One recent development of the CGI era, in fantasy and horror movies, that annoys me:
Human-sized and human-shaped creatures that can scurry along walls and ceilings
A. without damaging the walls and ceilings
B. moving faster than the humans running on the floor below.
Or when miniaturized person wears clothes that hang naturally, or drinks water normally.
I’d say that the more-modern cliché is “I thought it was firecrackers” (or fireworks).
Omigosh, I thought this cliché was dead*, but I saw it again: Character leaves, but most of the way through the door they stop, turn and lock eyes with Character Still In Room and say something Super Serious, that’s either meaningful or soon will be.
Bonus points if they’re repeating the second half of what we’d hoped would be their last line of the scene:
“But, Doc, for Angela’s sake, and for all she’s meant to you, to Beanie… and, yes, I’ll admit it, to me… you’ve got to save her mother.”
Walk out door, pivot, pause… “You’ve got to save her mother.”
.
*I mean, it was the mid-90s when my kid and I would make fun of that. If I’d leave to go to the store: “I’ll stop by the library and the store, and I’ll get Lucky Charms.” I’d freeze as I was halfway out, and I could feel him staring at my back, waiting for me to swivel, stare and repeat the line: “And I WILL. Get Lucky Charms.”
In my opinion, a screenwriter or author gets one single free usage of the “guy stepped out of the room seconds before the critical phone call came” trick, in any of its forms.
This showed up in Apollo 13, as one of the astronauts took his phone off the hook moments before a crucial phone call was coming in.
I was recently reading “The Day of the Jackal” and was quite disappointed when this precise missed-the-call thing happened and I was prepared to give up if the author did it again. Fortunately, the author didn’t and turned out to be quite skilled at giving both good guys and bad guys equal amounts of good/bad luck in varied forms, and both made mistakes. Very good book.
Ok, what about burying a dead body on the trail or out in the wilderness somewhere?
Maybe it’s one murder or accident victim, and the Person in Charge orders the Lesser-Ranked Persons Not In Charge to “give this guy a decent burial,” which those Persons manage to do with shovels not much bigger than salad plates. If the situation is primitive enough, the people doing the burying sometimes have to dig the hole using plates, or canteens, or old shoes.
If it’s a massacre of some sort with bodies strewn all around, please refer to orders given in the preceding paragraph. Next scene shows multiple piles of dirt or rocks in tidy rows and exhausted underlings mopping their sweaty brows.
Sometimes the hero has to bury the body(ies) all by himself.
I guess this leads logically to Moving Dead Bodies All Over Including Up and Down Stairs and In and Out of Cars (sometimes big, bulky, heavy dead bodies moved by relatively small persons), and especially taking clothes off the dead body and/or re-clothing the dead body in the live person’s clothes. This would be a very hard thing to do.
