Billboards for Lionsgate Film, "Captivity," Rankle Parents

This is the movie poster for a new film that is causing a furor in Hollywood. Imagine this on a huge billboard.

This, from an article in the LA Times:


Shanise Laurent and her friends left Palms Middle School one afternoon last week and stopped for a soda at Jack in the Box.

Shanise, a seventh-grader, didn't need me to point out the billboard across the street. She said she had noticed it the day before.

"What a graphic, nasty billboard," said the 13-year-old.

Her sister Rachel, 11, was in agreement, as were their friends.

"There's kids who walk around here," said Taylor Shaw, 13, who didn't think kids should be subjected to such images on their way home from school.

"I think it's scary," said Cameron Olivas, 12.

Across the busy intersection of Overland and Venice was one of 30 billboards in the Los Angeles area promoting the May 18 release of the film "Captivity." The ad consisted of four panels:

Abduction, in which a terrified young blond woman has either a gloved or black hand over her face, as if she's being kidnapped.

Confinement, in which she's behind a chain-link fence and appears to be poking a bloody thumb through the fence.

Torture, in which she is flat on her back, her face in a white cast, with red tubes that resemble jumper cables running into her nostrils.

And Termination, in which her head dangles over the edge of a table, the murder complete.

Hooray for Hollywood.