Many, many anime situations. Where “good” and “evil” become hopelessly muddled; logic, proportion and the inviolable laws of physics have fallen slowly dead, and the victor of the great conflict of all time is just the person who screams and/or sobs the most, and he still ends up dead, anyway. (Dead, vaporized, and probably heartbroken or insane.)
Actually, I think I would quite enjoy being trapped in Romero’s Living Dead world. I would hate being the guy who goes back in time to kill the guy who was gonna assassinate Hitler, cause the alternative is much worse.
I’d hate to be there when they cross the streams.
Brave New World/1984. Nuff said. :eek:
It’s indeed a source of conflict, because, as a viewer, I find watching all participants in such muddled catastrophes eventually die, so they will finally shut the fuck up, deeply satisfying. If I were one of them, I might just hate myself enough to welcome the Psionic Robots of Atomic Doom.
On the plus side, we wouldn’t ever have to worry about where you are.
Some of the predicaments of sci-fi/horror are so easily remedied, too. Like in Alien and Aliens, simply spacing the ship as soon as the creature is revealed or taking off and nuking the entire site from space, just to be sure, are such mind blowingly obvious solutions that the real horror comes from being so stupid that these things aren’t done til the end of the movie.
So, I will amend my earlier fears of being in a situation where I couldn’t communicate at all tho I tried my ass of to (Kadir beneath Mo Moteh), surrounded by zombies, or being trapped in the S.O.L., to being stuck with a bunch of stupid jackweeds who perpetuate and exacerbate whatever rotton scenario we’re in by means of idiocy.
Varley, John. “The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged).” is the story you want. Maybe. 
I wouldn’t want to be in a situation where every one of my family members and friends were turning up dead and brutally murdered, having nobody to turn to for support because they keep getting killed off one by one. At this point I’d just want the killer to do me in and get it over with.
To be fair to the characters in these movies, I think in Alien they didn’t realize at all what they were up against until the alien was large and lethal. (Though you have to wonder what the alien was eating after it emerged from Kane, for it to have grown so big already by its second appearance. Did it find the Haagen Dazs stash somewhere?)
Also, they were in the process of bringing home a huge freighter of valuable something-or-other (ore?), worth a lot of money to them, and which they’d spent a large chunk of their lives on. Destroying the whole ship was surely a last resort.
In Aliens, Ripley and company didn’t know there was a hive of the creatures until they were inside the complex. Plus, they were initially on a rescue mission, looking for any surviving colonists. Nuking the site at the first whiff of alien goo would have been a bit callous, and trigger-happy. By the time the rescue mission was moot, they were already trapped themselves.
And of course, in any monster movies like these, there would hardly be a movie at all if the monster were dispatched in the first act.
Not destroy, space. Open the ship to vacuum while wearing your spacesuits. And Ripley’s nuke comment came after the group had determined the colonists were lost and they were discussing saving the edifice somehow.
But, that’s beside the point as you are making the common mistake of picking on the example and not the statement the example is backing. You get a pass this time… 
Yeah, unless it’s in “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” in which case, well, read for yourself and decide whether it makes it into a top 10 bad science fiction destiny.
Because the main point is that I wouldn’t want to be in a similar situation in real life, not what makes a movie watchable.
How about where I’m the last person on Earth and can read all the books I want, then I break my glasses?
One day I got up, went to work, and was shrunken to a miniscule fraction of my normal size. Physicians injected me into the blood stream of a living man, and his immune system turned on me. After being coated with immunoglobulins, I was phagocytosed, and spent my last, agonizing moments being digested by enzymes in the acid environment of a lysosome. Boy did that ever suck.
Possibly the worst thing I ever read was in Stephen King’s ‘The Jaunt’ where It turns out the teleportation takes an unimagainably long time, subjectively, so people have to be knocked out to use it. It’s mentioned in the story that a guy “killed” his wife by transporting her to “nowhere”, so she’ll be in the limbo or whatever possibly forever.
Another bad one is in Dan Simmon’s Hyperion books where folks are taked by the Shrike and impaled on a “tree of pain” to suffer for God knows how long, maybe centuries or millenia or even forever.
In those stories, you’re always the killer.
To add to Bytegeist’s comments on this, the proposal to take off and nuke the site from orbit was made after the initial encounter in the reactor room. The Marines had determined the status of the colonists, discovered that a hive was extant, and Ripley suggested the nuke. Burke tried to overrule her, Hicks exercised his authority as next in chain of command and called Ferro for an immediate pickup.
So, really, as soon as they saw what the situation was, they tried to do the smart thing.
Seconded. In general, being trapped in a situation from which there is simply no escape (floating through space in nothing but a suit, discovering you’ve traveled backward or forward through time with absolutely no way to return, etc) has always been the most disturbing kind of predicament to me.
May I strongly suggest you don’t read World of Mazes, by Robert E. Vardeman?
Uh, pretty much all of them?