The Summer of Massacre (2011) and the Effects Within

I went into this thinking I was going to write about anthology movies and where they can go wrong.  The problem with that train of thought is that I haven’t actually seen all that many anthology movies and most of the ones I have seen have actually been decent.  I don’t have the knowledge yet to accurately describe what is good or bad about anthologies and what makes some better than others.  Thus, I couldn’t do any writing about that.  I had to find another topic to write about in relation to the movie and it came to me fairly easily.  The effects work is something worth noting in the movie.  So, voila!  I now have a new topic to write about.

There are two main types of effects, practical and computer generated.  Both of these methods of creating imagery have their good and bad moment.  There’s a certain suspension of disbelief that must be allowed in many cases when watching something that is heavily effects based.  This is less of an issue in mainstream films as the technology has advanced throughout the years.  However, with lower budget movies, such as this week’s The Summer of Massacre, the effects can still be unimpressive.

Practical effects and action sequences in movies are something that I appreciate more than computer graphics.  Not only do practical effects look better within their surrounding world, but there is also an amount of work that you know was put into them.  I appreciate the effort made with practical effects.  But I’d like to focus on the first thing that practical effects are good for.  They look better within their surrounding world.  Since the practical effects are in the scene at the point in which it is being filmed, they exist alongside the people and the environment.  The people can properly interact with the practical effects, and the practical effects can properly respond to the interactions.  Watching practical effects feels much more real than watching computer graphics.

The practical effects in The Summer of Massacre were pretty good.  There weren’t too many instances in which practical effects were used, however.  But what was there was good.  I would have been happy if the entire movie was done with effects of that quality.  Joe Castro knows how to do practical effects.  This is what leads to the disappointment that I have with the rest of the movie’s effects.  The Summer of Massacre relies heavily on computer generated effects.

Computer generated effects can sometimes be used to great effect.  Don’t get me wrong.  They can be great when used to enhance practical effects.  There are some instances where they are great without the practical blueprint.  And the technology is only getting better.  In a few years, I’ll probably be eating my current snobbery.  This is how I feel right now.  In a lot of cases, the effects can look quite exceptional, on their own.  When brought into a live-action environment, however, they feel like they are on a different plane and can’t properly interact with the surroundings.  This isn’t even bringing into account the lower quality of CGI in most lower-budget movies.   The lower the budget of a movie, the lower the quality of the computer effects seems to be.  There isn’t much more to that side of it than that.  If the movie doesn’t have the funding for better computer effects, the computer effects will be worse.  That’s just how it goes.

In The Summer of Massacre, there are some horrendous computer effects.  There was a game I recently played on the AMC website (the television channel, not the theater chain).  It was a “Which character are you?” game for The Walking Dead.  This is a quiz, really.  So the images are just images.  There is nothing special to them.  The effects in The Summer of Massacre were the same quality as these pictures.  A film has computer effects of the same quality as a quiz game.  This is something that I never expected to be thinking, let alone writing, but here we are.  These effects ruined any of the impact that was supposed to exist from watching the murder on screen.  The shock was lessened by the low quality of the effects work.

The movie was not good.  That’s not to say that it would be impossible to be good.  It actually kind of got better as it went on.  What hurt it, though, was the low quality of the computer effects.  The later portions of The Summer of Massacre didn’t rely so heavily on them.  This made the movie slightly more enjoyable.  I can see the potential in what was happening, but it didn’t reach the potential.  That makes me sad.  I hope to check out some other Joe Castro work in the future and see what his movies are like without the overly heavy use of computer effects.

There are some notes before this is over:

• I briefly discussed practical effects in the post for The Deadly Spawn.
• If you would like to suggest a movie, tell me on Twitter, or you could leave a comment.  I like comments.
• The Summer of Massacre was suggested by @deggsy