The 80s. It was a
time when bad low-budget movies were good, and good low-budget movies were even
better. That age of movies has long
since come and gone. It no longer
exists. Most bad movies now are just
plain bad. With advances in technology,
you would expect low-budget movies to improve, but there is one thing that
technology cannot fix. That thing is effort.
Effort is one of the, if not the, most important aspects of
making a movie. It is a desire to
create. It is a need to create. Throughout the late 70s and well into the
80s, this could be seen in both major and minor budget films. The filmmakers cared about what they were
doing. They wanted to make something
that an audience would find meaningful, fun, or both. They wanted to make something enjoyable. To do this took a will to overcome
obstacles. The result might seem like a
mess in terms of quality, but the effort of the filmmaker bled through the
screen, and the audience could feel it.
This hardly exists in low-budget films today. A lot of this could be blamed upon
technology.
In the 80s, technology was not at the fingertips of every
person with a few spare dollars. There
were little to no home computers, cell phones, there were no iPods, and home
video was a relatively new concept. The
vast majority of films were released in theaters, and those that were not had
to compete with the theatrical releases.
This meant that a certain amount of effort was necessary to make a
movie. Take, for example, The Deadly
Spawn. The writing may not have been
great by any stretch of the imagination, but other aspects of the movie made up
for it. Most notably was the creature
design, which was semi-unique, and seemed thought out. There was effort put into making the movie
better through how it looked. This is no
longer the case.
In the current day and age, a lot of movies are the result
of some friends sitting around and deciding that it would be fun to make a
movie. Most of these people don’t care
about the results. The final product is
an afterthought. It becomes more about
the fun times that could be had making the movie than the movie itself. Someone goes out and buys a cheap camera, and
they begin production. If they can’t
film certain action bits, or they don’t want to put in the effort for practical
effects, they don’t have to worry.
Technology has advanced enough that there are widely accessible computer
graphics programs that make it easy to create action. It might look like a mess, but who
cares. The action is there. Luckily, a lot of these movies don’t come to
fruition, once the friends hit an obstacle or get bored. But a lot of those seem to be missing the
same sort of effort that was present in older low-budget films, such as The
Deadly Spawn.
The Deadly Spawn might be far from a perfect movie, but
there is a lot more to appreciate than with the majority of current low-budget
fare. This is entirely due to the effort
and care that you can see on screen while watching it. They tried something, and though not entirely
successful, the movie is better because of it.
If made today, with the computer graphics technology that is available
to anybody with a small amount of computer knowledge, The Deadly Spawn would
probably be a complete mess. Or maybe
not. The people behind the movie were
invested in what they were making. They
put their heart and soul into the movie.
Though not a completely personal film, the effort is something special. The effort shows why the 80s low-budget
movies were typically better than current low-budget flicks. But, hey, what do I know? I’m as full of shit as anyone. I just write my stuff down.
I have two notes to leave here:
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