@moviegique For 57? Yeah. The technology simply wasn’t there
And yet it never seemed like the '80s stuff was using high-technology. I guess some servos and latex? John Carpenter’s The Thing was more than tech, though, it was bravado. It took guts to make that movie that way and he paid heavily for it.
1957 had a lot of ugly monsters, and I will say CotD is at least, not ugly. Nor is Harryhausen’s 20 Million Miles To Earth guy:
3 Likes
Oh, how about the Brain from the Planet Arous? It’s a balloon shaped liked a brain…sorta.
5 Likes
5 Likes
I’m see this and I’m just…
7 Likes
I hear Joe Dante is a huge fan and this landed in The Criterion Collection. That said, Fiend Without A Face’s (1958) creatures should have stayed invisible. The last 5 minutes killed the movie.
5 Likes
And even with all the advancements in effects technology 1988’s The Brain didn’t fare much better.
Alas, there’s just no way to make a disembodied brain attacking people NOT look stupid.
7 Likes
Made for a great riff, tho’!
4 Likes
Here’s an article about the very problem. The TL;DR:
- Too much work. These days some movies have thousands of shots with some level of CGI in them, many of which are intended to be unnoticed, e.g., support wire removal and background replacement/augmentation. How do you think West Side Story (2021) filmed crane shots in and around Manhattan’s Upper West Side circa 1957? And that was a musical, not Marvel’s latest blockbuster!
- Movie release dates dictated by marketing strategies, and not by whether the film is finished or not (global pandemics notwithstanding)
- VFX studios stretched way too thin
Some sucked more than others (I’m glaring at you, The Giant Claw).
3 Likes
The “Cyberspace” world of The Lawnmower Man is just embarrassing.
5 Likes
In a movie that has a fun and semi-respectable Goro audioanimatron, the OG Mortal Kombat really had something terrible on its hands with those Reptile effects.
Let’s just say that the effects in the sequel exist and let that be the long and short of it.
5 Likes
The werewolf from 1974’s “The Beast Must Die” has a very special place in my heart for being played by a big friendly dog in a wig who looks like he’s having the time of his life.
6 Likes
Is that the one where the studio added a “Which one of these people did it?” interruption that the director hated?
3 Likes
Wait, what? Are you suggesting this was all special effects? It looks so real. Who knew?
3 Likes
Air Force One (1997)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
I can’t find a screen grab of this, but it’s the part where the Fellowship are being chased through the Mines of Moria and come to a staircase that collapses as they descend. There is a really glaring piece of green/blue screen work when Frodo has to leap from one wobbling platform across to Aragorn waiting on another.
4 Likes
The 1977 Japanese horror film House has these laughable effects by the score, but that’s precisely the film’s charm.
8 Likes
That’s right! That was '57!
What you send away for (six cereal box tops plus $3.95 S&H):
What arrives in the mail 4-6 weeks later:
7 Likes
Beaky Buzzard, noooooo!!!" 
A variation of the famous joke about making the whole plane out of the black box stuff is: “Why didn’t they put the poster maker in charge of the special effects?” Okay, that doesn’t always work either. But I still find myself thinking it frequently.
5 Likes
I like the original Ghostbusters, but there’s occasionally some iffy fx shots. The one that comes to mind is when the Terror Dog wreaks havoc on Lewis’ party, specifically the shot where it takes out the table.
5 Likes
*Snort *
Or, I guess the more appropriate term would be -
*Squawk! *
Though I still think that looks better than the Quetzalcoatl they came up with for The Flying Serpent
Granted, that was from 1946, but still.
2 Likes