Condensing the entire plot of a feature film into a handful of words without accidentally implying that it sucks is surprisingly difficult—as these 10 eye-wateringly terrible film taglines clearly show.

Here are the 10 worst Japanese movie taglines we could come across, ranked from “mildly awkward” to a “someone-may-have-gotten-fired” caliber of embarrassing.

#10
Bilocation
“A shocking ending even better than The Sixth Sense“

Image: Amazon

They really dug themselves into a hole on this one. I mean, part of the reason the ending of The Sixth Sense was so shocking was that its makers didn’t announce that a “shocking ending” was coming right there on the freaking poster. Thanks to this tagline, any viewer of Bilocation will spend the entire film wondering what the shocking ending could be and is pretty much guaranteed to be let down. I haven’t seen it personally, but the 2.5 out of 5 average rating on Yahoo! Movies hints that the surprise might not have been all that is was promoted to be.

#9
Avengers: Age of Ultron
“Dedicated to the human race who knows love”

https://twitter.com/moriki03/status/664114572400328705

Comparatively speaking, this one wasn’t so bad. In fact, the sentiment was downright sweet, but it does seem terribly out of place on this poster for a superhero romp. In the end I just feel really bad for Foreigner…Won’t somebody show them already?

#8
Stand by Me Doraemon
“Won’t you cry with Doraemon?”

I’d rather not.

#7
Rocky V
“And so, the gloves were thrown away…”

Image: Amazon

We can’t blame the writer of this tagline for not expecting Rocky VI to come out years later, but he could have left the door open a little by saying Rocky had hung up the gloves rather than tossing them away.

#6 TIE
Nothing Left to Fear
“N’bobobobooo”

Image: Amazon

We Are Still Here
“Gugoh Gugegegeeeee”

Image: Amazon

These two horror flicks share sixth-place honors with their respective nonsensical ejaculations of syllables on movie posters.

It’s an unfortunate flaw in the written Japanese language that it simply cannot emulate spooky sounds. Not that English is perfect by any means, but if you were to write out Jason’s legendary “Psycho” kih kih kih mah mah mah sound in Japanese it’d be like kee kee kee ma ma ma.

I rest my case.

#5
Alien VS Avatar
“Go ahead, fight!”

Image: Amazon

The slogan for this masterpiece (according to one guy on Amazon.jp) feature film is meant to say “It’s a free-for-all!” describing a no-holds-barred war of the worlds. However, the way its worded kind of reads like like someone saying, “Help yourself to some cookies.”

It appears they made another version with the tagline: “Ea! rth! Set! Battle!” I have no idea which one is meant to be the improvement.

Image: Amazon

4#
Last Man Standing
“13 people in 7 seconds = 0.5 seconds of ecstasy”

Image: Amazon

Yessir, nothing sells a film quite like a convoluted and strangely erotic sounding math equation. Last man standing indeed…

#3
Raw Deal
“B Power Hardboiled Explosion Duet!”

Image: Amazon

Let’s overlook the fact that the Japanese title for Schwarzenegger’s Raw Deal was inexplicably changed to Gorilla and focus on the tagline…I mean I might have given them the benefit of the doubt and assumed the meant Guerrilla, but they went and spelled it all out in English to avoid any confusion…

Sorry, now let’s overlook it. You might think that the line as written above is just some poor translation, but it doesn’t come remotely close to any of the original English taglines. Even odder is the fact that even Japanese people can’t seem to make sense of it.

#2
Avengers
“Hey Japan, this is a movie.”

Image: Amazon

Apparently the people behind the Japanese release of the Avengers were so confident they only had to state that what they had was a movie as opposed to, say, a hat full of pudding.

Probably they were trying to say something along the lines of “Now THIS is a movie!” But the slogan was written in such a plain way that it looks like its just pointing out a fact rather than comparing itself to “lesser” excuses for films.

This is actually even more inexcusable given an advantage of written Japanese. While it may suck at transcribing ghost noises, the four writing styles of hiragana, katakana, Chinese characters and the Roman alphabet can add a lot of depth to the language. In this case, printing kore (this) in katakana rather than hiragana would have gone a long way to adding the intended intonation.

#1
Detective Conan: Private Eye to the Distant Sea
“This…is bad, isn’t it!?”

Image: Amazon

Again we have a case where the intended message gets totally lost when printed. Most likely this is meant to be one of the characters describing their situation as particularly sticky or harrowing. However when splashed across the front of the movie poster devoid of context and with ambiguous wording you are left with a very self-deprecating promotional campaign.

You could say these slogans are crappy, but I suspect they might be crappy like a fox. After all, they certainly are memorable and draw attention to the movies they are charged with promoting. Heck we wouldn’t have written an entire article about Nothing Left to Fear had it’s tagline not been so bad.

Source: Hamusoku, DeadpooTaro, Yahoo! Movies Japan, About Eiga Koen (Japanese)
Video: YouTube/MajorApplePie