I know, that’s why I forgot about them. But titties are tittiies and tiities are watchable.
Titties are titties and titties are watchable.
Damn hamsters screwing with the posts.
Does the board work now? let’s edit.
Good point.
Yep. Don’t forget that the burned up Hungarian sure thought he saw Keyser Soze, since he kept saying “Keyzer Soze!” while he was in the hospital giving them the sketch that was faxed to the police station. But I agree that’s for another thread and isn’t an Idiot Plot.
Here’s an Idiot Plot that won Best Picture: The Departed.
There’s a mole in Jack Nicholson’s crew of about five guys. Could it be his long-time associates and henchmen, or the new guy who was recently kicked out of the Police Academy?
There’s a mole in the police station. Could it be the guy from Southie who had close ties to Nicholson’s crew and who just got a new too-expensive apartment that was CO-SIGNED by Nicholson?
The Lieutenant was murdered, and no cop at any point thought to trace calls made to / from that phone? Worse, no one thought to try “redial” on the dead Lieutenant’s cell phone until Damon tried it and was instantly connected to the mole?
This is not a joke. The worst plot of all time is the third act of Hamlet. Yes, that Hamlet and again this isn’t a joke.
Our Danish Prince enters and announces “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead”. The Norwegian Army is approaching Elsinore, but that ain’t enough. Our hero has to do a mano y mano swordfight. Laertes pierces Hamlet with a sword, but that’s not what kills Hamlet. Oh no, simply running a sword through Hamlet’s chest can’t kill him. He dies because it’s a poison blade! But then Laertes gets stuck with his own damn sword and dies. Ham’s mom drinks the poison thinking it’s freakin’ wine. And we’re still not done. Nope, not yet. A sword-stabbed and poisoned Hamlet manages to come back from the dead and kill his betraying uncle. Then the army shows up and now we’re done.
I love Shakespeare but I never got why people dig Hamlet so much. It’s as if Will thought to himself, “How do I end this? Screw it, they all die scribblescribblescribble I need a beer.”
This Island Earth This movie is filled with non-sequiturs and manifest stupidities.
The aliens are looking for really intelligent Earth Scientists to help them, it turns out, in their battle with another space-faring bunch. They obviously have scientist Cal Meacham on their short list, because when he stupifdly loses his burners on his jet because he’s showing off, they step in with their Magic Tractor Beam and save his ass.
Then they give him an intelligence test, proving that he can follow schematics, building an Interociter from an interstellar Heathkit. They contact him and his assistant via the magic device nd invite him to join them. But they don’t want evidence left behind, so they blow up the machine and the catalog, and fix it so that pictures taken of him don’t come out. It later turns out that they’ve been secretly siphoning off scientists and making the world believe they were dead. If this is how they were doing it, it’s amazing that it worked so long. You’d think the Powers That Be at their labs would be curious about the explosion in the lab. Or that the assistants would talk.
Cal goes to the pickup spot and is flown away in a magic plane with no pilot that can self-navigate, and is taken to a house full of ulled scientists and people with white hair and high foreheads (no, not suspicious at all. You want them to say “We Are From France” in Beldar Conehead’s buzzing monotone to prove it.) The aliens are high-toned guys, who dress formally, live uin a nifty home, and listen to Mozart. But they seem to be acting creepy deliberately. They turn the scientists loose in a basement lab, but sopy on them ostentatiously. Why? The only thing this does is get everyone suspicious, which is guaranteed to wreak havoc with their productivity.
Finally, a crisis is reached. What crisis? Well, they don’t say. It’s probably the imminent doom of Metaluna that we see later but, if so, I gotta say that they started this program wayyyy too late, and hadn’t gotten good results. They decide to close up shop and go back to the home base, in the meantime using their nasty-o-ray (where’s it come from? we never see.) to blow up two of the scientists. (WHY??? If the whole point of this business was to gather cative scientists, then what’s the point of killing them? One of them wasn’t even obviously trying to get away!)
They use their tractor beam to vacuum up Cal and his lady friend, having evidently polished off the other scientists (If this is how they do everything, I’m not surprised that they’re a dying race losing the war. I like the enemy Zaygons more every time I watch this.) They put them in jumpsuits and treat them in ntheir magic Visible Man Tubes. Then they have a run-in with cool-looking delta-wi nged Zauygon bad guys before they land on Metaluna.
Metaluna is a hoot. The entire surface of the planet is hidden under a solid rock shell with convenient holes in it. Huh? It should be awfully dark under there, but it isn’t. Oh well, at least the shell keeps them safe from bombardment by the Zaygons. Only it doesn’t. All the time they’re there, big balls of fire keep raining down (how are they getting through the shell?). Clearly, they didn’t tthink things through.
They get to see the Head Conehead, whose atom-symbol thing has all purple-lights, which makes it twice as cool as the one on board the spaceship. He says that the scientists are to have their free will eliminated. I’d think that this would be a serious impediment to creative thought, myself, and a waste of the people you’ve laboriously recruited and transported across several light years. But Metaluna is a rigid bureaucracy, and you just know they’re going to lose to those Mac users from Zaygon. It develops that the reason they were recruiting Earth Scientists is because the Metalunans had run out of radioactive materials, and needed Earth scientists to think up something else they could use. The idea of technologically superior aliens with FTL space ships hijacking earth scientists to come up with even more technologically advanced things doesn’t strije anyone here as odd. Seems to me they would’ve been better off stealing nuclear material from our military and power plants, but apparently Metalunans don’t think that way.
For no good reason, we get to meet their assistants – insectoid, big-brained , claw-limbed “mutants”. I know that, when I choose my stupid lackeys (despite the big, exposed brains, the Metalunan Mutants are described as “of low intelligence”. Imagine how stupid they must’ve been before they enlarged the brains.), I’m certainly going to choose ill-tempered, strupid, eight foot tall ones with sharp claws for hands. Because you KNOW that you’ll never have any labor problems with them. The mutant attacks the Good Guy alien. They meet another, who conveniently dies in a rubble fall. Or so we think.
The scientists and the Good Guy alien escape just as Metaluna starts turning into a sun (I know this fits in with the theories of stellar evolution I’ve been taught) The Good Guys get into the Magic Visible Man Tubes, but we’ve already used that effect, so we don’t get to see it again. The Mutant shambles around again, just to be menacing and to let the Woman Scientist show off her Screaming and Hopelessly Stumbling Around Technique. After this, the Mutant pointlessly dies asd evaporates. The Good Guys get dropped off on Earth (I persobnally think that the Alien should’ve dropped them off in the Antarctic or the Gobi or something, just so they know they’ve BEEN somewhere, but he apparently leaves them where he found them. Good GPS on those flying saucers). Then, realizing that he’s dying, he crashes his ship. I guess he didn’t want to be left in the hands of Earth healthcare or something. Although leaving us that high-tech flying saucer would’ve been a nice gesture.
The MST3K treatment killed me, especially when the sympathetic Metalunan tried to negotiate past one of those freaky alien guards:
“Allo, mein Herr! Zigaretten?”
My favorite idiot plot is The Forgotten. It starts off as a perfectly pedestrian “the kid has gone missing” plot. It gets spooky when all evidence of the kid’s past starts going missing as well. So far so good. I’m hooked. As a parent I can sympathize. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, ALIENS!!!1!!!. Fuck me.
Actually, there were 2 moles in the police station. That said, the third idea works in terms of the movie, as Damon was in charge of the investigation. Obviously, if done right, he would not have been alone. As to the second, we’ll have to figure that the dumb cop played by Alec Baldwin, surrounding himself with a bunch of equally dumb cops, might not have had the ability to notice the financial chicanery Nicholson’s crew used to hide who was really financing Damon’s apartment. Also possible, with Damon in such a prominent position and Baldwin so inept, maybe they just didn’t look at Damon.
I got nothing for the first one. Was it ever revealed whether or not the guy shot around the time Sheen died is or is not also a mole? Two moles on each side increase the difficulty of running a disinformation campaign, especially when run by incompetents.
There’s a whole collection of (now somewhat old) reviews pointing out gratuitously bad plots (and gratuitously bad acting, directing and cinemetography) at
One of my favorites is the review of “Sudden Death” It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie: Reader Review: Sudden Death, by Faux Pas
Minor quibble, but it’s actually the fifth act.
Doesn’t the guy in the hospital identify Verbal as Sose. And if I remember the movie correctly, the police have heard of Sose before this. I don’t think Sose as someone that Verbal made up on the fly to explain the bodies makes much sense.
The real problem with that movie is at the end. Do they really let someone involved in a shootout involving something like 20 homicides (not to mention the earlier crimes Verbal confessed to being involved in) out on bail after a single interrogation?
Oh, come on, it was an awesome moment when we see what it really means when the aliens “take you away”
Other than that, yeah. Some nudity would have spiced that movie up.
-Joe
Yet another point about Flightplan: the plot would not work if Jodie Foster’s character simply stayed awake. She had to take a nap long enough for her daughter to be kidnapped from right next to her.
That wasn’t bad script writing. That was reality. They really were that stupid. 
“The railings are magnetic.”
“And if your hands were made out of metal, this would mean something.”
Major quibble: you’ve completly misunderstood the end of the play.
First, the Norweigan army had a right of passage to move through Denmark to attack (IIRC) Poland. Their unexpected conquest of Elsinore was the result of Fortinbras breaking the treaty.
The duel between Laertes and Hamlet wasn’t supposed to be to the death. They were playing for points, essentially, like a sporting match. Hence, the poison: Laertes could score a minor wound on Hamlet, as would be typical for these kinds of matches, and then Hamlet would collapse unexpectedly. Since Claudius was in on the murder, he could cover up any suspicions of poison, but blatantly impaling the next in line to the throne in front of an audience would be a bit tougher to sweep under the rug. Hamlet’s never “run through,” unless you’re watching a particularly weak staging.
Gertrude doesn’t mistake the poison for wine. It is wine, intended for the victor of the match. Claudius sets it out at the beginning of the fight, and drops a pearl into it as a prize for the winner. The pearl is coated in poison. This was their back-up plan, in case Hamlet swept the match without ever taking a wound.
Lastly, Hamlet doesn’t come back from the dead. He takes a minor wound from Laertes, but the poison is slow-acting, and he’s able to dispatch the King before he finally succumbs.
And, as pointed out, this is the fifth act. The third act is the one where he kill Polonius.
No, I don’t think you get me. I got Buffy. It was idiotic for a single town to be repeatedly plagued by monster attacks and go on with life as normal. We knew it, Joss knew it. We’re all part of the joke. That makes it one of my favorite idiot plots.
The Usual Suspects was simply annoying. OK, it’s not clear how much of what Verbal says is true and how much is lies. It is clear that the police are interested in who killed a bunch of guys by the dock though. The police detective is too dimwitted to know that he’s being lied to, though that much is clear to everyone in the audience. He does realize it 10 minutes later, so he’s going to nab Verbal when he shows up for arraignment. Or if Verbal skips, he’s going to have to quickly become a criminal mastermind to elude the police. I liked the style of the movie, but I prefer to have a bit of substance as well.
But Verbal clearly isn’t just Verbal, the crippled small time confidence man. He’s not actually crippled. He’s got enough pull somewhere to get released even though there are 25 dead guys on a dock. He’s scary enough for some reason that the Hungarian guy tries to walk out of the hospital on a fried drumstick rather than face him. So he’s not going to show up for an arraignment, and he’s already something of a criminal mastermind.