HNUM²

I don’t hate CGI in a movie. It never really bothers me. In fact, I actually quite like it at times. With the right budget and the right creative teams you can get some really impressive stuff.

In really low budget movies, it’s almost OK to give them a pass when the CG is terribly done. It’s certainly cheaper for them than the practical effects. And it’ll probably not look too much worse than whatever the poor-mans KNB could come up with. That way they get to spend money on other things. Like competent actors. Or screenplay rewrites. Or… well, in the case of Cheerleader Massacre, some big tittied women and bottles of chocolate syrup.

It’s harder, though, to give a pass on movies with a medium budget. I know 30 million dollars isn’t a lot when it comes to the movie making business, but when your budget doesn’t afford you the chance to make something work, you should probably rethink the scene.

So, I’m watching Blood: The Last Vampire, the live action version of the great, if a little short anime of the same name.

It’s all going pretty well for the first half an hour or so. Sure, there’s some bad CG blood every time a sword connects to flesh, but I’m thinking they were probably going for an anime-look there so that can easily be overlooked. But when you’ve got a big, money-shot action scene that involves CG characters chasing over rooftops it’s a little hard to overlook when the CG looks like something that was current a decade ago.

Remember when you first watched The Matrix and were blown away by the effects. The integration of characters into the environment in the rooftop chase scene was amazing. I’m assuming that you watched the movie when it came out, of course. Watching it now, especially in high definition, some of the scenes wouldn’t look out of place in a video game cut-scene or one of the Animatrix shorts.

With 10 years of technological advances, you’d think making CG of a comparative quality would have gotten a lot easier (thus cheaper and more medium budget friendly.) But if it has, it doesn’t show here. There’s not even a single shot where the monster blends naturally into the environment. In the bright neon-lit shots the movement is jerky and unnatural. And it only gets worse when they get back to the air-force base. The now winged monster is looking like a little more “actual object rather than computer generated”, though. It’s just a shame the actual object it resembles is a claymation monster, not a monster monster.

There’s a whole lot more bad CG throughout the rest of the film, too.

With the exception of the bad CG, I enjoyed the movie. It wasn’t a patch on the original animated version, but it was pretty fun. A girl chopping the shit out of a bunch of vampire monsters? Always fun. Even the non “girl chopping the shit out of things” bits were watchable.

There were some really great shots that looked like they could have been taken directly from the source. Except with, you know, real people instead or top notch animation.