10 Horror TV Shows You Must Never Pause
3. Anna's Unhinged Jaw - V (2009)
The 2009 reboot of legendary 1980s sci-fi horror miniseries V received wildly mixed reviews across its two-season run, with one of the key complaints being its distractingly low budget, defined by cheap sets and low-rent visual effects which failed to live up to the original show.
This was most palpably felt during the reboot series' attempt to recreate the iconic scene from the '80s show, where villainous alien queen Diana (Jane Badler) unhinges her jaw and eats a live rat.
The original prosthetic effect certainly didn't look great, and there was clearly a ripe opportunity here to massively improve upon it with contemporary VFX, and yet when Diana's daughter Anna (Morena Baccarin) chows down on some squirming vermin it somehow looks even worse.
Rather than using a practical prosthetic, Anna's unhinged jaw and widely extended mouth were achieved digitally, which make sense, except that it looks like ABC spent $5 on an After Effects plug-in to pull it off.
More comical than disturbing, the shot of Anna dropping the terrified animal into her gaping maw looks like something out of a bad '90s FMV video game, rather than a scene from a TV show that aired on a major network barely a decade ago.
TV shows are famously produced on tight deadlines with limited VFX budgets, but come on - people can literally produce more convincing effects on their home computers these days.