My vote is for A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson picks up his hat close to the end of the movie. The effect is just a little too much. What is your vote for most excessive sound effect.
Any sound from an explosion in space in a Science Fiction movie is excessive, in my honest opinion.
There’s a scene in The Morning After where Jane Fonda slams her hand down on a kitchen counter to emphasize her point in an emotional outburst. They must have dropped a mid-sized Chevy from a 50-foot crane to do the foley for that sound effect…
In the commercials for “Snow Day,” the snowballs all made a “ploit” sound on impact, like someone being hit with a pie in a cartoon.
I remember there were a lot of “ploints” and “boinks” and such in Batman and Robin.
In Jurassic Park, when the fat dude (Newman from Seinfeld) slips in the rain, a cartoon type sound effect plays. It sounds ridiculous.
The Firebird from Smokey and the Bandit. Driving along the highway at full speed, it sounds like he occasionally let in the clutch to rev the engine for no reason.
In the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun, a very neat corkscrew turn in midair in a AMC is ruined by a overly cartoony and badly-done sound effect that would make Tregowith Brown vomit.
How about the gratuitous “ricochet sound” in every old western?
Nobody’s mentioned the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles?
::d&r::
Or Jeff Daniels and the Turbo Lax aftermath bathroom scene in Dumb & Dumber?
God, that damned ricochet…It’s in war movies, too. You’ll hear it even when the bullet hit something. Like wood. Or dirt. Or flesh.
Sometimes, you’ll even hear it as the gun fires. Like it’s ricocheting before it leaves the barrel.
Someone’s going to foley artist hell for that one.
The Fuc* and Shi* words used all over the Blair Witch’s Project movie.
How about the bowling pin strike sound in The Matrix Reloaded when Neo takes out a pile of Smiths.
How about the “whoosh” whenever anyone in a kung-fu movie throws a punch, delivers a kick, or picks up his mail?
The “whoosh” of passing spaceships makes less sense, but I’ll admit that I miss it when it’s absent.
Any movie in which a character tosses something out of frame and you hear a crash and a cat yowling!
“xhi xhi xhi…ah ah ah”
Carpenter’s Halloween movies
Along the same lines as the “western ricochet” is the “tire squeal”. Tires squeal on wet, dry dusty, gravel, whatever roads.
Indiana Jones’ thunderclap punches.
I think that, as westerns fell out of popularity, the richochet foley guy transfered jobs and took over the tire-squealing foley job.
It’s not usually very realistic in any given movie but there is usually a whooshing sound when a someone trained in a martial art throws a good punch. It comes partly from the clothing and partly from the way the guy throwing the punch tenses the muscles in the upper body to get the full weight of the body behind the punch, causing the air in the lungs to exit. Look at a Bruce Lee movie in slow motion and observe how his entire body from the belt up works as he punches.
A few years ago there was a segment on someone training karate in the news (or similar non-fiction program) with some guy showing some punches and kicks. My mum asked where the sound was coming from and wouldn’t believe me even though it was obvious that they were authentic.