A seedy, dingy dump in a tenement building. (The sound of a baby crying can clearly heard through the paper-thin walls from an adjacent apartment.)
In a horror movie, the hapless teens driving up to the isolated cabin-in-the-woods will invariably include at least three character archetypes, including…
the dumb bimbo, the slacker, and the jock, all of whom must die horribly.
The pirate who leaps onto the deck of a hapless merchant ship must always…
Is an aspiring artist of some kind, who lives in an apartment you’d have to be a gazillionaire to afford… but we know she’s NOT a gazillionaire, because she has empty Chinese restaurant take-out boxes everywhere.
…toss off a pithy one-liner before anything else.
After the musical intro to a romantic comedy, we will find our hero and heroine are both doing what?
Going about their (separate) lives, usually interacting with a best friend or coworker.
Any time a scene features a western landscape, you will hear…
…a hawk’s cry.
Unless necessary for a plot point, parking spaces are always…
…empty.
The villian has succeeded. The planet is vaporized. A hero gasps. The camera fades, and…
…the hero wakes up from a terrible nightmare.
Name the 5 distinct ethnic groups represented in EVERY American infantry squad in a World War 2 picture.
One white guy from Brooklyn, a Southern white redneck, a Jew, an African-American (who slowly wins the admiration of the redneck) and an Asian guy for comic relief.
When a macho veteran cop expresses the slightest doubts about his new female partner’s ability to handle herself in a rough neighborhood…
…she’ll end up saving his life by way of her amazonian cajones.
Whenever there is a scene with more than one man in a men’s bathroom at a wall of urinals…
During WW2? I don’t think so. The Army wasn’t integrated yet (even by Hollywood). I’d agree with the Brooklyn white guy, the Southern redneck and the Jew, but for the latter two I’d substitute the Midwestern hayseed farm kid, and the preppy from the wealthy family who was too much of a screwup to become an officer.
Whenever there is a scene with more than one man in a men’s bathroom at a wall of urinals… one of them will be whistling.
A beautiful woman in a spacesuit in a scifi movie, of course, must…
Have the NASA/Starfleet/Whatever’s only skin-tight spacesuit while the men look like Buzz Aldrin.
When the hero/heroine tells their hopeless dilemma to the kind old stranger sitting next to them it will turn out…
…that he just so happens to have the means to solve the dilemma/is intimately connected with the issue/is the hero/heroine’s childhood hero and of course they can help.
If a plot crucial letter is being delivered by parcel/mailbag, and the carrier is one of the characters, then…
The kind old stranger has a story to tell, that at first seems totally random and irellevant, but gradually starts to make sense. You see he had a buddy back in the day who had exactly the same problem. “And here’s how he dealt with it…[explanation]… Matter-of-fact, I do believe I still have the [widget] that will allow you to [save the day] back at home in the back of mah closet”. “You’re welcome to it if ya wan it.”
Sorry!
The letter is going to get caught in the wind, snatched by a dog, or swapped with a similar looking letter. Either way, that letter is toast.
If a character demonstrates an appreciation for classical music, that character is either… or …
gay or a total snob.
Whenever you drive to a house in a poor black section of any southern city or rural county you will know you’re getting near when you hear…
… old or a square.
Name the different type of aliens and how they interact with the government
Gunfire.
If you’re a female superhero in Gotham City, even though you would expect it, and the men seem to, you don’t seem to have any…
problem hitting on handsome, wealthy Bruce Wayne while not realizing who his alter ego is.
Any very speedy superhero will not be able to resist…
running on top of water to show off.
The very BEST supervillians will never…