Fan Works
Once a potent symbol of the feared Thorkoth race, the flying saucer had suffered the inevitable Gibsonian decline of that once mighty spacefaring empire. Chesley Bonestell paintings had given way to shoddy mattes, expensive optical effects to over-lit models and dodgy chroma-key. Anti-gravity machines hung by visible wires while bubble machines made pathetic imitations of luminescent protoforms. The walls wobbled noticeably, and the instrumentation looked like it had been scavenged from a sound studio's bankruptcy sale.
Film — Live-Action
"Shark still looks fake."
"This is from Bride of the Monster, in which a man with a spaghetti strainer attached to his head gets tortured by a photo-enlarger on a microphone stand."
Literature
...disbelief had not so much to be suspended as hanged, drawn, and quartered.
Live-Action TV
"Now he's eating stop-motion cartoons! I've got to do something!"
— Jonah Heston, Mystery Science Theater 3000, watching Reptilicus
"It seems like lawmakers should exhibit a little more awareness of what they're releasing than the makers of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. Look, I dunno, I just had the CGI team mock up a furry potato with a corpse's face; someone smarter than me can figure out if that's nostalgic for people."
Tabletop Games
"You can tell they spent hundreds of dollars on the effects.
— Chez Geek "Z-Movie" card.
Theatre
...can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon!
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon!
— Chorus, Henry V
Web Original
There are probably 99-cent smartphone apps that could do that effect better than this movie did. And they come with 10 varieties of pre-recorded fart sounds at no extra charge.
So, post-production Justice League tried to remove Henry Cavill's mustache with CGI and he looks like fucking Human Shrek!
— Lorenzoni Repeater, Twitter
Due to a salary dispute with The BBC, actor Anthony Ainley has been fired from the role of The Master. Thankfully, we were able to complete his remaining scenes with a suitable replacement. A cardboard cutout.
— Doctor Who: The Abridged Series
In the 1933 King Kong, the islanders’ capture of Anne Darrow led to 30 solid minutes of chases, dinosaur fights, and monster rampages, all realized by Willis O’Brien’s groundbreaking stop-motion animation and some of the best image-compositing work in cinema history. This version, on the other hand, gives us a man in a gorilla suit. Okay, so it’s a Rick Baker gorilla suit, and Baker’s gorilla suits have always been the finest in the world, but it’s still a goddamned gorilla suit, and at no point is that ever not obvious! And the incredibly exciting pursuit of Kong through the jungle has been truncated to two incredibly lame set-pieces: the log-bridge scene, and a battle between Kong and one of the worst rubber snakes ever built by a professional special effects crew. These two scenes show up the technical deficiencies of the Di Laurentiis King Kong like nothing else does. In the log scene, the effects team mainly shows the three elements of the action— Kong, the men on the log, and Prescott taking cover in the crevice on the cliff-face a few yards below— individually, rather than go through the effort expended by O’Brien 43 years before, and present all three in a single amazing shot. The snake fight scene is this King Kong’s surrogate for all of O’Brien’s awe-inspiring monster battles, and falls even flatter than the log scene. The snake itself is outright embarrassing; I bought equally convincing rubber snakes from the Kresgie’s toy department when I was eight years old. And what’s more, the interaction between it and Kong is in the vein of Bela Lugosi’s climactic grapple with the octopus in Bride of the Monster. Rick Baker (inside the monkey suit) just holds onto the snake and waves it around, pretending to struggle with it!
—Scott "El Santo" Ashlin on King Kong (1976)
King Kong (1976)Web Video
"Oh God, these are making the spider from IT look real!"
"This means that, technically, the Ninja Turtle Christmas Special had better effects, because they at least made an attempt to have their lips move!"
"They couldn't do a special effect for a splash? But what they could do is make him implode! Now, if you couldn't make a splash, why couldn't you just cut away, and then just leave the sound of the splash? That would've actually been more effective."
Dragon: No star shining tonight?
Lindsay: The soundstage is quite desolate!
Lindsay: The soundstage is quite desolate!
"Is it possible for a movie to embody a Geocities page? Because somehow this film does it, complete with shitty GIFs, blink-y text, and low-res pictures of your favorite bands."
"There's a shot in this movie in which Reed Richards, after he becomes the stretchy guy, warps his face to look like someone else to be in disguise. When he warps back into Reed Richards, it looked like a movie that came out in 1993 that was trying to use CGI effects that weren't invented yet. I'm not exaggerating, there wasn't a single thing convincing about it."
"The visuals are a lazy, unfinished mess, cobbled together by no less than five separate effects companies, resulting in a cartoony, CGI fakeness to the picture's most important moments."
— Jonathan Paula, on Fantastic Four (2015).
Fantastic Four (2015)."The animation here is so terrible it resembles one of those quick and dirty South Korean news reports, if it were rendered with a Nintendo 64 — sans Expansion Pak."
— Jonathan Paula, on Foodfight!.
Foodfight!.Real Life
"Beautiful-looking picture, but the whole thing fell apart because the effect of the snakes on Megaera's head was not sufficiently well done for the climax of the film. Not a memorable film, but it could have been terrific."
— Christopher Lee on The Gorgon, The Films of Christopher Lee
