Staged Shooting: What Rollie is hired for in the first movie, based on the success of one he helped execute for a movie. Bringing the near impossible to life took skill and imagination, now with CGI anything is possible, so some of the reality has been lost. Justified as the crew behind the film's effects were also responsible for the robotic effects in Short Circuit and Class of 1999, with a skull from the latter being seen among Rollie's belongings as an Easter Egg. Brian Dennehy, Diane Venora, Cliff De Young, Mason Adams, Jerry Orbach, Martha Gehman, and Joe Grifasi). MacGyvering: Rollie uses his special effects wizardry to survive a number of scrapes throughout the films.

These include a robot head from Class of 1999 and a toy robot from a pre- Energizer Bunny Energizer commercial. The Department of Justice hires him to stage the murder of a gangster about to enter the Witness Protection Program. It turns out to be a double bluff where Rollie is framed for the death of DeFranco, but he was indeed only Faking The Dead.Wiener admitted that they thought that the two letters together would be "provocative" like MASH and admitted that they had made a mistake. Movie special effects expert Roland "Rollie" Tyler is hired by the Department of Justice to stage the murder of Mafia informant Nicholas DeFranco. Latex Perfection: Justified in that Rollie not only employs significant computer resources to generate a full 3-D image of the head, but he also generates the "mask" in strips so that it moves naturally with the face. One executive claimed that no one understood what the title meant, but they accepted it because it was what the producers wanted. F/X: Murder by Illusion is a 1986 movie starring Bryan Brown and Brian Dennehy about a special effects designer who gets dragged into a criminal conspiracy.

Faking the Dead: The professed intent of Rollie's first job is to do this for DeFranco being put into witness protection. A film technician is hired by the US government to stage the fake assassination of a mobster turned informant. Rollie more effectively uses this against his would-be assailant by jerry-rigging some hair spray and canned beans at a supermarket. Mason picks up the gun and demands the key back, but Rollie reveals the gun is empty and has Krazy Glue on its grip, before shoving Mason out of the mansion toward the police, who misinterpret his actions as a threat and fatally shoot him. and Doug Drexler); Eric Allard and his team at All Effects for the sequel, with Allard also serving as one of the Second Unit directors doing the actual effects.Producer Jack Wiener read their script, which was submitted as a low-budget television movie, and felt that it should be made into a theatrical release. The shoot ends in failure when the effects technician's explosion doesn't go off when it's supposed to. To pull off the film's special effects, the producers hired John Stears, who had worked on the first eight James Bond films and shared a special effects Academy Award for Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Mandel accepted the job because he wanted to dispel the perception that he was a "soft, arty director".

With Brown’s uncharismatic hero backed up by the king of hammy 80s concepts Brian Dennehy’s lumbering, interesting cop-on-the-case, and enough plot twists and reversals to keep you going, this is probably more satisfying as a video item than it ever was in the theatres. In the first movie, it's a crime thriller involving a mysterious trenchcoated man shooting up a fancy restaurant.Before he dies of heart failure, Mason takes from him a key to a Swiss safe deposit box containing the funds DeFranco stole from the Mafia. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. In his review for The Sunday Times, George Perry praised the film's premise as a "nice idea, but the effects themselves are merely ingenious when they might have been spectacular". A movie special effects man is hired to fake a real-life mob killing for a witness protection plan, but finds his own life in danger. A week before its release, a film industry screening was very successful, as was its premiere at the United States Film Festival (later known as the Sundance Film Festival).