Not meaning to derail the thread but do you mind me askingwhat happened to the assailant?
[quote=“Morbo, post:10, topic:484308”]
[ul]
[li]Gas tanks do not explode when hit by a bullet.[/li][li]Hydrogen tanks do not explode when hit by a bullet.[/li][li]Propane tanks do not explode when hit by a bullet.[/li][li]Scuba tanks do not explode when hit by a bullet.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Spotted Horse does not die when hit by a bullet.
I wonder what would happen exactly to someone who has the neck-twisting manuever performed on them.
Ok, did you make that one up, or am I just watching the wrong movies?
[quote=“Morbo, post:10, topic:484308”]
[li]Gas does not ignite when a cigarette is dropped on it. [/li][/QUOTE]
Hmm. Why not? Is the ember not hot enough to ignite the vapors? Would it require an open flame?
I could make one partial exception for this- getting hit in the back of the head with a blackjack, something designed expressly to stun people while minimizing the chances of cracking their skull. Because they’re filled with heavy lead shot so they pack a wallop but are flexible enough to not be a rigid impact. At one time bags of sand were used to the same effect, hence to get “sandbagged”.
Bourne Identity
Scroll down to Cigarettes as lighters
Quite true, but I think of all that as coming under the action-movie category (see the OP).
One thing I’ve always wondered about TV and movie deaths: in real life, isn’t dying usually followed soon after by soiling yourself? If so, wouldn’t that random person you’ve stumbled across who knows how long after colapsing be lying in their own waste, so you’d know they’re probably be dead by smell before you leaned in close to take their pulse?
That would depend entirely on how much they left behind. Also, sometimes poop doesn’t stink so bad. Depending on what I’ve eaten I might leave behind very little scent after spending some time reading on the throne.
Really? Then why does my pulse feel (to palpation) so much stronger on the left side of my neck than the right?
No, it depends on the plot. It can be as you say, or alternatively two toughguys can wallop each other in the head for, well, as long as they like before it’s time for the culmination of the fight scene, without so much as looking a little irritated.
I did that experiment many, many times as a teenager and never once got the gasoline to light. You can take a bucket of gasoline and flick lit cigarettes into it all day long and it won’t blow up or ignite at all under typical conditions. Cigarettes simply don’t get hot enough and gasoline is still fairly picky when it comes to ignition conditions.
Wasn’t a septic tank. It was a big-assed propane tank. Those still don’t blow up when hit with a normal shotgun blast.
Thankfully, most of the following I do not know from personal experience, but from being around EMTs and military people, and secondarily from doing lifesaving classes, and studying anatomy on my own from a martial arts point of view.
Knife wounds and cuts are generally portrayed very inaccurately. You know that over-the-top scene in Kill Bill where The Bride is fighting the Crazy 88s? Remember how she got soaked in blood and it fountained to the ceiling when she decapitated one of them? That’s actually just about right. Arterial spray comes out at high velocity as long as the heart is pumping. It can splatter objects 3–5 m (12–15 feet) away.
Cutting deeply into either side of the neck will probably hit the carotid artery. At knife range, it would look like you got hit in the face with a paint sprayer. Any action hero who cuts a throat and isn’t behind the soon-to-be dead guy is going to be absolutely soaked.
Severing limbs can easily be done with a normal sword if the person is unarmored. The stumps will probably spray blood unless the vessels clamp down or retract, in which case they’ll just blurt a big gout of it every time the heart beats.
Even a single stab with only venous bleeding will leak an amazing amount. Multiple stabs would result in the killer being half soaked and splattered with blood everywhere. If the person was going at it in a frenzy, blood would get slung off the blade in all directions. It would make most of the scenes in Hostel look like a PG-13 film if they showed this realistically.
Blood covers a startling amount of flat surface. Someone getting shot on a tile floor would leave a puddle of blood that would cover most of the floor in a regular sized room. Wall to wall carpeting will be soaked through for about a meter or more around if someone bleeds out on it.
When people get shot and wounded badly, they pretty much just fall down or slump over like they passed out. They don’t get blown backward. They do, however, scream a lot while they’re lying there unless they either passed out from shock and blood loss, or died immediately. Ditto for knife wounds.
Heroes who shrug off getting shot through the shoulder or thigh are showing about as much fortitude as Superman. Normal people start going into shock almost immediately, even if the bleeding is minimal, because of secondary trauma around the wound. Broken bones are common even when the bone wasn’t hit directly. People have been shot multiple times and continue to fight, but in seconds or minutes at most, they are going to go down hard. The question is how much damage they’re going to do before they go down.
When people die violently, they tend to piss and shit themselves. Unlike people with a terminal illness, they’ve probably eaten solid food sometime in the last 8–12 hours. The smell is pretty noticeable, and sometimes the body will make disturbingly funny farting sounds when the anal sphincters let go.
Head trauma is really, really dangerous. Anything that knocks you unconscious is likely to leave you with some amount of blurred vision, memory loss, weakness, nausea, headache, light sensitivity, and possibly some kind of permanent impairment like a personality change, loss of cognitive ability, or debilitating headaches. A couple of lighter hits that, as boxers put it “ring your bell,” can accumulate to produce much more severe effects than a single injury. Sometimes very minor injuries or accumulated injuries result in seizures, massive increase in intercranial pressure, and sudden death.
To give you an idea of how little trauma you need for ill effects, heading in soccer is associated with measurable cognitive deficits in many players and occasional hospitalizations from repeated very minor brain injuries. Hitting someone in the back of the head with a gun is probably going to put him in the hospital for a couple of days, and is possibly going to kill him outright. You could leave him permanently fucked up. Might as well shoot him as knock him out; he’ll probably be better off in the long run.
Action heroes who don’t: puke repeatedly; have balance trouble for the next couple of days; exhibit disorientation with regard to time, place, or identity for some time afterward; or show extreme weakness — especially in hand grip strength — after being knocked out are simply not human. Getting knocked out like a boxer and going down for the count is one thing, getting your ass knocked out and going down long enough for someone to tie you up and transport you is a serious thing. You’re not going to be good for anything for at least a couple days, and you might literally die if you do anything strenuous immediately afterward, especially something like take another knock on the noggin.
Most westerns, and war movies, showing someone getting shot multiple times and just falling over, no entry or exit wounds visible.
Arrow hits are invariably unrealistic. Typically, a broadhead arrow is shown going into an unarmored man by some five inches, where in real life, broadhead arrows shot at big game animals typically blow through at least up to the fletching, occasionally all the way through and some distance beyond the target. The amount of blood even a small game animal will spray from a pass-through is quite spectacular, and would be extremely graphic in man-made surroundings (foliage and dirt hide blood pretty effectively).
However, arrow hits to the torso won’t kill anyone instantly, as in, grasping their chest and falling on impact. With the adrenaline charge anyone has under fire, a lethally-arrowed man might stay quite functional for thirty seconds or so before collapsing from massive internal and extrenal bleeding. Typically, little pain is felt (judging by the reactions of game animals, as well as reports from arrow-hit people).
Also, even poorly penetrating arrows don’t stick rigidly upright on soft, mushy human targets sporting holes much bigger than the arrowshaft.
Come to think of it, ‘Deliverance’ did a pretty good job at portraying toxophilic activity on humans (the hillbillies spurting blood and mulling about for some time after being skewered, but, inevitably dying).
One of my favourite descriptions of what an actual rapier thrust to the thigh does to your ability to fight.
Paul Rubens in the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was intentionally played for supposed laughs but it didn’t fit in the movie at all.
Everyone in The Cheap Detective. “Just once I’d like to see somebody die ‘regular’ on this case!”
Yeah, it pretty much does. There has to be enough of it around though. So, unless it evaporates quickly on concrete or sinks into the soil, it will burn. Countless teenage experiments proved this one works. Kids don’t try at home.
No, it doesn’t.
Only maybe in an enclosed space like a shed if there wasn’t any wind to blow away the fumes.
Gasoline does not ignite that easily, gasfumes do.
The latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight, had a really stupid scene in which the Joker cut up somebody’s face (just around the mouth-area) and the guy just drops dead.
What was up with that?
The most realistic portrayal of this I’ve seen was in the movie Grand Canyon. Steve Martin’s character is mugged, and the mugger (just because he’s an asshole) shoots Martin in the leg with a small-caliber pistol (looked like a .32). Martin’s character looks confused for a second, then collapses, vomits and passes out.