I'm always amazed at how technology changes the way cinematic storytellers are able to craft their tale. Computer generated imagery has supplanted the realm of some of the most standard on-set special effects creations -- like character make-up and even bloodly gore effects. Take for example digital blood. We've come a long way from the days of the bright red liquid manufactured by 3M that Tom Savini was pouring all over the Dawn of the Dead performers. Torture-porn like Saw III and it's previous instalments -- which in the good old days would have had a barrel of blood and a bucket of pig guts straight from the butcher's shop right next to the camera -- now make use of the highest level of digital trickery to provide the lowest level of explicit grue. Last year in George Romero's Land of the Dead, KNB EFX Studio make-up artists relied mostly on the kind of old school latex and kayro syrup that audiences have come to expect from a Romero zombie flick, but they weren't afraid to employ a couple of digital tweaks to enhance the on-set mayhem and raise it the next level. And while digital efx were used to destroy bodies in both of these aforementioned flicks, in a movie like 300 they can be used to build bodies and create muscles on actors where none previously existed. Heck, they're not only creating the actors, but everything around them. Yes, it's all very cool looking, but I miss the good old days when blood would actually spray the camera lens or an actor began to cry and I knew it was them and not a digitally created teardrop. (Asia Argento image courtesy of www.ugo.com)