5
The Android Blood in Aliens Was Rancid Milk
20th Century Fox
Aliens was chock full of acid-bleeding penis monsters, grotesque face-hugging vagina creatures, exploding stomachs, and androids who bled white stuff. That last one seems pretty tame by comparison, right?
That's only because you weren't on set ...
The Terrible Reality
In the original Alien, the android blood effects were achieved with simple food coloring, but James Cameron's Aliens took it to the next level by swapping that out for gallons of milk and yogurt. With that in mind, here's Lance Henriksen:
20th Century Fox That facial expression ain't acting.
What that screencap isn't showing you is Henriksen's character, Bishop, dramatically coughing that stuff up everywhere in the first place. Yep, he had to chug rotten dairy products and regurgitate them back onto himself like a pornographic Exorcist.
Of course, it didn't start off spoiled. The problem was that the special effects team didn't remember to put the milk and yogurt smoothie back in the fridge after they whipped it up. They just left it out overnight -- and it also sat under those hot lights between the long, long takes ...
If Henriksen's performance seems genuinely pained in his final scenes, it's not just acting: after the scene wrapped, Henriksen says, he was "sick as a dog" and spent the next four days puking. And it wasn't just because of that disturbing alien queen egg-chute scene ...
4
Elysium Filmed in a Real Garbage Dump Full of Poop
TriStar Pictures
Neill Blomkamp makes entertaining sci-fi commentaries on social issues, and they're not exactly subtle. In Elysium, the big-budget follow-up to District 9, he presents a dystopian future where the 99 percent scrape together an impoverished existence in the giant slum that is the entire Earth, while the rich orbit the planet in a tastefully appointed space station. But obviously those settings are the result of elaborate sets and CGI -- they didn't really send Jodie Foster into space, and obviously they wouldn't have sent Matt Damon running around a real garbage dump.
YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images "Not unless we're sure Ben Affleck would follow, then it might be worth the sacrifice."