Selling The Linguini Incident Badly

Before I watched The Linguini Incident for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 all I really knew about the movie was that it starred the god-like David Bowie and boasted one of the stupidest and ugliest video boxes I have ever seen. When I stocked The Linguini Incident during my video store days at Blockbuster in the early 1990s I would cringe a little inside every time I saw the uniquely hideous image they inexplicably chose to advertise the film. 

Whoever created the poster apparently labored under the misconception that what The Linguini Incident really had going for it wasn’t the central presence of David Bowie in one of his few starring roles, the sublime and gorgeous Rosanna Arquette as the female lead, a stellar supporting cast that includes the late Buck Henry (Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth co-star), My Dinner With Andre’s Andre Gregory, a very young Maura Tierney and Academy Award winner Marlee Matlin, or an audacious look courtesy of cinematographer Robert Yeoman, who would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for The Grand Budapest Hotel, one of many collaborations with Wes Anderson. 

No, judging by its abysmal video box, the poster designer for The Linguini Incident labored under the misconception that the primary/only thing the film had going for it was that its title nonsensically and obscurely references a form of pasta. Instead of playing up the David Bowie factor, or the film’s stylishness, they instead decided to really focus on the linguini. 

The Linguini Incident’s title and video box would make more sense if the movie was a campy horror movie about noodles that come alive and devour people instead of being devoured. If The Linguini Incident was a horror movie, that would certainly explain why David Bowie appears to be screaming in visceral pain on the cover, his eyes closed shut, his mouth open wide. 

Why the hell is David Bowie screaming? Why is he surrounded by noodles? Who thought crudely photo-shopping the extraordinarily attractive heads of Bowie and Arquette into a mass of pasta would be a good way to sell a painfully quirky little independent would-be sleeper? 

Looking for images for my The Linguini Incident article I made an astonishing and surprising discovery: there are two alternate titles for The Linguini Incident (it’s almost as if someone realized at some point what a phenomenally shitty title that is) and posters/boxes for the film that are nearly as bad as the original, if not much worse. 

In Germany the film’s title is Houdini & Company, which at least makes sense and is thematically appropriate, since Arquette’s character is an aspiring escape artist obsessed with Harry Houdini, his wife, and their life together and apart. But it would be hard to find a less inspiring visual image than a bad still from the film of Arquette and Bowie handcuffed together. 

That’s nothing compared to the DVD box for Shag-O-Rama, which makes the quirk-fest look like a homemade fan film tribute to Austin Powers that somehow got David Bowie for the lead and was made five years before Mike Myers’ hit spy spoof.

Then there’s an alternate poster for The Linguini Incident that places astonishingly unflattering representations of Bowie and Arquette’s floating heads above a diner. That would seem to make at least a modicum of sense. The Linguini Incident does, after all, revolve around a restaurant its leads rob and work at. 

The problem is that the restaurant in The Linguini Incident is vast and incredibly arty. It’s big and fancy enough to host the motherfucking Met Gala. Yet the restaurant on the cover is the kind of modest, 24 hour diner Edward Hopper immortalized in Nighthawks. 

In other words, the restaurant depicted on the cover couldn’t be more different from the one in the film: it would be like if the only thing the poster designer for Do The Right Thing knew about the movie was that it took place at a pizza restaurant so he decided to photoshop the heads of Spike Lee and Danny Aielo above a Pizza Hut and then called it a day. 

So the next time you see a DVD poster with nothing but the giant heads of the movie’s stars on it remember that it could be worse, and, in the case of The Linguini Incident at least, much, much worse in several markedly different but equally terrible ways. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place by pledging as little as https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

OR BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY BOOK! https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author-ebook/dp/B083QSSG6G/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion+to+al&qid=1579045029&sr=8-1