10 Terrible Movies That Were Actually Groundbreaking

10. Howard The Duck Featured The First Digital Wire Removal In Cinema History

Even accepting that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made a fair effort to "redeem" Howard the Duck, 1986's George Lucas-produced movie based on the character continues to be regarded as one of the worst movies of all time.

Yet it should get some flowers for pioneering a facet of modern filmmaking which we as audiences take completely for granted, and yet played a vital part in the production of classics such as Back to the Future Part II, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and The Matrix.

Prior to 1986, there was no visual effects process for removing wires, and so common techniques involved either painting wires to be the same colour as the background or shining a hard light on them to make them close to invisible.

But of course, this is far from a perfect process, and on higher-definition re-releases of older movies it's often quite easy to see said wires regardless.

Yet Howard the Duck was the first film in history to erase wires digitally. For the opening sequence in which Howard (Ed Gale) is launched out of his apartment, Lucasfilm created a program called Layerpaint which allowed them to paint out the offending wires frame-by-frame.

An arduous process, for sure, but the end result is absolutely seamless, no matter the film's overall quality.

As such, the technique was quickly adopted by countless other big-budget Hollywood movies, and digital wire removal is trivial enough today that it can be easily carried out on home computers.