Vintage Belgian Movie Poster Laserblast 👽 1978 Rayon Laser Charles Band SciFi Cult Classic

Remember Laserblast? 👽 A Teenager, an Alien Laser Cannon, and a Belgian Print Shop

Size: 14" x 22" ~ Unused archive stock. Little to no wear. I keep everything dark and climate controlled, 72°F and under 40% humidity, so any age a poster shows, it already had when I got it.

I love this one. It's an original Belgian theatrical poster - an affiche - for Laserblast: Rayon Laser in bold blue French lettering across the top, the film's own jagged green LASERBLAST logo worked right into the art, and Laserstraal anchoring the bottom in red Flemish. A wide-eyed kid has a chrome laser cannon strapped to his arm and firing right at you, two lizard-faced aliens look on from a roof, a spaceship streaks over, and the whole street's burning behind him. It's everything a late-'70s drive-in sci-fi poster should be, and then some.

No other country printed posters this size, and the Belgians went bigger and louder than anybody. Between the size, the graphics and how few of them survive, these are a favorite among collectors - this one included.

🎬 The Movie This Poster Is Selling

Laserblast opened March 1, 1978 - Michael Rae directing, Charles Band producing, written by Frank Ray Perilli and Franne Schacht. The story: bullied teenager Billy Duncan (Kim Milford) finds an alien laser cannon out in the desert, straps it to his arm, and starts turning it on the people who've wronged him - which is a problem, because the aliens who lost it want it back. Cheryl Smith plays his girlfriend, Kathy Farley; Gianni Russo is the local heavy, Tony Craig; and the poster's two "real actor" names, Roddy McDowall and Keenan Wynn, show up as Dr. Mellon and Colonel Farley. Dennis Burkley rounds out the cast as Deputy Pete Ungar.

David W. Allen built the stop-motion aliens, and they're the one thing even the film's harshest critics tend to admit holds up. The score is Joel Goldsmith and Richard Band's first film credit, written together in five days flat.

It was one of the quickest of the sci-fi movies rushed out on the heels of 1977's Star Wars, and it was made under Charles Band's own banner - that's the "A Charles Band Production" line you see on the sheet. Band went on to found Empire Pictures in 1983 and Full Moon in 1988, and between them they helped keep video store shelves stocked with B-movies right through the '80s and '90s. This one is from before all that, back when the banner was simply his own name.

Critics did not like this movie. It sits on IMDb's own Bottom 100. And yet - Mystery Science Theater 3000 gave it the full riff treatment as episode 706, which aired May 18, 1996. That was the show's last original episode on Comedy Central before it moved to the Sci-Fi Channel. So this scrappy little movie about a kid with a laser arm ended up closing out an era of television. I find that genuinely funny, and it's exactly the kind of backstory that makes a "bad" movie worth owning a poster for.

🌍 Printed for Belgium

This sheet was printed for Belgium, in its own compact format, laid out for a country that reads its films in French and Flemish both. That's why you get three titles doing the work of one: Rayon Laser up top, the film's own Laserblast logo kept intact in the middle of the art, and Laserstraal at the bottom. Edicolor of Brussels printed it - their mark is in the corner, and Imprimé en Belgique runs along the bottom.

🗄️ Where It's Been Since

This one comes from the archive of the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept together as one collection since 2007. It's Belgian distributor stock that was never posted up in a cinema lobby and thrown away when the run ended - it sat in the trade's own hands instead, which is the only reason it's still around to sell today. That round logo is Les Films du Dragon's, the company that released the film in Belgium; their record there runs from 1975 to 1988, so the sheet was printed in those years - for the 1978 release, though not necessarily in 1978 itself. I haven't seen another copy of this Belgian printing offered anywhere, so it's a rare one - and once these are gone, they're gone.

🎨 What's on the Sheet

Dead center: a young man, pale and wide-eyed, gripping a chrome laser cannon on his forearm, its green beam firing straight down the page and out past the border. Upper left, two lizard-skinned aliens watch from the top of a burning building. Upper right, a spaceship with long light-trails cuts across a dark sky. Lower left, two cars pile up in front of a wall of fire while a figure goes sprawling in the street; lower right, a couple runs for it. The credit block reads "A Charles Band Production," "Color by Technicolor®," and the full cast list, with the round Les Films du Dragon emblem set beside it.