MovieChat Forums > Hellraiser (1987) Discussion > Wow... 80s effects vs. CGI

Wow... 80s effects vs. CGI


Wow... So much better than today's CGI...

The 1980s practical effects and gore in this movie are so much more viseral than any CGI horror movie I can remmeber from recent years...

Filmmakers and visual effects people need to study this and give us some of the reaction that we get when seeing this movie...

If someone gets shot or stabbed it should feel painful, not like video game CGI red spray...

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Studios will gladly sacrifice quality if it saves them time and money.Unfortunately CGI effects are a lot cheaper and a lot quicker.

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That's also why a lot of their films are bombing lately too. People are getting sick of all the CGI wankfests that are constantly coming out with no substance or rewatchability.

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I prefer the old fashioned effects to all this CGI

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At least old fashioned effects look somewhat real, a movie with too much CGI looks like a cartoon.

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Yes I don't enjoy them that much.

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Compare The Terminator in 1984 to Terminator Genesys in 2015 and Genesys looks like a comic book, T1 looks like real life mixed with sci fi(very effective). It's a night and day difference. Why does something in 1984 with a low budget look way more realistic than a 2010's movie? It's madness lol!

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are you serious? people are so into hating CGI for the sake of it.
The effects in T1 are laughable , and the CGI liquid T1000 in T2 is soo awesome

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I like movies about real people. Another thing that gets lost is the digital color correction of movies since 2001. Once you could wash over everything in the computer, the quality of real light was lost.

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are they really cheaper?

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No, they're not.

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Then why would Hollywood use something both more expensive and worse quality?

I’ll tell you why. CGI is an industrial product. It can be churned out by throwing money at it. SFX is art. It requires a talented artisan. That’s too much leverage. Best to take them out of the picture. But they can only really get away with it if they all do it, force us to settle for less. That’s a cartel and it needs to be busted up. 90% of what Hollywood does is about artificially inflating the cost, so all the cronies can get paid.

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that's what I thought, CGI must be insanely expensive, more so than special effects, and they look like shit.

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Yeah, you can google it, but from what I know - CGI are expensive. There was a video on YouTube with this cool and very professional guy (for some reason I think it was James Cameron) talking about CGI and busting the myth of them being cheap. Seems like it was taken from some DVD extras. I, unfortunately, cannot find it. This one is different but also good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6hp8BKB24&spfreload=10

It doesn't deal with the topic of costs though, mostly talks about CGI being good or bad, visible and not.

Well, I personally hate Terminator 2, one of the reasons being the CGI. I mean, almost all of this stuff was done several years before in the Flight of the Navigator, so Terminator could do much better IMO. And it was really like a huge surprise finding out that most of these effects are actually props or a combination. So, in the long run, it's just a question of quality.

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There's a funny line with things like this.

Good CGI is more expensive than good practical effects. But CGI is easier to do as it's done on a computer rather than on set/location.

Bad CGI is cheaper than bad practical effects. Think of those various cheesy dinosaur/shark/whatever movies. The effects on them are almost achievable using at home software! But if those films used practical effects, they would be more expensive.

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Makes sense

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not just the 80's, special effects in silent films are better than cgi.

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Buster Keaton was innovative.

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I love the effects in this movie. Practical effects indeed usually look far superior to cgi, but sometimes a marrying of the two can be the sweet spot. For example, model effects shots practically and then composited digitally often gives the best look. Certain things practically have a hard time being as good as cg, especially scale elemental stuff. Doing as much practically as possible is the best way and fill in only minor gaps digitally. There are many ways to achieve desires effects, but movies from the 80s sure do look great if they took their time and spent the money. Hellraiser is a great example of a small movie that makes a huge impact visually.

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I watched it for the first time and I'm a child of the 80s. I loved the effects, they felt so real, especially when Frank was pulling himself around on the floor and that horrible thing was chasing the woman up the corridor.

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Not only that, but back in the 80s when you saw something awesome you were truly amazed at how the hell they pulled that off.
Now, everything looks fake even when it's not, because you just say "oh those CGI were just real looking": THE MAGIC IS GONE

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I think thats it. It doesent matter how good the CGI is , the fact that they didnt have to do it the hard way makes people hate CGI.

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It's like a magic trick: if you see it live in front of you, you are amazed.

But if you see David Copperfield making the statue of liberty disappear on TV, it's like "yeah hack, great editing / camera angles". He's not doing anything special, the technology is, so it looks like anybody can do that. It's not magic anymore.

I was amazed once by CGI for Terminator 2, when it was brand new.
I was NOT amazed at all by Jurassic Park, by 1993 it was like "yeah, I know they can draw anything on screen now".

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true - not amazing , but i'd rather have that than a stop motion puppets from "The land that time forgot" etc

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Yes it's all very competent and properly done, don't get me wrong. There's not a single "that shark looks like rubber" moment here.

But I remember they made a big deal about the sfx in Jurassic Park, when in fact it was what it was: CGI exactly like the one before it and like the ones after it.

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cgi is not practical

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No shit Sherlock:-)

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CGI blood is the worst thing that happened to movies. Ruined horror & action genres for me.

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you prefer the ketchup bottle blood from the westerns then?

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Real blood actually is a shockingly bright shade of red when spilled in large quantities. It's not at all like the black, crude-oil or chocolate-sauce blood they use in modern movies. The 70s westerns were much more accurate in the color they used.

Click on the pic but WARNING it is a real dead Mexican narco who has been shot. There is a great deal of 'ketchup bottle blood' in the picture. DO NOT click if you will be grossed out or offended. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

https://exiledonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/6a00d8342adfcf53ef01127970ae7528a4-800wi.jpg

Now here is a scene from the 1969 western, The Wild Bunch. You will see the blood is the same color as the real blood.

https://66.media.tumblr.com/cf502553afdc9a2deedd0e98c20b25ea/tumblr_nsio6ihhXW1syptjoo7_500.jpg

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hmm.
It must be the easiest thing in the world to adjust the redness of CGI blood. there must be a slider on the GUI , or box you put 0 to 255 in.
So if cgi blood is the wrong colour , it must be deliberate!

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I know that in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver, Scorsese originally got an X rating for the final shootout scene. He desaturated the film and made the blood darker, and then it got an R. I think they use darker blood now to be able to get away with more of it. The dark blood trend started with Taxi Driver. Audiences eventually got so used to it that they saw it as 'more realistic' than bright blood and now they laugh when they see what is ironically, more realistic vivid red blood.

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Optical effects looked like crap in Hellraiser, but makeup effects were ok I guess...

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It's a movie that does a ton on a low budget.

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