This one totally fooled me…it's the ‘fat lady's scene from the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall. I had always wondered how it was done and had assumed it was CGI despite the fact this was a 1990 film and possible a bit too advanced for the era.
You may remember this scene. Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) travels to Mars in disguise as a large woman (played by the late Priscilla Allen) only for the disguise to malfunction at passport control and the head open up to reveal Quaid underneath.
Due to the slightly odd looking Quaid we see underneath the mask I had assumed it was a CGI rendition, and it moves slightly as the mask opens up. So I was surprised to read that it was accomplished with a carefully sculpted (and cut with a surgical scalpel) styrofoam head with a photograph of the womans face carefully glued on by the effects team.The head was opened up by a specially designed rig and an animatronic Schwarzenegger was underneath. The styrofoam head was massively oversized hence why it was shot only from one angle in order to hide the scale.. And the scene has to be shot quickly as the studio lights melted the glue holding the photo of the woman’s’ features onto the head, , causing the photo to wrinkle in places so only a few takes were able to be shot. Incidentally another animatronic model was used for the slightly earlier scene when the woman starts convulsing and the wig falls off. The two scenes were then edited together (note the off centre camera angle below before a brief cutaway and then the scenes above occur).
All pretty impressive stuff for a film from that era and it would almost certainly have been done CG now. Having said that the film does use some very early CGI in the body scanner scene below.
It proved to be a very complicated scene to do and was close to being scrapped. However the rest of the movie was done the old fashioned way with detailed model work, prosthetics, wire work and trick photography.