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I haven't read all of this thread, so probably I'm repeating some of these obvious cliches.
-- Ducking bullets. The hero (and sometimes the villain) sneaks a peek out a window or around a corner or over a boulder, someone shoots at him, and he ducks back out of the way. Even worse is when someone is spraying the room with bullets, the hero dives over a table in slow motion, firing guns with each hand, takes out the bad guys but never gets a scratch by leaping bullets in a single bound. Another version of this is the hero is occupied doing something while the bad guy in his hiding place draws a bead on him with a telescopic rifle, fires, and misses the good guy with the first shot, losing the element of surprise!
-- Car crashes. Back when I was working the police beat, I ran lots and lots of car wrecks, usually involving fatalties (no one runs fender-benders). In all those years, I never once saw a car catch fire from impact. But in the movies, all they have to do is run off the road into a ditch and the car explodes into flame!
-- The worse cliche of all is the group of folks in some remote, spookey location--an old house, an abandoned motel, a spaceship--and they know there's a monster/madman/serial killer/wild natives around somewhere. Someone says, "Our only hope is for everybody to stick together for mutual protection--nobody is to leave this room." Which is the clue for one of the expendable cast members to leave the main group in the very next scene because he needs to take a shower, she wants to wash her hair, he's hunting his good-luck charm or recovering stolen money, or she's got to find her pet cat who has wandered away. They go out into the dark and almost immediately get zapped, and whoever follows them to bring them back either gets killed too or barely makes it back alive.
-- One that always gave me a laugh was when the Mummy, as played by Boris Karloff, would be chasing a victim who runs screaming into the night while Karloff follows slowly behind with his step-drag-step-drag pace. The victim looks like a marathon runner, yet the Mummy with its one step by one step locomotion not only catches up with the victim but sometimes has gotten ahead and is waiting there in the dark when the fleeing victim finally stops to catch his breath. Same thing with Frankenstein's monster and his stiff-legged gait. All I can figure is that when fleeing slow-moving monsters, victims always run in a big circle and "catch up" with the monster who is just waiting for them to come running back to where they started.
-- Any time in a movie when the hero turns to a companion and says, "I'm going after the bad guy and will try to stall him while you run and get help", you immediately know that the companion won't really go for help or make the telephone call that he promised because he's really one of the bad guys too.
Last edited by rufnek; 05-26-10 at 04:57 PM.