Resurrecting one of its oldest properties for 1999’s The Mummy meant Universal struck gold. So when wrestling superstar Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson joined the cast of the follow-up, The Mummy Returns, the studio quickly green-lit a spin-off/prequel in 2002’s The Scorpion King.

The monster’s grotesque skin with its utterly absurd physique wasn’t exactly impressive. Not even Dwayne Johnson could save this abomination of visual effects.

Good thing Johnson’s box office numbers have continued to grow and flex like a bicep.

Here’s one of the most appealing examples of CGI misuse in the past few years. Henry Cavill’s Superman had his upper lip and even entire lower jaw, digitally reconstructed in 2017’s Justice League.

Cavill was still in the clutches of Mission: Impossible reshoots, so it seemed like DC would have to delay the release of their film.

But some producers claimed they could digitally redo Cavill’s mustachioed face to make it smooth. So with the irony of a witch’s curse, Cavill looks extra smooth in Justice League that he’d need the Witcher’s help to undo this curse.

Adapting a classic novel for the big screen is a difficult task, especially when it’s scheduled to be a Christmastime blockbuster with Will Smith, but for I Am Legend, it was a case of so close, yet so far.

The film’s vampires were actors wearing prosthetics. But in post-production, these were converted into weird looking CGI figures, removing any trace of humanity the creatures may have had left.

That completely undermined the whole point of the original text and the film.

Star Wars was released in 1977, and was praised for its scope and its brilliant special effects. Most of it involved the use of models and a few quantities of gunpowder. But George Lucas felt constrained by budget and deadlines, so he set about making changes to the trilogy for the films’ later releases on home media.

The worst has to be Jabba the Hutt in Episode IV: A New Hope.

The galaxy’s foremost mob boss gastropod looks completely out of place, and the scene adds nothing to the film. The DVD release in 2004 had Jabba updated to better resemble his appearance in later films, but the damage was done.

Jabba’s odd inclusion remains the crowning vainglory of Lucas’ Star Wars rehashes.

Twilight is a book and film series that combines vampires and teen angst. It has received its share of criticism but nothing is as mortifying as the portrayal of Renesmee, the half-vampire half-human baby of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen.

Producers wanted to use an animatronic baby to convey the unearthly beauty of the child, but ultimately decided to construct it out of CGI.

Renesmee as a little girl was portrayed by actress Mackenzie Foy, but the character rapidly ages so Foy’s face was digitally grafted on to a conveyor belt of teenagers and grown women.

Vampires suck blood, but this CGI moment makes them cough it up.

The tepid reception to Timothy Dalton’s Licence to Kill (1989) had Bond written off as a Cold War relic. But Pierce Brosnan came roaring back as a suave and more modern 007 in GoldenEye (1995).

When 2002’s Die Another Day was announced, critics and audiences were excited to see Bond reinvented for the new millennium. And the answer was CGI!

It’s a film that features an invisible Aston Martin, but the worst computer-generated crime against cinema was the glacier-surfing scene.

Brosnan is green-screened into an arctic landscape then replaced by a spaghetti-like figure for the stunts.

Air Force One is mainly remembered for Harrison Ford playing the president. It’s one of the most popular action flicks of the 1990s, with a healthy dose of critical acclaim and golden box office receipts.

What most people have forgotten is the film’s amazingly dated CGI finale.

It’s a sequence in which a plane tumbles into what looks like an ocean. But it still is one of the best-performing films of the 90s, and one of Harrison Ford’s best-known standalone efforts.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy was widely acclaimed for its visual effects, especially its physical effects that director Peter Jackson had honed as a B-movie horror filmmaker. His orcs are beastly, with matted hair, while the sets are grand and tangible.

When Guillermo del Toro was booted from the highly anticipated adaptation of The Hobbit, Jackson decided to go for more CGI than normal.

The worst is the melting statue that coats Smaug the dragon in hot gold. There is a similar gold-melting scene in The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) to convey Thorin’s madness, but it made sense since it was a hallucination.

But for Smaug, the strange physics and sickly sheen of the molten metal just didn’t work well.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy was visually spectacular in all sorts of ways, but that doesn’t mean everything about the three films was perfect.

The Return of the King is so beautiful that its flaws only become more apparent by contrast. We’re talking about the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the scene with the Oliphaunts.

Legolas leaps on to an Oliphaunt, standing his ground against the creature’s thrashing and its mounted soldiers. All you’ll see are blurry green-screen shots of Orlando Bloom and a rubbery elf bouncing around, culminating in Legolas ‘sliding’ down the trunk of an Oliphaunt.

They must have had Bloom jumping from a box on to the floor about 20 times until they got the right take. And it still only counts as one.

In 2005, production began on a new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, dropping Wonka from the title but making the infamous chocolatier the undisputed focus of the film, with its backstory and all.

In the 1971 film, we’re told, but not shown, that the rotten children will be “completely restored to their normal, terrible old selves.”

But Tim Burton chose otherwise.

The worst horror of all is Mike Teavee, who was stretched by a taffy puller into a Jack Skellington-esque figure. Perhaps it was better to leave such terrors to the imagination, and not CGI.

Everyone remembers Toy Story with thick nostalgia goggles, especially its breathtakingly beautiful sequels. But 1995 was a different story, and today Molly, Andy’s younger sister, comes off the worst.

There’s something odd about the human eyebrows and oddly-pursed mouths in this film, and when she goes after a toy, she’s like a saliva-drenched Godzilla with her lumpen mesh of limbs.

To be fair, Pixar had made huge advances in rendering CGI children by the time Toy Story came around in 1995. Try to watch the studio’s short Tin Toy, from 1988, and then get a good night’s sleep.

Men in Black arrived in cinemas in 1997, with its visual effects pushing the limits of CGI. We all remember Edgar the Bug, the giant insectoid who wears Vincent D’Onofrio’s skin as a disguise.

The sequel, Men in Black II, came around five years later, with hopes that the sci-fi franchise would still blend practical effects with premier quality CGI. Which was true for the most part.

But the film begins to tear at the seams in the locker scenes.

When the frantic plot wraps up, K reveals that the universe as we know it, is just a locker in a giant alien train station.

The scene is undermined by the lanky spaghetti demons just trouncing around the foreground.

Terminator 3 was a disappointment considering it followed the footsteps of James Cameron’s classic The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This long-delayed sequel featured a sexy female robot and a lot of explosions, but the film had little substance.

Especially the cemetery scene. Kristanna Loken, the TX, is sent back in time to kill John Connor’s future wife. Then John and a reprogrammed T-800 arrive in a bullet-riddled hearse to save the day.

Also, Arnold Schwarzenegger is carrying an RPG.

Arnie fires a rocket at the T-X, and viewers were treated to incredible CGI rag-dolling, with a collision on a CGI tombstone that looks like it’s made of fudge.

There are other tombstones in the background that have been hastily CGI’d in to make sure the one built in MS Paint doesn’t stand out. To think this film was the most expensive made at the time of its release.

Rogue One stirred controversy for ‘resurrecting’ Peter Cushing, the actor who played Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars. He died more than two decades earlier, but fans argue this was the biggest CGI moment of the decade, one which has been both praised and maligned.

Fans are torn between Tarkin’s performance and uncanny look due to CGI, or Cushing’s inherent gauntness, easily forgetting that there are two computer-generated time-skippers in this film.

Princess Leia comes off worse looking like a porcelain doll. Presumably happy with the Grand Moff, the Rogue visual effects team decided to go buy-one-get-one-free on rejuvenated actors, but the force wasn’t strong with this rendering.

When Ang Lee directs a film, fans know they’re getting something original. So looking back on Hulk from the vantage point of today’s MCU-dominated box office, it’s pretty clear that this film stands out.

Sadly, the CGI is horrible, especially in Bruce Banner’s villainous father.

He is able to transform himself, phase through solid objects, and control electricity. This character is a smorgasbord of supervillainy, with the role played by Nick Nolte, who joined the project after Ang Lee described his film as a Greek tragedy.

Unfortunately for Nolte, it’s the visual effects that make it tragic.

It’s one of the world’s most dominant franchises, but the effects in Harry Potter can feel sloppy. There are CGI misfires in the first film, The Philosopher’s Stone, with Fluffy, the three-headed dog as a squishy computer-generated animal.

So by the third film, fans expected better.

Lupin’s transformation at the end of The Prisoner of Azkaban had viewers treated to a threatening performance by actor Marnix van den Broeke, a reliable monster actor similar to Shape of Water’s Doug Jones.

Unfortunately, the CGI is messy, maybe intended to be masked by the nighttime setting and the thrill of the scene but in reality, it’s disappointing for a finale.

Spider-Man 3 is remembered for emo Peter Parker, and more villains than the population of Andorra. But fans may not have heard of the visual effects team’s efforts to understand the physics of sand, which involved throwing sand in stuntmen’s faces.

The team developed their own CGI software, so the film contained more than 900 visual effects shots, which was a lot to applaud.

But when we lose Thomas Haden-Church, the actor playing Sandman, everything goes wrong. It’s not even the actor augmented by sand physics CGI, but a big brown face in the sky.

The Lawnmower Man was considered cutting edge at the time of its release, but the Stephen King adaptation has dated so poorly that it feels like an elaborate prank today.

The name of the film has little to do with its plot, where a groundskeeper leaves his body and enters a computer mainframe, where he seeks to infect and control all of the digital systems in the world.

The film was released in 1992, with Hollywood’s visual representation of cyberspace still confined to a garish blue expanse riddled with geometric shapes.

What’s worse is that Jobe looks like Homer Simpson designed by HP Lovecraft.

The Matrix Reloaded broke new ground with its visual effects, and this scene we’re talking about is brilliant to be fair.

The sequence known as the Burly Brawl has Neo face off against a growing number of Agent Smiths. This has to be one of the most elaborate fight sequences in history, with Neo fighting multiple agents all at once.

But when Smith begins converting other Agents into clones for more manpower, the scene accelerates, and the CGI begins to be rushed like someone hurrying to bury a body.

Neo turns gloopy with the camera spinning as he is flying and kicking, and the action gets even faster as Neo spins like a centrifuge, throwing off uncanny valley Hugo Weavings into CGI buildings.

When the fight is over, Neo flies off like Superman. It’s hard to sympathise with Agent Smith’s annoyance and unfulfilled revenge since all we feel is tired relief.

1994’s Disclosure is a slick and spicy corporate drama that focuses on a sexual harassment lawsuit between Michael Douglas as a computer company executive and his up-and-coming business rival Demi Moore.

The fact that they work in the computer industry may make the use of some computer graphics acceptable, but in this one, it just becomes downright weird.

To get to the bottom of a mystery, Douglas seeks the truth by means of a virtual reality program.

He slips on a ridiculous looking headset then steps into a digital recreation of the office, complete with a computerised rendition of a humanoid woman having a still image of Demi Moore’s face embedded on its head.

1995’s Jumanji was one of the first blockbusters to explore the possibilities of CGI after Jurassic Park. It does so successfully, with impressive digital animal attacks balancing out old-fashioned practical makeup effects and puppetry.

But there’s one creature they couldn’t quite get right. It’s those monkeys.

The aim was to make the pesky primates look both cartoonish and creepy, so from a certain point of view, they did a good job.

However, they look unlike actual monkeys and more like possessed puppets from pre-teen nightmares. It’s hard to watch scenes involving these creatures without a sense of unease.

The 1982 classic Tron was a landmark movie in the history of CGI. Its early digital effects work still holds up today as the film takes place inside a computer world.

It was a little different in 2010’s belated sequel Tron: Legacy, since CGI has come forward leaps and bounds in nearly three decades since the original, and leading man Jeff Bridges also aged a bit.

Unfortunately, Tron: Legacy used CGI to give viewers a digitally de-aged rendition of Bridges’ Kevin Flynn.

This was one of the first times such an effect was attempted, which still is a difficult trick to get right. Fail to hit the mark and fans are left with something creepy, like this pseudo-young Jeff.

2011’s Green Lantern is one of the most notorious fails in the history of superhero movies. The plot and characters were totally over familiar and uninteresting, while director Martin Campbell’s film completely squanders the talents of an impressive cast, especially Ryan Reynolds.

What got in the way of it all? CGI.

Green Lantern is overburdened with digital effects, almost like a bank of computers repeatedly vomited over the whole film.

The most bizarre was the decision to create Reynolds’ suit entirely from CGI. Maybe they intended to convey a greater sense of cosmic wonder, but it only had the whole endeavour lapse into self-parody.

One of the first movies based on a video game was 1995’s Mortal Kombat with CGI also becoming the in-thing in Hollywood.

Some of the characters have special abilities that required special effects, like Scorpion, the yellow-clad masked man famous for roaring “get over here!” before shooting a chained spear of some sort from his hand at his opponents to grab them.

In the original Mortal Kombat arcade game, the weapon is in someway concealed up Scorpion’s sleeve before he shoots them out.

The movie interprets it a bit differently, presenting the weapon as an organic part of Scorpion which comes out directly through the palm of his hand. It looks silly and unconvincing, which was also inaccurate to the source material.

Along Came a Spider is another film you’d be forgiven to think had no need for CGI. The second movie to star Morgan Freeman as author James Patterson’s detective hero Alex Cross is an grounded psychological thriller with Cross hot on the trail of a kidnapper.

That’s when things take a turn for the spectacularly bad as the car accidentally goes off a bridge.

There’s nothing unusual about a car crash in a thriller but since Along Came a Spider was made in 2001, someone thought it would be better if they created the whole thing, like the car out of control, hitting the edge of the bridge, then dangling over the edge where the driver falls, completely on computer.

It’s a scene that just prompts unintentional laughter.

1997’s Anaconda boasts an unusually starry cast for a low-rent creature feature. Jon Voight, Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz and Danny Trejo are some of the big name actors flowing up the Amazon to battle with the biggest snake the world has ever seen.

Even a then-unknown Owen Wilson played Gary, the sound man for a documentary crew. He was an unfamiliar face and a comic relief character, so Wilson was on the snake’s to-eat list.

No one expected his death scene to be so bizarre though, as the coils of a poorly made CGI snake wrap themselves around a blurry digital recreation of Wilson.

After the massive success of 2017’s Wonder Woman, expectations for the sequel were naturally high. But 2020’s Wonder Woman 1984 was far from a triumphant follow-up thanks to its strange plot, sloppy characterisations and odd use of digital FX.

The film had many slip-ups, but nothing was as confounding as Kristen Wiig’s villain, the Cheetah.

First off, there’s the character’s introduction: Wiig’s Barbara Minerva becomes powerful via wishes, so viewers assume she is on a level of becoming a freakish feline-human hybrid.

But the CGI used to create this feline-human hybrid looks really bad.

2002’s Blade II has to be the best entry in the trilogy of movies about the comic book vampire hunter. It does use CGI well, particularly with the antagonists called the Reapers.

Those monster mouths were brought to life with a combination of practical and digital effects.

Sadly, director Guillermo del Toro and company had to use CGI for an early battle scene between Wesley Snipes’ Blade and a masked vampire in front of an array of spotlights.

Most of this scene were just the actors fighting, but a few cringe-inducing shots feature oddly-shaped CGI stunt doubles making it look like a video game.

2001’s Shrek proved to be a landmark film in the history of computer animation. This Dreamworks production proved that Pixar weren’t the only ones who could do CGI animated movies that appeal to all.

But it has to be said that back then computer animation still had a way to go, particularly when presenting humans.

The people in Shrek, even Princess Fiona, suffer from that weird quality that makes them look creepy. The freakiest would have to be the introduction of Monsieur Hood (voiced by Vincent Cassel) and his Merry Men.

It was meant to be a funny scene but the quality meant some viewers may have suffered from nightmares.