10 Hilariously Terrible CGI Scenes In 90s Movies

CGI is never as easy as some make it look. In the 90s, as the technology was literally being created as it was being used, it was even more difficult as artists were still feeling their way in the dark. But for every Terminator 2, there were many more like Anaconda. Even today,  300 million dollar films sometimes have horrible CGI. Anyone who watched the Whedon cut of Justice League can attest to that.

Sometimes it’s better just to not use CGI at all, to either do practical effects or figure out a way to get around it, otherwise, the filmmaker risks pulling the viewer out of the experience or worse, getting laughter where none is wanted.

10 The Monkeys And Wasps In ‘Jumanji’ (1995)

The story is, a couple of bored kids find a game called Jumanji and start to play. As they play, the game causes things to happen in the real world. Suddenly wasps appear and try to sting the kids, and then monkeys pop up and tear apart the kitchen.

The wasps are not good, looking something armored spiny bats, but the monkeys are worse, with weird, frozen faces and bulging staring eyes. They are swinging from doors, smashing dishes, even set themselves on fire, but the effect just doesn’t work. Best to cut away quickly.

9 The Shark Eating Sam Jackson In ‘Deep Blue Sea’ (1999)

This one is notorious for its bad shark CGI overall, but the worst is the scene of Samuel L. Jackson’s character being caught and eaten by a massive shark that seems to change size between shots. Deep Blue Sea is one of Renny Harlin’s overblown masterpieces; too much money, silly dialogue and premise, and over-the-top everything else. Except for the CGI.

While the rest of the movie can be absurd fun, the CGI is terrible. The shark comes out of the water from a hole that seems too small for it and starts chewing on a laughingly bad ‘Sam Jackson’ that looks more like a gaming avatar circa 1999 than an award-winning actor.

8 The Anaconda In ‘Anaconda’ (1997)

Anaconda had a great cast; Jon Voight, Jennifer Lopez, Eric Stoltz, and Owen Wilson, a good budget (about 45 million, according to IMDb), and an animatronic snake that broke down. But the biggest snake effects were done with CGI. That’s where the fails begin. They tried, but the scenes of the snake wrapping itself around Lopez and Ice Cube look pretty terrible.

The film has gone on to develop a cult following of people who enjoy it for being a somewhat trashy monster movie, with the bad CGI only adding to the fun.

7 The Werewolves In ‘An American Werewolf in Paris’ (1997)

To do a werewolf movie, the first thing the filmmakers have to do is nail the werewolves. If the film can’t convince the viewer that a person can turn into a werewolf and that werewolves are real, then don’t bother making it at all. Or make it animated. This is film didn’t nail down that basic premise, but they made it anyway.

The werewolf transformation is a combination of the practical (the clothes ripping, hair bulging out) and CGI (everything else, including the full wolf). It doesn’t work. The werewolves look they’re not in the same film as everyone else, and shown today, would elicit laughter, not chills.

6 ‘Spawn’ (1997)

Just about every CGI effect in Spawn is bad. In fact, it goes from bad to progressively worse. Spawn’s cape and chains are unconvincing, and then the film gets to bigger scenes, like the Hell sequence where Spawn is sent by the devil back to earth. Nothing really works, it looks more like ’70s keyed-in greenscreen than CGI; the flames are bad, the seething lava is bad, the demons are really bad.

The practical effects are really quite good; Spawn’s costume looks great, John Leguizamo as The Violator is excellent. It’s just when the movie goes for CGI that it takes the viewer right out of the film.

5 Blarp From ‘Lost in Space’ (1998)

Part monkey, part iguana, and all nightmare fuel. Lost in Space was an attempt to reboot the 1960s TV series for a new audience, while hopefully holding on to its nostalgic appeal. While the film itself is an okay, if bland, retelling of the series, Blarp, the creature found by Matt LeBlanc, was a mess.

The effect was created by LeBlanc holding a placeholder puppet, and then the CGI was put on top of that, but it never looks like LeBlanc is holding anything. The movement of Blarp and LeBlanc doesn’t match well, and the character design doesn’t help. Originally it was to be animatronic, but that was not deemed realistic enough.

4 “The Lawnmower Man” (1992)

Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man was ahead of its time, and maybe too ahead of its time. When the character enters the film’s virtual reality environment, it’s a nightmare of terrible CGI and ideas that couldn’t really be expressed in the tech of that time.

The producers should either have invested more money in the sequence, more time, or have done it practically and used that as the basis for the CGI effects. Or, they realized there was just no way they could work it out on their budget.

3 “Air Force One” (1997)

Air Force One is a Harrison Ford film about a group of terrorists, led by Gary Oldman, taking over Air Force One, featuring Ford as the President fighting them with guerilla tactics. Pure fantasy, but fun and escapist. There’s hardly any CGI in the movie, until the climactic fight and crash of the plane into the water. That’s where the problem begins and takes the viewer out of the movie.

The audience sees the plane, with the villain kneeling in the doorway, and it already looks bad as the matting is wrong. Then it hits the water. Water is hard to do right in CGI, and this whole scene is dependant on getting the plane to hit the water and the audience to buy it. They don’t. The plane skids into the water, but the water either doesn’t react or reacts wrong, they try to cover it with spray, but it looks like they’re trying to cover it with spray.

2 “Star Wars Special Edition” (1997)

George Lucas is justly celebrated for his support of the development of pioneering special effects, his Industrial Light and Magic has long been the gold standard of special effects in Hollywood, but this is bad. Lucas can sometimes be overeager to incorporate CGI when it’s completely unnecessary, and the changes in the Star Wars Special Edition shows that. Not everything needs CGI, particularly when the effect of that CGI takes viewers right out of the movie.

Jabba’s size changes from shot to shot and he never seems to be on the same plane with Han, or even the same film. The scene is unneeded anyway, as viewers already got all this information previously. Better to omit the scene than to use it poorly.

1 “The Mummy Returns” (2001)

The terrible Dwayne Johnson CGI Scorpion King. It’s bad. Somehow, they took a handsome guy like Dwayne Johnson and make him look like a nightmare. Recreating an actual person with CGI and making them look human is no easy feat, but it’s hard to imagine anything looking faker than this.

Recently the Corridor Crew CGI artists on YouTube tried to fix it, using a DVD rip and more modern tech. They were able to improve it, but just about anything would be an improvement.

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Tom Stewart
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Tom Stewart is an actor, playwright, and writer living in Seattle, WA.

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