(You may need to click through to the larger version to fully appreciate it.)

• Poor photo with on-camera flash? Check.
• Distorted aspect ratio of said photo? Check.
• Photo of too small a resolution blown up and used anyway? Check.
• Clashing background? Check.
• Sloppy/skill-free PhotoShopping to integrate the main image with the background? Check.
• Title in all-caps in a font that should never be used all-caps? Check.
• Almost unreadable text all over the cover? Check.
• Labeled “Special Edition” even though the only thing “special” about this DVD is that someone finally decided to rescue this movie from VHS obscurity? Check.
• Lens flare just cuz? Check.

In case you’re wondering if the cover accurate represents the contents, here’s the description from Amazon:

Shawn, a skeleton freak philosopher and his drug induced zombie henchmen rule the bowels of the sphinx guarded “”Unknown Cemetery”". As an outcast cult leader Shawn is always on the lookout for students to educate into the arts of mental expansion. Four naive college kids find their way into the domain of the graveyard weirdos and their playground of occult teaching methods including forced opium smoking, sexual deviancy, hypnotic anti-religious dialog and Tarot. Dark Night of the Soul delivers in originality with heavy occult overtones, eerie atmosphere, drug usage and nudity.

Pretty accurate, I’d say.

First up is Lust For Vengeance, which trumpets itself as the “Tenth Anniversary Explicit Version.” None of that decade-long period was spent brushing up on PhotoShop skills. (Comic Sans AND Papyrus? Bold move, sir!)

The next up is Hidden, which answers the pressing question, “What do you do when the only production photos anyone thought to grab and unimpressive, and the wrong dimensions to boot?” Answer: SSTTRREETTCCHH.

For the designer of the “10th Anniversary Special Edition” DVD of The Resurrection Game, the normal trick of compositing multiple headshots with different light sources simply wasn’t enough of a challenge. No, the hurdle he set himself was this: How many different saturations and hues can those photos be in? Extra points for including both monochrome and hand-tinted!

Because House of the Damned comes to us from the same self-distributing auteur as Lust For Vengeance, it is therefore no surprise to us that he thought Comic Sanes was entirely appropriate for cover copy meant to be taken seriously.

There’s not such a scarcity in books, though. With the groundswell in self-publishing via Kindle and CreateSpace, there are scads and oodles of authors who think that just because they’re competent to string words together in a sentence (itself often a self-assessed competency), they can design their own book covers. Or hire their friend to do it — a friend who promptly subcontracts the task to his teenage daughter because she’s really better at that there PhotoShop thing.

It is thus with mingled horror and glee that I announce Horrendous Book Covers, a tumblog slapdashedly thrown together by little ol’ me to showcase the underwhelming excesses of DIY cover designers. So far I’ve mostly restrained myself from snide commentary — the covers speak for themselves, really — but my self-control on that front could easily slip in the days ahead.

I leave you with one final thought:

There. Consider yourself warned.

I just found the cover on Buy.com. Suddenly I know why Amazon thought it had a better shot at sales without it.

Camera phones have many great uses. Taking the shots for the front of your DVD cover is not one of them.

Really. Scaaaary.

You know, if you’re going to plaster a publicity shot of Will Rogers all over the cover instead of anything spectral or fantastic or in any other way headless-horsemanish, wouldn’t it behoove you to label him “Will Rogers” somewhere in the cover, instead of assuming that his seven-decades-dead likeness is instantly recognizable to kids these days?

Well, at least the star power of Henry B. Walthall is trumpeted loudly on this one.  Doesn’t the spookiness just chill your bones?

Because I’m trying to be a more positive, less snarky human being, I shall here list all of the good points to 1993′s Leprechaun:

1) Warwick Davis! (It’s pronounced “Warrick,” by the way.)

2) To my knowledge, this movie did not contribute in any way to the electoral confusion in the state of Florida in 2000.

That’s it. You find your silver lining where you can, folks.