TheMovieBlog (one of my current favorite blog/podcasts, thanks mostly to the comic insanity of Doug Nagy) had an interesting post recently about various movie cliches that they are absolutely sick of seeing. The following are 20 of my own contributions:
1. In ghost horrors, you always know that a ghost is about to zip by in the background from the way a character is positioned within the frame. Usually, you have your actor in the foreground with just enough space over their shoulder to allow your audience to be “suprised” by the sudden movement behind him. The actor will then turn, and see nothing there.
2. In slasher films, characters get into their cars and drive around for minutes without noticing that there is someone hiding in the backseat. Anyone who’s ever driven or ridden inside a car knows that this is impossible, no matter how dark it is.
3. In monster movies, there is always some enterprising fool who thinks he can make money from the creature, if he can just figure out a way to capture it without killing it. This cliche has been around since the original King Kong, and has found its way into a plethora of movies such as Aliens, Anaconda and Lake Placid.
4. In teen slasher films, the female character who shows the least amount of skin will survive until the end. Blondes have the highest death rate in any genre, generally because audiences feel they are dispensable.
5. In teen comedies, the most beautiful car in the film always get wrecked by the end.
6. In sci-fi’s, all aliens belonging to a single race dress exactly the same. (The implication being that, unlike Earth, with its 16 million unique cultures, alien races only have one.)
7. In disaster movies, there is always one character who will die right after resolving his/her differences with another character. (See Poseidon.)
8. In action flicks, whenever a villain has a change of heart and decides to help the good guys, he will end up dead.
9. Nobody ever waits for change. Characters in movies know exactly how much their bill at restaurants, in cabs or at bars will be, and thus can make a quick exit no matter what the situation is.
10. In action films, it doesn’t matter what kind of make/age/size of cars are involved in a chase, or how many passengers and hardware each vehicle is carrying. They will always be practically neck-and-neck.
11. During foot chases, the female character always trips at least once.
12. In action films, whenever a character falls from a great height, he lands squarely on a car, and the alarm sounds.
13. Computers in movies have user-interfaces that exclaim, in big screen-filling letters, things like “TEMPERATURE DROPPING” or “PAYLOAD RELEASED” or “EXPLOSION IMMINENT.” This is invariably so as to help the people in the audience who have never seen a computer before understand what’s going on.
14. During foot chases in buildings, elevator doors do not re-open automatically when a villain inserts something in between them, allowing the hero to escape unmolested. In some cases, the villain attempts to pry the elevator doors open forcibly; this usually ends up with him getting shot in the face. (See Terminator 2.)
15. Whenever a hero is in a repeat showdown, the part of his body that got injured in the last fight always gets hit again, causing him great pain and usually allowing the villain to gain the upper hand momentarily.
16. In horror movies with child characters, one of them always maintains a collection of incredibly sinister stick figure drawings to creep out the adults. (See Hide and Seek, most recently.)
17. Characters who are shot will usually fly backwards dramatically, even though this is patently impossible. (Simply physics will tell you that if the blast were that powerful, the person wielding it would fly backwards too.)
18. Running or jumping through a glass window never results in any kind of injury to a hero. I hate this one mostly because it’s usually unnecessary; it’s just one of those idiotic movie flourishes that don’t really make any sense.
19. During an earthquake or some other tremor, lightbulbs in a row will shatter in sequence, beginning from the one farthest from the camera.
20. During phone conversations where the caller is being traced, a helpful computer display will show a flashing dot moving across a map as the caller’s location is slowly triangulated. (Most memorably in Sneakers.)