This episode was cool, but it bugged me too. Mostly because it seemed like a ripoff of “The Thing”/“Who Goes There?” (which is one of the best sf novellas ever, IMO.)
-Ben
Sir Rhosis wrote:
“The biggest gaffe, not necessarily continuity-based, that I’m aware of is from “Citizen Kane,” i. e., who the hell was in the room to hear Charles Foster Kane’s famous final utterance…“Rosebud”?”
I always thought it was that smarmy butler guy that wanted to be paid for his interview. No?
The filming of “Bonfire of the Vanities” was done in two stages. They filmed all the exterior scenes in and around New York City, then all the actors had a couple weeks off while the production staff moved everything to Hollywood to shoot interiors on the soundstages. During the time off, Melanie Griffith got breast implants. The size of her breasts changes back and forth during the film. Somebody top that.
stuyguy,
I believe we are supposed to imagine it was the butler or the nurse, but IIRC, in the shot, the nurse comes in far too late to hear Kane’s whisper, or is at the door as he says “Rosebud.”
Eutychus’ post about the commentary on “The Usual Suspects” reminds me of something else that was sort of a gaffe but was left in the film. They mention the scene where (God, I can’t remember names) the Big Guy (Proudfoot?) in California (played by the actor whose ass was gotten medieval on in “Pulp Fiction”) flips a cigarette butt into Stephen Baldwin’s face. The lighted butt hit Baldwin in the eye and he snapped for a second and jumped at the other actor. He chilled out, but they kept his real life reaction in the film for a brief second or two.
Sir
The films with the worst gaffes? Probably my student ones.
All humor aside though, check out some foreign french films. there’s one called the visitors which had SUCH bad continuity that everyone i was watching it with was simply disgusted; even people who are only casual moviegoers. It’s as though the director thought of the 180-degree line as some american-made and therefore throwaway inconvenience. My god.
I read this in a magazine somewhere and it drives me nuts now because I see it every time I watch Reality Bites:
It’s the scene where Winona Ryder is talking to Ethan Hawke in their apartment. She’s standing with her back to a refrigerator that has alphabet magnets scattered over the door. The camera cuts between the two actors and every time it cuts to Winona, the magnets would appear in different positions. I used to wonder if they were trying to spell something out.
One of the cars in the big chase in Bullitt loses no less than seven hubcaps…
I just remembered a couple in Batman. In the restaurant/museam, the Joker’s boys slash a painting. Then, in the very next shot it’s miraculously restored.
Also, there was usually black paint around Keaton’s eyes when he wears the cowl (making it seem like the mask goes right up around his eyes). However, it seems to appear and disappear from shot to shot.
Oh, I remember a gaffe I saw in the movie ‘The Falcon and the Snowman’. Its actually kind of a two part gaffe, but anyway the first part starts where Sean Penn’s character is planning on smuggling drugs out of(Mexico?,Tiajauna? I cant remember exactly)but he is suppose to have a prosthetic leg which is where he hides the drugs,theres a long scene showing him sitting on a pile of bags or someting(to hide his real leg I guess)and he’s stuffing his fake leg and bragging to his friend how clever he is; So o.k. cut to a later scene when he got caught and was taken into police custody and stripped down to his jockey shorts and made to sit on a chair while being interrogated by the authorities,anyway if you watch that scene you’ll notice that he has TWO perfectly good legs on him,so where did his prosthectic leg go? I know it didn’t grow back. That always kinda bothered me about that movie.
Here’s some I can’t believe nobody has mentioned yet:
In Commando, there is a chase-scene with Arnold, and Rae Dawn Chong in a yellow Porche that gets horribly smashed and restored about 6 times in a row. At one point, the car even ends up landing on it’s passenger side. You can see the door completely caved in when Arnold pushes it back over, then in the next scene, no damage.
‘Twister’ is guilty of the same thing at least a couple of times. There is a scene where a big hunk of debris hits the truck and clearly breaks the windshield, then in the next shot, not a crack.
Not a time problem but an oversight? in ‘Lake Placid’
The scene: a couple guys in a helicopter herding the giant submerged croc’ to a waiting team at shore. One fellow on shore radios the copter and asks if they have a visual. The response: “No, but we’ve got him on radar.”
Excuse me, but doesn’t radar bounce off water?
I forget the name of the movie, but it had something to do with a guy who just got out of prison, found someone’s day planner, and took over the 2nd guys life. He showed up at the mansion matching the address in the day planner, walked in the front door, and gazed in amazement at the opulence before him. The front door was wide open. Cut to a view of the room. Cut to a view of the guy staring at the room…in front of a closed door.
The second one I remember was on ER - Jeannie was talking to Carrie in a corridor and her purse strap was either over or under her coat lapel, depending on whether or not the camera shot was from the front or the back.
And ANY movie where women wake up in the morning with every hair in place and perfect makeup? HORRIBLE continuity problem 
In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, when Jack Nicholson is at the typewriter for the first time and Wendy says she’s make him sandwhiches and then maybe she can read his work and he’s yelling (or snapping) at her, there’s a chair behind him against a wall. It disapears and reappears whenever they move the shot from Nicholson to Duvall to Nicholson and Duvall and back to Nicholson.
I’m not sure if this is just me missing something or not, but in Gladiator (I think in the middle of the bit where Maximus escapes from Proximo’s compound) there’s a shot of someone putting a snake into someone else’s bed (I think the Emperor’s sister’s bed)… What the hell was that? I didn’t notice anything else that referred to it in any way at all.
This one’s very small in Mallrats. When Jay and Silent Bob are running from LaFours and meet T.S. and Brodie in the food court, T.S. is holding a cup labeled Coke. In the shots, it switches back and forth from Coke to Diet Coke. The first time you notice it, it looks like it could be just the other side of the cup, but if you just keep watching the cup, you realize it’s definitely not. The colors keep switching…
In the beginning of Me, Myself and Irene, the voice over says that Charlie (I think that’s his name…) was couldn’t swim. Then it’s never mentioned again. This is because the scene that dealt with that was cut from the original footage. It’s on the dvd.
How could I have forgetten BladeRunner? 
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Deckard is told at the start that there were 6 replicants, and that one got fried by running through an electrical field. That leaves 5, but only 4 are ever seen (due to a cut scene that accounted for the missing replicant).
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When Deckard goes to see the guy who made the snake their dialogue is very badly dubbed over whatever it was they originally said. You can see that it was totally re-scripted.
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In Deckard’s ‘fight’ with Roy Batty at the end, there’s a bit where Batty pushes a nail through his hand and then smashes his head through a wall. These shots were originally in the opposite order, but they got switched, with the result that a broken window miraculously repairs itself.
I think there’s more as well, but I can’t quite remember any at the moment.
I remember a couple of ones from the movie INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM. The main one is the scene where Indy, the woman and the little boy are in a plane thats about to crash into a mountain, so Indy grabs a rubber raft,they jump in it and he pulls the cord to inflate it as it careens down to the side of the mountain. Anyway, after the raft reaches the edge of the mountain and it heads down the the river below you can actually see a HUGE rip on one side of the raft as it hits the water. I remember catching that gaffe the first time I saw that movie and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t sink right away;wasnt til later that I discovered it wasn’t suppose to happen that way.
Another scene in the same movie that I always found amusing :Its where Indiana and the woman jump out of the nightclub and land in the car driven by a little boy(about 8 or 9)and he drives them recklessly thru the streets until they reach an outdoor market. If you watch that closely, right after the car zooms around a corner and before they broadside a large fruitcart, the little boy inside the car briefly turns into a full grown 250 lb man before going back to being a little kid again. It all happens really,really quick so if you want to catch it,you’ll probably want to keep your finger on the pause button,or play the scene frame by frame.
I caught the other two you mentioned, but I always thought this one was done on purpose. In the director’s cut especially, the implication is made that Deckard himself is a replicant. That would thus make 6.
There’s a book (whose title I forgot) on the making of Blade Runner which explains this in more detail. The sixth replicant was supposed to be a June Cleaver housekeeper type who got killed early on (perhaps on the “Junkyard Planet” scene which was never filmed? I don’t remember.) The mention of six replicants is thus a true continuity gaffe, although it helped feed speculation over whether Deckard is a replicant.
-Ben
In “But I’m a Cheerleader”, there’s a scene where the main character and her girlfriend (but not yet) are talking outside and the second girl is smoking a cigarette. The cigarette grows and shrinks according to the side of the shot.
And then there’s that scene in “Fled” where Stephen Baldwin has a shirt on, then a jacket on top of it, then not. Camera angles (i.e. different parts of the same scene shot more than once).