Harping on Harpies

I have to shake my head a bit on this one. I watched a movie last night on the Sci-Fi channel that the commercials had made look pretty enticing. A sort of Dracula'ish' looking movie called 'Harpies'. It was kind of a cute movie in a lot of ways... not the sort of thing you'd expect someone to say about a 'draculaish' movie, but it was. It had a lot of humor and the story line was one of those time travel 'Conneticut in King Arthur's Court' type ideas. It even had a name actor in the lead role -- Stephen Baldwin. These are all pretty much a recipe for a movie I'm going to really love. I did like it enough to watch the whole thing, but some of the acting was so cornball that it took some doing to keep watching in spite of the cute story, and humorour horror line. What REALLY made me shake my head though was after watching for a bit I had to click on the info button and check. Yep, it was made in 2007 so a very recent movie. The special effects looked like something I could do on movie maker. I was REALLY expecting something more than that in the realm of effects. You can't get away with cheesy effects anymore like you could back in the 60 and 70's... even 80's. There isn't that much excuse for such fake makeup and bad special effects either, not for a station made movie. I can see if it were some silly backyard highschool kid making a movie. Then it would have been fantastic, but this was a real movie and it just looked 'dated' by the quality. This should have been an A+ movie, but ended up being a C- at best.