-16, but then it’s a chaingun? Then it has a sight on it that due to the perspective appears to actually be attached to the chaingun part of the weapon? So this thing would empty an M-16-sized magazine in about a second while needlessly spinning a completely unnecessary sight around and around making it impossible to aim with. THEN, did they put Danny Dyer’s head on Michael Biehn’s body? I only ask because that is obvious a fucking PULSE RIFLE FROM ALIENS he’s holding!
So I must insist that this is without a doubt one of the most inept, misleading and thoroughly terrible DVD covers I have ever seen. Have you seen worse? I’d love to see them so tweet me @jawncastmart to show me.