Since the dawn of computers, movies have used them to generate images. This happens because they are either too lazy to use practical effects or they are just making impossible things. These 10 movies have the worst CGI in the world of movies. But all of them are better than Eli Roth’s movie Ice Cream Man. Even the worst CGI is better than the use of generative AI in filmmaking.

#10 Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

I introduced Birdemic: Shock and Terror to my children because apparently part of being a parent is exposing the next generation to important works of cinema. My son, Chicken, was genuinely scared by the attacking birds. He is a pathetic coward. My daughter, Alpha Dora, took a different approach and hit the television with a clothes hanger.

Calling what happens in Birdemic “CGI” feels disrespectful to computers. The birds look like someone found an animated eagle GIF on a GeoCities page, copied and pasted it forty times, and slapped the resulting flock directly over the footage. They don’t interact with the environment. They barely interact with physics. There’s no convincing lighting, shadows, or attempt to make these creatures appear as though they occupy the same physical universe as the actors. Alpha Dora apparently understood the assignment better than anyone: while other children might hide behind the couch from menacing bird gifs, my child looked upon these digital abominations, grabbed the nearest available weapon, and attempted to physically defend our household from the visual effects. She saw the CGI in Birdemic and tried to kill it. I can’t criticize that decision.

#9 – The Lawnmower Man (1992)

In the summer of 1992, I was an unemployed 12-year-old, so I did what any ambitious child would do: I started mowing people’s lawns for money. Naturally, when I saw a movie called The Lawnmower Man, I assumed it was a training video. The CGI was absolute dogshit, but that didn’t concern me. Employment training videos always look like shit. I just figured the floating chrome heads, primitive polygons, and psychedelic virtual-reality sex were somehow important information that OSHA needed me to know before operating a Craftsman.

Unfortunately, The Lawnmower Man left me woefully unprepared for the actual lawn-care industry. Customers became disturbed when I showed up with a lawnmower and an entire VR rig. They became considerably more upset when I started shooting chimpanzees. Apparently you’re just supposed to cut the grass, collect your twenty bucks, and leave. Nobody told me that. Pierce Brosnan certainly didn’t tell me that. It was a terrible summer. I made no money, the chimpanzee situation got completely out of hand, and the CGI still looked like somebody had given a Windows 3.1 screensaver a $10 million budget.

#8 – Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

My daughter Alpha Dora is very interested in the martial sport of mortal combat and quite active on the youth MMA circuit. She recently won the Tri-State MMA Championship in the Girls 8-to-10 division, although her victory became somewhat controversial after she tore the heart out of her competitor. When horrified officials asked where she learned such a move, Alpha Dora proudly explained, “I learned it by watching Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.” As a parent, this was deeply embarrassing. Not because of the heart thing. Kids get competitive. I was embarrassed because now everyone knows I let my child watch Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

Worse, it’s absolutely terrible instructional material. The CGI creatures look like unfinished PlayStation assets, the environments resemble screensavers, and the climactic animality battle is so spectacularly unconvincing that no responsible youth MMA organization should recognize any of its techniques. If Alpha Dora is going to rip out another competitor’s vital organs, I want her learning proper form—not studying a movie where the visual effects department couldn’t convincingly render a goddamn dragon. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation isn’t merely terrible CGI. It’s bad training for America’s next generation of youth MMA champions.

#7 – Son of the Mask (2005)

I never wanted to watch Son of the Mask. Unfortunately, one afternoon Jamie Kennedy entered our home carrying a gun and a DVD of Son of the Mask and informed us that nobody had appreciated “his masterpiece” in theaters, so we were going to appreciate it now. He even captured our miniature pinscher, Bark, and painted him green while forcing us through the movie. The experience was horrifying—and then the CGI started. The digital baby looks like an escaped medical simulation, the cartoon physics make everyone appear boneless, and the CGI dog somehow looks less convincing than my actual dog after Jamie Kennedy painted him green.

When the movie ended, we smiled and told Jamie Kennedy it was wonderful. What else could we do? The man owns all the police. He’s a Kennedy, after all. He eventually left satisfied, and Bark was physically unharmed, although he remained green for several baths and still becomes visibly nervous whenever someone opens a DVD case. I learned two important lessons that day: Son of the Mask contains some of the most hideous CGI ever committed to film, and Jamie Kennedy takes criticism extremely poorly.

#6 – Spawn (1997)

I was a terrible person in 1997. One afternoon, bored and apparently operating without anything resembling a conscience, I beat up a bunch of sixth graders and took their money. I spent my ill-gotten fortune on many different drugs and seventeen pounds of Red Vines, then headed to the theater with a gang of vicious sex workers to see Spawn. We were all spectacularly high, which turned out to be the optimal viewing condition, because Spawn has some genuinely cool practical makeup surrounded by CGI that looks like somebody tried to render Hell on a Commodore 64.

And then we actually go to Hell. Thousands of identical demon soldiers cover the landscape like somebody discovered copy-and-paste, while Malebolgia resembles the final boss from a PC game packaged free with a box of cereal. The only way this CGI becomes remotely convincing is through an aggressively altered state of consciousness; the sort where you’ve completely lost track of reality and are no longer entirely certain whether you’re watching Spawn or experiencing a catastrophic neurological event. The only way this movie becomes tolerable is when you are snorting cocaine through a Red Vine off of a woman’s posterior. When the credits rolled, I knew two things: the CGI was fucking terrible, and I really needed to make some significant changes in my life

#5 – The Scorpion King (2002)

I remember watching The Mummy Returns in 2001 and having a perfectly good time right up until The Rock appeared as that ridiculous CGI scorpion monstrosity. Apparently someone at Universal looked at one of the most hilariously unconvincing digital creatures ever put in a major studio movie and said, “Give that beefy man his own movie.” So when The Scorpion King arrived the following year, some friends and I prepared appropriately: we spent an entire Saturday day-drinking, got thrown out of several bars for our increasingly inebriated behavior, and eventually wandered into a movie theater.

We somehow finished two large bottles of Jack Daniel’s during the movie and, according to witnesses, made quite a scene. I don’t remember the plot. I don’t remember leaving the theater. I don’t remember being arrested. I simply woke up the next morning in county jail with a pounding headache and one crystal-clear memory: the terrible CGI in The Scorpion King. Think about that. My brain discarded an entire night of drunken criminal misadventure, yet preserved those shitty digital effects in perfect detail.

#4 – Green Lantern (2011)

My daughter Alpha Dora absolutely loves Ryan Reynolds in the Deadpool movies. She wants to be Deadpool when she grows up. I made the mistake of mentioning that Reynolds had starred in another superhero movie before Deadpool. I didn’t think this information posed any danger because surely no respectable streaming service would still carry Green Lantern. Curse you, HBO Max!! Alpha Dora found it. She watched it. And she witnessed Ryan Reynolds flying around space in a glowing CGI onesie with a digital mask that looks like someone circled his eyes with a radioactive green Sharpie.

My fiancée and I awoke in the middle of the night to find Alpha Dora standing over our bed holding a butcher knife. She didn’t attack us. She simply stared down at me and asked, “Why? Why did Green Lantern happen? Why was the CGI so bad? Why did you fail to set parental controls on your HBO Max account?” I didn’t have an answer. No parent does. All I could do was apologize and promise to be more responsible. Parental controls aren’t just there to protect children from sex and violence. Sometimes they’re there to make sure your eight-year-old never has to see Ryan Reynolds wearing a suit that looks like it was rendered by a Mountain Dew commercial.

#3 – Die Another Day (2002)

Remember when I woke up in county jail after The Scorpion King with the worst hangover of my life? Well, everyone knows the cure is a little hair of the dog that bit you. So I ate some dog hair, picked up a few bottles of booze, befriended some drifters, and drunkenly wandered into another movie theater. Not the theater where I’d seen The Scorpion King, obviously. I was banned from that one. We chose Die Another Day because James Bond was the guy from GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, which is the greatest video game ever made, so how could this possibly go wrong? Then Bond started driving an invisible car through an ice palace and parasurfing across a CGI tidal wave that looked like ass.

And suddenly, through the alcohol-induced fog, I recognized Pierce Brosnan. THAT SON OF A BITCH! He was the scientist from The Lawnmower Man. The man whose shitty CGI training video had taught me absolutely nothing about mowing lawns and ruined my entire summer of 1992. Eleven years of suppressed trauma came roaring back as I watched his digital stunt double surf across an avalanche of visual-effects diarrhea. I became violently angry. There was shouting. There were accusations. Security became involved. I was subsequently banned from another movie theater. At this point, bad CGI wasn’t merely ruining movies for me. It was systematically ruining my life.

#2 – The Mummy Returns (2001)

Just because.

#1 – Cats (2019)

For the longest time, I believed cats were simply the furry little creatures I regularly sacrificed to the Dark Lord. Then one day, while scrolling through Netflix with the family, we discovered Cats. Apparently it’s based on a Broadway musical. Who the fuck is making plays about cats? We watched it, and every frame presented some fresh digital obscenity. Human faces float inside furry humanoid bodies. Their hands are sometimes paws, except when they’re hands. Their proportions constantly feel wrong. My daughter Alpha Dora had to be physically restrained from attacking the television again. My son Chicken, meanwhile, was delighted by the movie because that kid sucks. How did my seed create a human being who finds James Corden entertaining? Somewhere along the bloodline, something has gone terribly wrong.

Eventually, some horrible CGI beast started singing about horrible CGI trains, and that’s the last thing I remember. I awoke the following morning soaked in blood, standing inside an animal shelter and muttering incoherently about Lawnmower Men, Scorpion Kings, and The Mummy Returns. Nobody would tell me exactly what had happened, but I was immediately and permanently banned from the shelter. Still, there was a silver lining: at least I wasn’t banned from another movie theater. That’s Cats: a film with CGI so catastrophically wrong that watching it apparently activated twenty-seven years of accumulated visual-effects trauma and sent me on a fugue-state rampage.