Vintage 1982 Angkor Kampuchea Express Belgium Movie Poster 🖼️ Cambodia Cult Action Adventure, Woody Strode

Size: 14 x 22 in ~ Unused archive stock, little to no wear. I have a small stack of these from the same Cosmopolis lot, so they vary a little one to the next.

🐘 An Elephant Loaded With TNT, and a Belgian Sheet With the Wrong Name On It

I'll tell you straight why this one grabbed me: it isn't just that a war elephant hauling dynamite past a burning Angkor Wat is about as unhinged as movie poster art gets - it's that the biggest name on the sheet is wrong. This is the original Belgian theatrical poster for Angkor / Kampuchea Express (also released as Angkor: Cambodia Express), a 1982 Thai-Italian war-adventure picture, and along the bottom the Belgian distributor billed the cast in bold as ROBERT WAGNER · CHRISTOPHER GEORGE · WOODY STRODE · NANCY KWAN. Only Robert Wagner isn't in this film. The lead is Robert Walker Jr. Maybe somebody in Brussels mixed up two actors named Robert, maybe they just liked the bigger name better - either way it's printed right there on the paper, and it's exactly the kind of quirk that makes a piece like this fun to own.

🎬 The Film, and the Robert Who Actually Starred In It

Walker Jr. plays journalist Andrew Cameron, searching for his missing Vietnamese lover in Cambodia under Pol Pot - real, brutal history that early-'80s genre cinema had a habit of turning into pulp adventure. Christopher George plays MacArthur, Woody Strode and Nancy Kwan round out the cast, with Thai star Sorapong Chatree also appearing. The poster credits the direction to Alex King; the film is usually credited to Thai producer-director Lek Kitiparaporn, and some listings carry the two names together. Music is by Stelvio Cipriani, the screenplay by Roger Crutchley and Kailan. It's Thai-Italian, it never got a U.S. theatrical release, and American audiences first met it on VHS in 1986 - and between Angkor, Kampuchea Express and Cambogia Express in Italy, it went by a different name nearly everywhere it played.

The producer alongside Kitiparaporn was Dick Randall - born Irving Reuben in the Catskills in 1926, a gag writer for Milton Berle in the 1950s who went on to produce exploitation pictures in Italy, Hong Kong, Spain, the Philippines and Britain. Here's the part I love for a Belgian poster: the very first film Randall ever produced was Holiday in Brussels (1959), a documentary about the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Twenty-odd years later one of his pictures came back to Brussels on this sheet. The same year as Angkor he also made the slasher Pieces, which tells you the range of the man.

A small bonus for Star Trek fans: Robert Walker Jr. played Charlie Evans in the original series episode "Charlie X" back in 1966 - the orphan with the terrifying psychic powers. That episode was directed by Lawrence Dobkin, and Dobkin turns up again on another sheet from this same archive, for Johnny Yuma. Small world, movie posters.

🎖️ Two Names Here Carry Real Screen History

Woody Strode and Nancy Kwan are the real deal, buried in a film most people have never heard of - half the fun of collecting this stuff. Strode was a pioneering Black actor and former athlete who worked with John Ford and appeared in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Kwan was one of the first Asian actresses to become a Hollywood star, in The World of Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song. Finding them billed under an adventure picture this obscure, on a sheet that gets its own leading man's name wrong, is exactly the kind of thing that makes a poster worth digging into.

🇧🇪 A Belgian Sheet, Two Languages

The header across the top says it plainly: "Cosmopolis Films présente / stelt voor" - French and Flemish side by side, because Belgium has always sold films to two language communities at once. It's a portrait sheet in Belgium's own poster size - Belgium is the only country in the world that used film posters of this size, and the Belgian sheets were flamboyant next to their counterparts around the globe. Between the size, the graphics and how few are left, they're a favourite among collectors. At the foot: "Imprimé en Belgique," and the printer's imprint, EDICOLOR - Bruxelles, with the print shop's old phone numbers still legible underneath.

📽️ Cosmopolis Films, Brussels

Cosmopolis Films was a Brussels film distributor at 4 rue des Palais in Schaerbeek, in the middle of the city's film-distribution district - Cine Vose Films and Elan Films were on the same street, Columbia Films on rue Royale. Trade directories place Cosmopolis at that address as far back as 1953, and Belgian censorship records show it distributing films from 1947 into 1987 - forty years in the business. Its catalogue ran the gamut of postwar genre cinema: peplum and sword-and-sandal pictures, spaghetti westerns, Eurospy thrillers, Japanese kaiju, Hong Kong martial arts, and in the end the kind of international co-production adventure picture this poster advertises.

This sheet comes from the archive of the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept together as one collection since 2007. Posters were printed to be pasted up and thrown away; a distributor's own archive is how a stack like this survives.

🔥 The Artwork

Whoever painted this Belgian sheet was not interested in subtlety. Three screaming faces dominate the top - one man in a red beret and eye patch, mid-shout - above soldiers firing machine guns from the back of a charging elephant with wooden crates of TNT strapped to its flank. Angkor Wat's towers rise out of the flames below, a gunman takes aim to the right, a man hangs upside down from a tree, and a couple huddles together, half-submerged in water, at the bottom. It's one continuous wall of orange and red, and it is an absolute showstopper on a wall.

📦 Condition

Everything I hold is stored in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled - whatever age a sheet shows, it had before it came to me, and it will reach you in the same shape.