I saw a police shoot out on one of those Caught on Camera shows and was disappointed at the sounds of the firearms. All the pistols sounded like little cap guns! Come on, man … in the movies they always sound sooo deadly and awesome. It’s upsetting.
This isn’t 100% true.
I can pick padlocks with just an x-acto knife.
But, bigger and better locks would require the pick and tension wrench.
For that matter, in the movies, you can strangle a person to death in fifteen seconds. You grab them, they choke, flail for about ten seconds, and they’re dead.
It takes a lot longer than that for a person to die of asphyxia or brain hypoxia. They can become unconscious very quickly - no more than 15 seconds if you can cut off the blood supply almost entirely - but you need to keep strangling them to kill them. If you just walk away after they fall unconscious, they’ll wake up quite rapidly.
Note to self … don’t ever meet RickJay in person.
And every other soap opera on the planet.
Most (I would hope) civilians/victims don’t run around their office/store/home doing tasks while being questioned by a police officer. Normal folk sit down and pay intense attention to cops’ questions and their own responses (I’m looking at you, SVU, CSI, and most every crime drama ever invented).
In response to up-thread observation about how difficult it is to start a modern-day car by hotwiring: some apparently Olde Timey thieves tried to steal my BMW by randomly pullling wires and jamming a screwdriver into the ignition. :dubious:
Is this also the general rule for suffocation by pillow? I’m not planning anything (at the moment).
I’m thinking about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the book, it took about 10 minutes for The Chief to suffocate McMurphy with a pillow. In the movie, about two.
And incredibly crazy people are not let out of hospitals once they do good deeds and appear sane.
Inside of a Michael Bay film, everything explodes.
A solid blow to the testicles ends the fight. It ends the fight. If you have ever received a blow to the testicles, you know that it takes all the fight out of you, you fall to the ground, it takes a while to get back up and you move really slowly and cautiously for the rest of the day.
The only realistic depiction of a blow to the testicles I have seen is from ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ where Luis Gossett Jr falls to the map and blows snot bubbles.
Mentioned many times before but may as well bring up office building sprinklers here. Holding a lighter up to a sprinkler will not drench the entire building in water - it will only activate the sprinkler head that you held the lighter under. There’s a tiny glass bubble on each unit that breaks under heat - if no heat breaks the glass in other sprinkler heads, they do not activate.
Also, cell phone reception in movies is exceptional, unless the plot requires it not to be, then it’s comically terrible where it shouldn’t be - like, say, Isla Nublar.
Have you ever been in an armed showdown? It’s not tense as a lot of quick camera edits make it seem. People’s minds wander, and you might have to rack your shotgun several times to keep everybody’s heads in the game.
Cracked frequently flogs these kinds of issues, or I’m frequently re-reading the same articles. Either way, it’s an interesting topic and I’m glad to be better informed. One thing they have mentioned is that suppressors, such as they are, really only muffle some 10% of the noise from a gun. Also, guns aren’t nearly as easy to bullseye as seen in zombie movies. Much of gunfire in actual combat is used to control how free the enemy is to shoot back. I’ve just about gotten over the fact that you can’t draw ninja swords over your shoulder if they’re strapped across your back.
Why not? Their makeup and hair will still be perfect, so their breath must also have stayed fresh too. 
This one always bugs me more than all the others combined. I hate it when someone “conveniently” crashes through a window or car windshield and the glass just breaks away with little or no damage. And it’s usually very thin glass.
Nuh-uh. Store front windows and car windshields are made of TEMPERED glass, for safety reasons. When they break, they don’t shatter. They usually just crack into a million small, dull pieces but remain somewhat in place.
That always makes me nutty. “You need to question me about the murder of one of my employees? The one who quit after accusing me of having an affair with his wife? That’s pretty important but not really inventorying-these-shoes important…”
You may know this and were just posting in jest, but that’s a function of the limitations of the sound recording equipment used in the production of those shows. Those gunshots probably sounded a lot closer to what you hear in movies to the people who were actually there.
Yeah, other than a .22LR, gunshots are very, very loud. I shoot outdoors, and really can’t comprehend how loud they would sound inside of a car or room, as we see on TV shows.
In TV shows and movies, when people go camping, hiking or hunting, they always have brand new clothing and equipment that shows no wear or use. I realize all clothing and equipment is brand new at some point, but unless the story line is about a new participant, most of the stuff would be old and used.
There are slow-acting poisons that function like a time bomb. You can predict the time of death to the precise minute. The hero has 24, 48 or 72 hours to find the antidote. It’s always an exact number of days. If the victim is given the antidote a few seconds before the deadline, he will make a complete recovery in less than a minute.
Not a movie, but on Night Gallery: Dear Joan: We’re Going to Scare you to Death with Joan Crawford, at the 4:30 mark you don’t use an inhaler by holding it inches from your face and squirting it into the air.
I seriously doubt if time bombs have dramatic red LED counters on them. An awful lot of improvised bombs (like the Patriot’s Day bombs in Boston, or the one in Valkrye) d\don’t rely on electronic or mechanical timers at all.
If I ever built one, I’d be sure that the bomb would detonate at something like 1:45 on the counter, just so anyone disarming it would not really know how much time was left.
And I’d make ALL the wires red.