Dead Birds (2004) – The title makes no sense — there is exactly one dead bird, and it occupies the narrative for about 10 seconds — but I guess they had to call it something, right? The concept has become a standard one for horror flicks, right up there with spam-in-a-cabin: A gang of bank robbers hole up in a secluded house which happens to be haunted. The twist here is that it’s set in the South during the Civil War. There’s creepiness galore, plus sexual and racial tensions what with one woman and one freed slave in the gang; there’s also a little too much reliance on CG effects when practical effects would have had more impact, and a few “We have to be stupid for the plot to work” moments. Not immortal cinema, but also not embarrassingly bad.
Night of the Big Heat (1967) – Neither this title nor its alternate, Island of the Burning Damned, really works for this movie, but “Big Heat” makes this sound like film noir, which it definitely is not (although there’s an adulterous love triangle, so I guess…). A northern English island is experiencing a freak heat wave in winter, and locals starts dying mysteriously. It takes iconoclastic scientist Christopher Lee and a bunch of “I didn’t pass sixth-grade science” technobabble to figure out that it’s the test staging area for an alien invasion. Peter Cushing is also aboard as the local doctor; of the seemingly thousands of movies featuring Lee and Cushing together, how many don’t have them as antagonists?
Given the finally revealed look of the aliens and the nature of their eventual defeat (spoiler: if you’ve seen Shyamalan’s Signs…), I lament the non-existence of a sequel, Night of the Big Heat II: Jellyfish With Umbrellas.
King Cobra (1999) – Standard-issue creature feature with a cobra-rattler hybrid (even the characters acknowledge that that was, retrospect, A Bad Idea) exposed to an aggression-growth neurotransmitter than makes it grow to a length of 30 feet, menacing a small town right during its tourist-drawing beer festival. Bonus points for having the giant snake be realized with practical effects instead of cheap CG (the Chiodo Brothers provided the huge animatronic snake, so it’s competent but cartoony); demerits for having the Jaws-aping beer festival plot point figure in the first half of the movie, then disappear when the mayor says You’re right, we should close it down at the halfway mark. Further demerits that when Pat Morita shows up as the town-saving herpetologist, his bloated dialog drags the pacing waaay down; I guess the writers/directors/producers weren’t willing to trim a single line of his in editing because, dammit, they paid for that!
I will agree that with practical effects you get the feel you are looking at an object, whereas with a lot of CGI you get the impression you are looking at an image.