8 Serious Hollywood Scenes That Look Hilarious With No CGI
Without kickass special effects, Star Wars would be a chamber piece, Jurassic Park wouldn't have any dinosaurs, and we'd only ever get to see the top of Tom Cruise's head on screen. As we've covered before, though, sometimes when computer effects get taken away, the magic and drama of Hollywood are immediately reduced to slapstick insanity. Such as how ...
Doctor Strange Looks Like A Disorderly Rave
Presumably because Robert Downey Jr.'s love of money isn't going away any time soon, Marvel launched a new series about a goateed jackass who becomes a better person after suffering a grievous injury and dabbling in some superpowers: Doctor Strange. Thanks to some magic doodads and the Ancient One (who turns out to be a middle-aged white lady), Strange is able to fight with balls of energy and bolts of otherworldly lightning.
Without The CGI, Though ...
Dude was swinging around a glow stick. Doctor Strange's fight with Kaecilius looks like a drunken brawl at a rave for middle-aged men. It's less "magical battle to save the Universe" and more "using Christmas lights to disarm a Juggalo of his Devil Sticks."
And those portals Strange conjures like he's using some kind of black magic Uber? A glowing hula hoop they probably stole from the Flaming Lips.
And Strange's trippy jaunt through the psychedelic astral plane? That looked pretty dumb in reality, too ... not to mention uncomfortable.
They hung Benedict Cumberbatch from the ceiling and spun him around like he was careening through space and time -- either because they couldn't CG his likeness for these scenes, or the crew was annoyed at how shitty Sherlock's gotten.
Even fans of The Walking Dead are probably as bored of watching the living dead feast on the flesh of the living living as they are of watching Pat and Vanna sell vowels to strangers. That's why the zombie show shook things up in the seventh season by adding a goddamn tiger. In one particularly memorable scene, the tiger takes out some of Negan's goons right as he's about to go full Joe Pesci on poor Carl.
Without The CGI, Though ...
As you might have guessed, working with tigers is expensive and dangerous, which is why a gritty reboot of Calvin And Hobbes has yet to come to fruition. So instead of wrangling a majestic animal, they threw a blue bodysuit on some guy and had him hop on a children's trampoline.
In a familiar sight for anyone who's ever heckled the Blue Man Group, the guy tackles the henchman, and then lays on top of him for an awkwardly long time:
"Don't say it."
Yeah, there's a reason William Blake never wrote "Guy in blue tights, guy in blue tights burning bright."
Stranger Things' Demogorgon Looks Hilarious Just Hanging Out
You're probably familiar with Stranger Things, the hit Netflix show created by the Duffer brothers and co-written by a copy of '80s Trivial Pursuit. The first season of the show finds a bunch of lovably scrappy kids taking on an outer-dimensional monster known as the Demogorgon. If kids today would get off their damn phones for two seconds, maybe they could take out a rogue vagina-dentata-faced beast from time to time.
Without The CGI, Though ...
Since the creators clearly wanted the monster to have an '80s movie feel, but likely thought that having the kids fight a keytar-playing Emilio Estevez would look silly, the Demogorgon was created using not only CGI, but also practical effects. Meaning that in some scenes of the show, the creature from the Upside Down was some guy in a rubber suit. It's a tad less scary when you realize that this interdimensional killer actually looked like your high school English teacher.
Instead of a hellish Georgia O'Keefe painting, on set, the monster's mouth was nothing but some poor fellow's sheepish expression.
At least the guy in the Xenomorph suit didn't have a peephole to constantly display his embarrassment.
The Passion Of The Christ's Jesus Was Whipped By A Dude In Shorts
The Passion Of The Christ was obviously a controversial movie at the time. For some, it was a transcendent, holy experience. For others, it was a Hostel if Hostel hated Jewish people. The bulk of the movie found Jim Caviezel's Jesus being whipped, tortured, and generally beaten to a bloody pulp, as envisioned by the star of What Women Want.
Without The CGI, Though ...
Jim Caviezel wasn't really whipped on set, except for those two times he accidentally was. But for the most part, they merely had actors whip handles, and everyone just pretended.
Instead of simply introducing a subplot about how the Romans had perfected invisible whip technology, the visual effects artists had to go back and painstakingly add the whip in (though you have to imagine no one working on this movie actually used the term "painstaking"). To do this, they had to film a separate actor with a real whip -- meaning that the true tormentor of the Messiah was this random fellow in jorts.
Then they used computer magic to superimpose this guy over the image of Jesus being beaten half to death:
Thankfully, computers also erased him, so Jesus wasn't beaten by what looks like a guy who was dragged to a Pilates class by his wife.
Andy Serkis Wore A Terrible Ape Costume On The Set Of King Kong
Before he somehow angered the gods and was cursed to spend eternity making movies set in Middle-earth, you may remember that Peter Jackson made some non-Hobbit movies. One of those was a remake of the classic King Kong, in which a giant ape falls in love with a human woman, then climbs the Empire State Building -- a scene Freud no doubt loved.
Without The CGI, Though ...
While the movie's visual effects seamlessly brought Kong to life, the behind-the-scenes footage is decidedly less magical. For one encounter with the fabled beast, they strapped Naomi Watts on a moving platform and jabbed at her with what we can only hope is supposed to be a giant finger ...
Kong was played by motion-capture guru Andy Serkis. So naturally, he showed up on set dressed like the California Raisins' haggard roadie.
Then Serkis goes up a crane and starts awkwardly headbanging like a preteen who's discovered that Iron Maiden isn't a Meryl Streep movie.
Helming all of this chaos is Jackson himself, who directs using the tried and true method of acting out the scene himself with a Barbie doll.
The perviest of Invisible Man movies, Hollow Man starred Kevin Bacon as a scientist who learns the secret of invisibility, which he mainly uses to grope women and murder people. But hey, those effects were cool, huh?
Without The CGI, Though ...
Even in scenes where you'd think Bacon wouldn't have to show up, he still painted himself like a die-hard Celtics fan and acted all invisible-like.
Even for the end scenes, wherein Bacon's character is a grotesque Body-Worlds-like monster, instead of slathering some poor P.A. in toxic green paint, Bacon played the part himself -- and to be fair, the scene is still extremely creepy.
Especially disturbing are the scenes in which Bacon forcibly makes out with Elizabeth Shue's character. Which would be disturbing in any context, sure, but check this out:
Thor: Ragnarok finds the titular God of Thunder kidnapped and relocated to Jeff Goldblum's hedonism planet, the most charmingly aloof of all hedonism planets. In one exciting scene, Thor is forced into a gladiatorial arena to fight the Hulk. The results are way more exciting than the time they gently tussled on '80s television.
Without The CGI, Though ...
Thor's badass moves were apparently accomplished by sticking Chris Hemsworth on a Slip 'N Slide with a pair of imaginary swords.
Instead of busting out the body paint and force-feeding Mark Ruffalo a shit-ton of Creatine, they of course opted to use a totally CG Hulk. To help on set, though, they threw a Hulk head on a tripod, as if someone exposed a camera to gamma radiation, then pissed it off.
And ... who even knows what the hell is happening here.
After the first scene of the very first episode gave us a terrifying attack, Game Of Thrones withheld the White Walkers for over five years, which was insane. That would be like if the Fresh Prince took three years to get to Bel-Air. Eventually, though, we got tons of sword-wielding skeletons from Westeros' Canada.
Without The CGI, Though ...
A lot of the White Walkers' undead wights are guys in skull masks with pajamas underneath, like some kind of Death Eater slumber party.
Sure, a lot of these special effects we've looked at involve actors in colored tights, but the fact that the tights are underneath tattered clothes and skull faces is just plain silly.
Watch how differently this wight attack plays out when Jon Snow and his buddies are battling a thrifty cosplayer:
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For more, check out 6 Famous Movie Moments That Look Hilarious With CGI Removed and 8 Movies That Looked Hilarious (Before The CGI Was Added).
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