We Can’t All Afford Ray Harryhausen

To a certain extent, special effects is one of those aspects of filmmaking where the budget’s on the screen. You can tell if they could afford high-quality effects and a good team and so forth, and you can tell if they couldn’t. It’s unfortunate, and we could frankly get into how much studios cheap out on special effects and are driving visual effects companies to bankruptcy by demanding high-quality effects for as little as possible, less than it costs. But that’s the opposite end of the spectrum with what we’re doing her.

It’s also true that good effects can be the result of improved technology. While some of the effects work of, say, King Kong is outstanding, some of it has aged poorly. That’s fair. Almost anything involving water is also iffy, because water doesn’t scale well. Nothing you can do about that. There are some things that put everything on an even playing field. However, even given a combination of low budget and doing the best you can, some effects are better than others.

We can all name dozens of low-budget science fiction and horror movies that look ridiculous. I recently saw a movie where the monster suit appeared to be made out of plastic dry cleaner bags and Mardi Gras beads. It is very true. If you’re a fan of movies with puppets in the corner, you can talk about dogs covered in carpet samples and just filming ordinary-sized bugs in front of postcards. There’s something charming about these, but it’s hard to call them good.

One surprisingly high-quality example from that array of movies is the largest of the spiders in Giant Spider Invasion, which is a VW bug made up to look like a spider, including people inside it to move the legs. That is an extremely clever solution to the problem. And I’m sure the Killer Shrews people thought they were being clever, too, but since you could still tell what breed all the dogs were under their carpets, they were decidedly less so.

Obviously your ideal would’ve been to have Ray Harryhausen and his stop-motion mastery, and not everyone could manage that. Not everyone could manage the high-quality Guys In Suits of the classic kaiju movies. A really good monster suit is expensive. So you show the suit as seldom as possible and for preference in dimmer light than everyone else. There are ways around it. Some people were just better at finding them than others.