The Gravedancers

For being one of the 8 Films to Die For at the AfterDark Horrorfest, Mike Mendez’s The Gravedancers is actually pretty good. Well, it’s pretty good up until the final 5-10 minutes when it becomes a special effects extravaganza filled with an awful CGI ghost head and hand. Obviously budget was a factor here, but that doesn’t excuse whatever was going on in the last couple of minutes of the film.

Jaws 3-D

By 1983, Jaws had jumped the shark (sorry). Jaws 3-D sees a great white shark sneak into Seaworld and eat people. It’s a fun movie, but it’s not good. It features one of the worst effects in the franchise in the scene in which the shark is destroyed. The shark breaks through a glass window that isn’t even visible on the screen and is then blown up with a grenade. The animated jaws of the shark float toward the screen in an attempt to cash in on the 3-D craze at the time, but the effect generates more laughs than screams.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

How did a movie made in 2010 have worse effects than a movie made in 1984? Your guess is as good as mine, but the scene in Samuel Bayer’s remake of Wes Craven’s classic in which Freddy spies on Nancy through the wall in the bedroom looks so bad that it makes the same effect in the original look masterful in comparison.

Let the Right One In

Another scene that sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise fantastic film, the cat scene in Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In is severely out of place. Virginia (Ika Nord) has been turned into a vampire and is attacked by cats in her friend’s (Karl Robert Lindgren) apartment. Rather than use real cats, Alfredson opted to use CGI cats, and the results are…..not that great.