Best Make-Up – 1982

Official Nominations: Quest For Fire. Gandhi

Quest For Fire is a deserving winner, but it’s a 1981 movie and doesn’t need to be here. My default winner therefore is Gandhi. 

My Winner: Gandhi.

My Nominations: Basket Case. Conan The Barbarian. Creepshow. ET. Swamp Thing. The Thing.

Does an animated, puppet freak deserve a nomination? I guess so, given some of the bigger films coming later in the 80s. Basket Case is a weird movie, but Belial becomes a character through the skill and grotesque artistry of his creation. If we nominate Basket Case, then we have to have the more impressive, expressive, bigger budget ET.

Conan The Barbarian has its fair share of creature make-up too, but more impressive is the gore work and paint work, particularly seen in the stealth attacks on Thulsa Doom towards the end of the film. My final three picks are all creature-effect heavy; Swamp Thing may be a dude in a suite, but it’s several levels more impressive than what you think of when you imagine a dude in a suit, largely down to the film’s setting and the facial make-up allowing us to see the actor’s emotion. Creepshow is a smorgasbord of Make-up treats, vignettes just as the film’s stories are vignettes, with Tom Savini leading the group of expert artists letting their imagination run wild.

But lets be honest; there can only be one winner here, with Rob Bottin and his team’s ground-breaking work on The Thing remaining awe-inspiring to this day. It’s not only a movie of Visual Effects, but of make-up – the two working hand in hand in an era when practical application meant the two art forms were more intrinsically linked.

My Winner: The Thing

Let us know your winner in the comments!