My heart lies with the classics, before computers made it all too easy.

Metropolis, 1926. Mostly a triumph of set design and model-building, there are shots in this film that still dazzle the eye.

King Kong, 1933. I mean, come on.

Forbidden Planet, 1956. If you haven't seen the 50th anniversary cleaned-up DVD, you've never seen this movie. Mouth-dropping. Breathtaking. Whatever other adjectives you'd like to use.

2001, 1968. I saw it in the original Cinerama as a callow youth of 12. Stumbling out of the theater, I wasn't sure what I had just seen, I just knew it was brilliant. And not just the visual fireworks of the ending - the costume, make-up and acting work in the first sequence about the ape-men has never been matched. Made the apes in the same year's Planet of the Apes look like the crude rubber constructs they were.

And yet Christina Ricci does a fantastic real-life version of a fan boy's anime girlfriend.

abbott & costello meet frankenstein
the attack of the 50 foot woman
the incredible shrinking man
invasion of the bodysnatchers (1956)

The films of Georges Meliers "A Trip to the Moon" from 1902 and "The Black Imp" from 1905 ... incredible, considering the minimal technology he had to work with.

But I'll never forget the spaceships going over my head the first time I saw the first "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters" ... 1977 was a very good year.

Ooops ... ****ed up the link.

Here's "A Trip to the Moon"

The NASA moon landing footage.

Any of those Republic serials with the guy in the rocket pack. I know it's a model, but it still looks amazingly real. Ditto the rocket ship he flies.

I'll have to give a shout out to Savini in the horror genre. No CGI

Gummo's right: King Kong (1933) and 2001 (1968). I was 11 when I stumbled out of a 70mm showing of 2001 and knew it was brilliant.

Then I was dazed again in 1977 when Star Wars came out. The opening on a big screen is nearly as staggering as 2001 was.

Yeah, CGI has made it easy, and commonplace. It's so bad that the film makers take it upon themselves to FX insert lens flares to make it seem like they're filiming reality...

There's just too much to cover in a comment. One can go to this Wiki entry, "Visual special effects techniques in rough order of invention," and stroll through the links, marveling at all the techniques. I will settle for the "memorable" criteria.

As for Harryhausen, well...let's take the Wayback machine to meet the adolescent me. We finally got cable, which consisted mainly of several independent stations around the country showing old TV shows and lots of old movies. This was before home video hit, and I finally got to see things I could only read about in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Back then, I would've argued that any Harryhausen was a masterpiece. Adolescents are like that, you know. I choose 1958's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad only because I saw that one first. Oh my...when that cyclops came tromping out, I was in love.

I'm fond of Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast, employing lots of stage trickery. The way Belle, using a magic glove, suddenly appears at her home--ala a trick similar to the disappearing cabinet--still thrills me.

Alfred Hitchcock got some wonderful effects into his films (the laughable ski close-ups from Spellbound notwithstanding). Of course, there's the Vertigo effect, and The Birds. Hitchcock loved rear projection, allowing him to stay in the studio. There's a great moment in 1938's The Lady Vanishes where Michael Redgrave is hanging outside the train as another train rushes bny the other direction. It's just rear projection and manipulated light and shadow--simple and effective.

My favorite matte shots are found in Forbidden Planet. When I finally saw it in the original aspect ratio, revealing so much more of the alien machines, I loved the film so much more.

I want to give special mention for the 1992 Coppola film Bram Stoker's Dracula. It was the last, greatest testament to the oldest schools of film special effect. Along with the lighting tricks and forced perspective, I was astonished to learn that much of what I thought were optical printer shots were done in-camera. CGI was starting to take over, and here was a big budget film using techniques that the Méliès brothers would understand.

I was mocked then & I am mocked to this day, but I will still say that when I walked out of the theater after seeing Cameron’s Titanic, I didn’t want my money back. And at the other extreme, with minimal special effects but each one spot-on, lies Sixth Sense.

Who Am Us:

You'll get no mockery from me on Titanic, at least special effects wise. The twenty or thirty minutes with the ship sinking is absolutely terrifyingly real. The movie itself, obviously, is an infuriating mess -- the stuff that's good about it is so good that the stuff that's bad about is even more heinous than it would otherwise be.

If you know what I mean.

If we're talking Ray Harryhausen, I'm opting for 20 Million Miles to Earth. The one with the lizard thingie that keeps growning after landing near Rome.