My pet peeve....(May contain movie spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

Is there some kind of unwritten law that 99% (sometimes 100%)characters in a horror movie have to be morons?

I’ve watched a couple horror movies lately and this always gets me.

Evil Dead: Recently saw this. Good movie considering the campiness and the budget (actually, considering the budget, the SFX are pretty good).

But at least one point, I was shouting “Okay, I know she used to be your girlfriend, but now she’s a flesh-eating demon/zombie thing. Use the damn chainsaw and chop her up! SHE TRIED TO EAT YOU!”

That and I was hoping they would just chop up the zombie girl in the basement for most of the film.

Pitch Black: “Get the HELL INSIDE! THE SUN HAS GONE DOWN!” They all know exactly what’s gonna happen, but yet they don’t do anything.

The whole hole scene. “Okay, you are on a strange alien planet. Someone has just been killed by going into a hole. So instead of making some ad-hoc explosives and throwing them in the hole, you decide to crawl in there without so much as a gun, by yourself, to try to figure out what happened. And of course, the ranking officer is the one to do this”.

Scream 3: The mother of all Cliches “Oh, look, there’s a killer on the loose and we’re a bunch of teenagers stuck in a big, dark house together. Let’s split up and look in the basement”.

Jeepers Creepers: “Look, the monster is eating a policeman. Let’s sit here and watch, instead of either trying to run him over or running for our lives!”

Also, “A guy in a creepy old truck tried to run us off the road. Later, we see the guy and the same truck throwing what looks like a body into a pipe by the side of the road. Instead of doing the smart thing and finding the cops, let’s go investigate and risk him coming after us too.”

It was this movie I had no sympathy for the kids because they were utter morons, and thus, deserved to die. “Kids, your ancestors had to rely on the big grey thing between your ears to survive. You are not exempt from this. If you go and do something totally stupid when you should know better, I will no longer sympathize with you, but rather will root for the bad guy”.

Am I the only one who feels this way? Am I the only one who would, without question, kill anyone, no matter who they used to be, who became a zombie/demon/vampire/werewolf/monster and was trying to kill me and all my friends, once I knew they were one?

Am I the only one who would get a damn machine gun ,if I had to,(temporaily laying aside any pacifism I may have in the intrest of not becoming dead) and kill the serial killer, no if/ands/or buts, the moment I see him?

*Wants to see more movies where the characters have actually watched movies of the same genre(within reason) and thus, are smart enough to avoid making the same mistakes. Scream did a decent job with this, but by #3, had fallen back into doing it.

Is this a sign of emotional issues, or am I right in believing most movie characters are idiots?

2

Wasnt the scream triology just a way for wes craven to make fun of him and his horror/slasher movie cohorts?

Which is why its so cliched and plot points telegraphed ect Its just a big in joke really

3

[slight hijack]
This is a runner-up with two of my pet peeves:

  • I don’t ever, ever again want to see the end fight between the good guy and the bad guy at an abandoned factory/warehouse. It’s always set there, so they can do the fighting high up, and so the bad guy can make a wrong and fatal move and stumble, thus falling to his death. Oh Lordy, we can’t have our hero actually killing him in cold blood, can we!? Even if our hero has killed gazillions of minions earlier in the heat of battle.
  • Why is the bad guy always talking so damned much when he has the hero at his mercy (a la James Bond). You have him at gun point, why do you wanna hang him upside down over some hungry 'gators or whatever and lower him slowly? Don’t villains watch movies and know what this will lead to?

[/slight hijack]

And yeah, I 2nd your thoughts about Darwin-awards going by default to any character in a horror movie.

4

Yes.

**

No.

**

That would make for some awfully short movies.

**

Yes.
Whenever my mom and I watch a horror movie together, she asks, about twenty times throughout the course of the movie, "Why doesn’t he just/she just/they just (here insert whatever would be the intelligent thing to do)?

My answer is invariabley the same. “Because if he/she/they did, the movie would be about ten minutes long.” Mostly, screenwriters and directors have to create lots of situations in which alleged humans are imperiled, so that the movie will actually be eighty or ninety minutes long. Wouldn’t be much of a movie if the plot was, “Five people go into a dark house, one of them gets killed by something scary, the other four run away and call the police, the end.”

Thus the need for the characters to be complete and utter morons.
BTW, you might want to pick up Roger Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary. Makes for fun, light reading.
Hope that helps.

5

No, but their kids do.

Dr. Evil: Scott, I want you to meet daddy’s nemesis, Austin Powers
Scott Evil: What? Are you feeding him? Why don’t you just kill him?
Dr. Evil: I have an even better idea. I’m going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death.

Dr. Evil: Begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism!

Scott Evil: Wait, aren’t you even going to watch them? They could get away!
Dr. Evil: No, no, no. I’m going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying. I’m just gonna assume it all went to plan. …What?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly made similar point.

Tuco, sitting in a tub taking a bubble bath, meets someone he shot either in the movie.
One Armed Man: I’ve been looking for you for 8 months. Whenever I should have had a gun in my right hand, I thought of you. Now I find you in exactly the position that suits me. I had lots of time to learn to shoot with my left.
(Tuco kills him with the gun he has hidden in the foam.)
Tuco: When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.
See, you can learn a lot from watching movies.

6

Why can’t scriptwriters actually write smart characters and perhaps smarter villians? It might be more entertaining.

Thanks. I’ll take a look at that.

7

Because a lot of screenwriters aren’t all that bright? :slight_smile:

8

Two pet peeves:

  1. I hate in action movies how the hero and the main bad guy always end up in a barehanded fist fight in the end. Even in movies where there’s shitloads of machineguns and bazookas and each character has a sidearm. Somehow, they both end up coming face to face with no gun.

  2. The main bad guy, no matter how pussy looking he is, can always put up a fight against the hero. A prime example of this is in Cliffhanger. John Lithgow vs. Sylvester Stallone! Stallone would maul him. Yet, since he is the main bad guy he has matching strength. It’s pathetic.

9

A good screenwriter does find ways to avoid the characters acting like idiots. However, too many horror fans are only interested in the shock, and not the logic, so there’s no reason to put it in.

I read an article about someone who novelized the Halloween (I think) novels and who pointed out how he had had to add things to fill the plot holes (part of his point, BTW, is that a movie goes faster so you don’t notice these things, while you read a book more slowly and have time to think about things). He talked about how the main baddie was put in an institution as a child, but later in the movie drives a car expertly. He added a section showing him learning to drive.

10

Duh, people. It’s a horror movie, the characters are scared.
Scared people don’t act rationally. The worst recent horror movie I’ve seen was Resident Evil, for the exact opposite reason: the characters are frikkin commandos, they don’t panic, they’re barely human… how in the hell is that scary?

Sorry, but complaining about the “stupidity” of horror movie characters being “unrealistic” is a pet peeve of mine. Real people do really stupid shit when they’re scared, there could be nothing less realistic than to show the characters in a horror movie rationally thinking through every decision they make.

11

Commandos are trained to deal with fear. If these guys start cracking under pressure, what the hell are they doing in the special forces/elite security? Resident Evil kinda bugged me because they shoot this guy, then he gets up and starts coming back to them, and it takes them forever to shoot them again.

Maybe that’s why I like ALIENS, because you actually have well armed guys who have a pretty good idea what they are doing fighting againest monsters.

In some cases you may be right, and not everyone becomes an utter moron when they are scared. If they did, I don’t think the human race would exist.

And splitting up in a dark house when you know a murderer is on the loose is not an act of fear, but of bravery to the point of stupidity, or perhaps just stupidity. A scared person would probably get the hell out of the house, and try to keep together, or at least find a room and lock themselves in it.