You Have Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me (The Bad Special Effects Thread)

[cojo965]

So, for some reason I've been watching B movie monster flicks. The current one is "The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but not THIS!

THE FUCK! SERIOUSLY!? WHAT IS THIS!? This is quite possibly one of the worst costumes I have ever seen, and with it, the sfx die with it.

What are the worst special effects you have seen?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

The FX in Starship Troopers have aged horribly. It was the early day of CGI and I guess people were too focused on the 'now' to notice all those CG bugs would not age well.

 

[RiseUp]

Well the effects here weren't particularly bad, but they seemed so out of place in a movie with such excellent practical effects throughout: The Thing (John Carpenter's original version, of course). At a few points throughout the film, a character will bump into an icicle hanging from the ceiling. The camera never lingers on it, and until it catches your eye it's pretty inconspicuous, but once you notice it, it completely takes you out of the movie: the icicles wiggle.

 

[Zhukov]

Kinda going for the low-hang fruit here, but...

There's this one scene in the first Twilight where Edward carries Bella around for super-vampire-speed piggyback.

Sadly I can't find a video, but the super speed special effects were indeed very special.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Many of the effects in Spiderman 3 were pretty terrible. The most glaring one I think was the tight close up of Harry Osborn the glider while he's flying down an alley between 2 buildings. The buildings just look awful in that shot.

Starts at about 2:45


It's not as noticeable in this video because of the low quality, but if you've ever seen the movie in HD, or on Bluray it's really noticeable. In fact, a lot of the backgrounds in the movie don't look particularly good during action sequences, probably because they figured people would be watching the action rather than the backgrounds. Unfortunately when a movie is this bad and has trouble keeping your attention you tend to notice things like that.

 

[Kenbo Slice]

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It had some pretty bad cgi in some spots. Azog looked fucking awful.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It had some pretty bad cgi in some spots. Azog looked fucking awful.

Agreed, not to mention the awful fat goblin inside the mountain. It was baffling how obvious the CGI in The Hobbit looked compared to any of the LOTR movies, which where released ten years prior.

I feel like I'm picking a soft target here, but 300 had awful special effects. Matt Stone put it best on the "D-Yikes" commentary when he said it looked "like it was made on a sound stage in Montreal by about 30 people". The CGI blood looked so fake it might as well have not been there at all. The backgrounds for the most part were just a random, yellow blur with zero sense of location. All the landscape shots that were supposed to look epic just looked like someone put a painted wall in front of the actors.

Lost's last season had some pretty awful CG effects, most memorably the shot of the submarine going underwater. It looked like a cutscene from a 1990's adventure game.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It had some pretty bad cgi in some spots. Azog looked fucking awful.

Agreed, not to mention the awful fat goblin inside the mountain. It was baffling how obvious the CGI in The Hobbit looked compared to any of the LOTR movies, which where released ten years prior.

I feel like I'm picking a soft target here, but 300 had awful special effects. Matt Stone put it best on the "D-Yikes" commentary when he said it looked "like it was made on a sound stage in Montreal by about 30 people". The CGI blood looked so fake it might as well have not been there at all. The backgrounds for the most part were just a random, yellow blur with zero sense of location. All the landscape shots that were supposed to look epic just looked like someone put a painted wall in front of the actors.

Lost's last season had some pretty awful CG effects, most memorably the shot of the submarine going underwater. It looked like a cutscene from a 1990's adventure game.

The special effects from 300 weren't supposed to look realistic, they were supposed to look like live action comic book art. That's why the backgrounds look like a painted wall in front of the actors, and why the blood didn't look like real blood.

 

[cojo965]

So, for some reason I've been watching B movie monster flicks. The current one is "The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but not THIS!

THE FUCK! SERIOUSLY!? WHAT IS THIS!? This is quite possibly one of the worst costumes I have ever seen, and with it, the sfx die with it.

What are the worst special effects you have seen?

OP im honestly confused. you are watching crappy monster movies from the 1950's where it was a running joke that they were always guys in dodgy costumes and complaining about how bad it is? thats what make them great

id suggest watching plan 9 from outer space personally one of the characters (bella lugosi" gets replaced by the directors chiropractor who is something like a foot and a half taller, or scene where the police leave the station at night, drive through the day and then arrive at night..

general rule is that cgi ages really really badly and physical effects dont

I hung a lampshade on that. But still, this thing was so stiff that I was unsure whether to pity it or laugh at it. It actually kinda looks like the kaiju Varan who I must say is far better.

 

[ajr209]

For me the award for crappy sfx goes to the movie "Spawn". If you haven't seen it...don't. For the love of god don't, especially if you like the comics. Now a lot of movies from the 90's get a pass from me on the grounds that many of the breakthroughs in CGI simply didn't exist back then but Spawn was bad even for the time. The scene where the clown transforms and the scene in hell were particularly awful and made worse by the fact that it could have been good (visually anyway, none of that would have fixed the stilted disjointed script or all but one of the actors phoning it in) if they had relied more on miniatures, puppets, and stop motion instead of what is easily the worst CGI I have ever seen. The movie was pretty ugly back when it was released but now on a HD TV it's almost painful to watch and proves that if you don't know how to do CGI well you just shouldn't use it at all.

 

[Scarim Coral]

The Revenge of the Sith come to my mind mainly for Padme birth scene (cgi babies look so fake)! Seriously why couldn't they just used real babies if their effect couldn't get the job done trying to be realistic?

 

[Casual Shinji]

The FX in Starship Troopers have aged horribly. It was the early day of CGI and I guess people were too focused on the 'now' to notice all those CG bugs would not age well.

I have a real hard time containing my befuddlement here. That movie still looks fantastic. To me it was the days of CGI before it got loaded with sub-surface scattering up the ass, making everything look overly squishy and fuzzy. Example: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. There was a nice starkness to CGI back then that's almost completely missing today.

OT: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Special mention to the CG claws in the bathroom scene. Fucking Lord did that look like dog shit. X-Men: First Class was pretty terrible as well. The only thing in that movie that didn't look like crap were Beast's feet.

 

[Nouw]

The FX in Starship Troopers have aged horribly. It was the early day of CGI and I guess people were too focused on the 'now' to notice all those CG bugs would not age well.

Really? I thought they mixed the practical effects, i.e. actual bug models, and CGI pretty well. The starship sequences are a bit iffy but to me, the bugs look fine.

 

[teqrevisited]

The giant gold dwarf statue (and the gold afterwards) in Desolation of Smaug looked like something you'd find in a cutscene from a game released in the 90s.

 

[hazabaza1]

I decided to give the TV show Grimm a shot since I saw it on Netflix.
The first minute involved a woman leaving the house, running down a path, and being grabbed by the worst looking "quick spooky scary monster boo" thing I've ever seen. Then a bunch of stock scream effects.

I burst out laughing for a good thirty seconds or so, turned it off and never plan to watch it again.

 

[Buzz Killington_v1legacy]

Hah. Those aren't bad effects. These are bad effects:

 

[Kyrian007]

It wasn't as much an "effect" as it was just a dumb aesthetic choice... but Man of Steel, which otherwise could have looked pretty good, got completely marred with a non-stop shaky-cam. The entire movie shot with a camera that seemed to be mounted on a washing machine with an unbalanced load. I couldn't help hating it, the effect in all of its pretention to being "indie" and "realistic" (yeah, realistic... in a movie about alien superbeings facepunching each other through buildings) just made it look like ass from start to finish.

 

[Alcamonic]

How come noone has mentioned the mess The Green Lantern was? Or that horribly close to inhuman puke that Avatar: Legend of Uung.