@judgedread

> Ironically Oppenheimer was 90% practical effects,

Still, kind of a flat, terrible movie. It felt like a TikTok nightmare, all people taking themselves more seriously than their previous actions warranted, and presenting a boring phantasmagoria. (I saw Interstellar and I think that guy's only good at making movies if his brother writes them.)

But I mean that the big-budget movies being all completely terrible; not necessarily the special effects, but Oppenheimer was a soulless dry-hump. Watching it felt exactly the same as everyone standing in a row near the cubicles and mumble-singing "Happy Birthday" to the assistant director of HR while a different middle-manager cuts up a day-old "manager's special" cake from the grocery store, and everyone's pretending that something fun is happening.

> Terminators were also Stan Winston, Total Recall was Rob Bottin for the creatures / makeup effects and ILM for matte shots, Alien was H.R. Giger himself working on the creatures with a technical crew and Brian Johnson of Space: 1999 fame for the models, and most of Romero's later films were Tom Savini who you may recall as Sex Machine in From Dusk Til Dawn.

Total Recall was kind of amazing. Three different latex Schwarzenegger heads!

I saw Land of the Dead and this made me distressed that Romero had stooped to making cheesy Romero rip-offs. He had complained that Day of the Dead had this expansive script and it was going to be (I swear) "the 'Gone with the Wind' of zombie movies" and that he had to cut everything but Day of the Dead was incredible. So he'd said that Land of the Dead was closer to what he had in mind and I think, like, someone needs to make sure he has less money so that he goes back to writing interesting characters that do interesting things against a backdrop of random Pennsylvania villagers painted blue.