CHUD LIST: THE WORST CGI IN HISTORY – DAY 8

Holy shit, CGI has changed the way we

look at the world around us. Back in the 70’s if you were waiting for
the

movie to start and the bucket of popcorn grew eyes and started
dancing

around the counter top assisted by a reanimated bag of Skittles
you’d

puke in your hat and call a ventriloquist, a priest, and a burly
cop

six weeks from retirement to come deal with it. Now we can’t flip
through

the channels without seeing a seemingly living 2,000 foot robot
whipping

up a lather in his 17,000 foot shower or a muffin writhing out
of
some
bitch’s grasp as she does a walk-and-talk about menopause being a

real pisser. Superman

made us believe a man could fly but it wasn’t until The Revenge of the Sith

that we could believe that Christopher Lee had both Jedi Powers and
Phase-Shift

Parkinsons.

CGI is an amazing tool that many
filmmakers

wield like a digital Mjolnir,

creating worlds and creatures that take our breath away. Unfortunately
through

the years some have used it as a scythe, slashing our dreams and

severing
that muscle that connects our sexual pleasure organs to the
muscle

that tells our mind we’re really good at using our sexual
pleasure
organs.
The result is oblivion.

So with that we bring you CHUD’s
latest

glorious list. The twenty worst instances of CGI in movie
history.
In
no order. Well, except the order we decide to do them.

THE OFFENDER:
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997)

THE
SCENE:
After roughly 75 minutes of just God awful everything (take your pick: characterization, plot, effects, ear-thumping techno, even some of the fighting which, you know, is the entire point of the film) protagonist, Liu Kang (Robin Shou) is engaged in a pitched battle with villain, Shao Kahn (Brian Thompson), for the fate of the Earth.  Said battle isn’t going so hot, so Liu invokes one of the lamer aspects of the Mortal Kombat games’ features: his Animality.  Basically he turns into a CGI dragon.  A really, really bad CGI dragon.  Like, Killer-Croc-ass-raped-a-Sleestak-and-this-is-their-lovechild-with-mutant-eczema bad CGI dragon. Not to be outdone, Shao Kahn turns into an even worse multi-headed…whatever in the name of Hydra’s butthole that was.  They continue the aforementioned pitched battle in a shitfest of ill-advised pixelation.

WHERE IT

ALL GOES WRONG: Where did it ever go right with this movie?  This particular bad CGI sequence was the cherry on top of a turdcake.  Where the original Mortal Kombat was a fun shlockfest populated by a hamming Christopher Lambert and some decent fights, Annihilation was exactly that to the MK franchise: instant death.  And it wasn’t merely the above-mentioned deficiencies in plot, nor characters.  Annihilation simply was bad CGI throughout. 

Instances are far too numerous to list here, but some examples include the entire opening scenes and their backgrounds, Jonny Cage’s power jump, the little dragon tattoos that folded up on themselves after the death of a bad guy, the demon that came out of the wall and ate Jade, the two merging realms, and on and on.  Motaro in full shot frequently looked like a horse’s ass.  But the capper was definitely the Animality ghastliness.  The whole movie was an exercise in how not to do computer effects. 

IN
SUMMATION: Flawless atrocity.