Tomb
Weird electricity effects in cinema
Lightning kicks ass. Not only is it nature’s fireworks display but it introduced us to electricity leading to the development of DVD players and Xbox Live. Movies have featured animated lightning effects from the very beginning and it never fails to wake up an audience. Hell even the Ancient Greeks would put awesome cataclysm scenes in their plays by painting a lightning bolt on the back of two posts and spinning them during the big finale. Look out Agamemnon! Zeus is going to fry your ass! Aieeee!
Movie lightning (and other assorted electricity-like effects) is cool because it can do anything. Some examples:
• Lightning as a weapon wielded by a pissed-off deity — not only do Thunderbolts seem to be the weapon of choice for the capital-G God but also for Zeus Thor and that bogus alien supreme being impersonator that tried to kill Captain Kirk in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989). Witness the zap-happy displays of Zeus in Fantasia (1940) and also the hilarious opening scene from Luther (2003) in which Protestant rabble-rouser Martin Luther (Joseph Fiennes) runs for his life from an electric storm while lightning scorches the ground around him. We can almost hear The Almighty grumbling “Hold still you little pipsqueak! Dang! Missed again!” Even that scene can’t hold a candle to the absurdity of International Gorillay (1990) the notorious Islamic melodrama made as a response to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses . Here Rushdie is depicted as a cackling villain who gets his just desserts when a flying lightning-haloed copy of the Koran zaps him with a laser beam.
• Lightning as a weapon wielded by a mysterious villain — why should deities have all the fun? One of the colourful villains in Big Trouble in Little China (1986) made a lasting impression with his enormous basket-hat and his cool crackling electricity effects. Another practitioner of the Lethal Fingers of Electric Death is the Emperor from Return of the Jedi (1983) although he seems to have turned the power down from “instant death” to “mild tingling.” Several minutes of constant electrocution causes Luke to yelp and moan a lot but it seems to leave no lasting damage.
• Animation of non-living tissue — this one goes all the way back to Frankenstein (1931). It still turns up in movies today because the formula (electricity + dead body = monster) seems to make sense to us. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) got around the fact that mad killer Jason Voorhees was already dead by resurrecting him with a bolt of lightning. The same technique also makes machines self-aware notably the adorable robot from Short Circuit (1986).
• Electric bikinis — it is already well established that people with mystical powers crackle with brightly coloured bolts of electricity. When a naked woman achieves this effect the shimmering energy tends to focus on her “swimsuit area” thus obscuring her goodies and giving the film a more marketable rating. The most notable practitioner of this effect is Indonesian director H. Tjut Djalil whose films Lady Terminator (1988) and Dangerous Seductress (1992) make prominent use of the effect I call “boob lightning” to hide errant nipples from the camera. The actresses in these films are gorgeous enough to cause male viewers to howl with disappointment over the obscured nudity but even so you have to admit that a bikini made out of lightning is 12 kinds of awesome.
• Miscellaneous effects — Squirm (1976) taught us that electrified worms will hunt and eat humans. Powder (1995) gives us a lightning-struck white-skinned magnetic genius as well as the only suicide-by-lightning in film history (that I’m aware of). Back to the Future (1985) uses lightning to jump-start a car that is also a time machine. Ernest Goes to Jail (1990) sends its gangly hero to the electric chair which turns him into a walking magnet who can shoot lightning bolts at will; and in Ratatouille (2007) a serendipitous lightning strike lends flavour to a cheese-dappled mushroom-on-a-stick. Zot!
