As I used to tell my fencing instructor, people like you are the reason they make guns. Particularly long range ones.

David.

Oh, I'd have friends with guns, too. But remember: blades don't run out of ammo or need to be reloaded. When the bullets are gone you're left with but a clumsy metal stick.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits

One that Cliff Clavin has probably never been in.

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...and a pile of dead bodies holding knives.

All very nice, are you saying you intend to use all of your knives?

I would get therapy.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

We were all having fun joking around and you have to go and make a mean, uncalled for "joke". Thanks, swoop.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits

I don't know if this one has been mentioned before:

A bomb is about to go off! The hero manages to defuse it right at the last moment!


Yawn...

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"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

And of course, all bombs have blinking lights and or big flashing numbers to make them easy to see.

I think just time-bombs in general are a pretty tired cliché. They're almost never used in RL. I'm not the world's greatest history buff or anything, but outside of some covert military strike we'll never hear about, I don't think they've been used that much since WWII, by the French Resistance etc.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits

Bombs with delay timers were used by the Germans in WWII

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

'Lo folks! Wow, I've been gone for a while, good to be back! (For a moment at least.)

Anyhoo; movie cliches I hate:

Grenukes.

Addendum to Grenukes: a Good Guy standing (running, ducking, whatever) five feet from an exploding Grenuke and not taking any damage whatsoever.

Addendum to the addendum of Grenukes: Grenukes with highly variable fuze times - occasionally in excess of twenty seconds.

Addendum to the addendum to the addendum of Grenukes: Voice activated Grenukes. as in - Grenuke rolls to the Bad guy's feet, and sits there, happily dormant until Bad guy looks down, sees it and says something to the effect of "Oh, shi..." BOOM!!!!!

Question regarding cliches - why is it a Bad Guy is never captured and arrested by a uniformed officer? It's always up to the steely eyed/moody/angry/withdrawn/wisecracking plainclothed Detective, Sergeant, etc. while the uniformed cops sit in their cars going 'duh'. Wouldn't it be nice for a uniformed cop - not a renegade, or a genius, or a CIA plant or sommat; just a hard-working, ordinary joe police officer to be the hero, just once?

This one I blame entirely on the worst crime ever inflicted on Hollywood: Bruce Willis (though it could've been Steven Segal. Whatever; they're both pretty miserable). I don't know what you call it, but it's that horrible holding-the-handgun-sideways-with-your-palm-down everybody seems to like doing nowadays. I admit; it's a pretty good explanation of why every Hollywood gun battle goes at least a thousand rounds without anyone hitting anything, but it's the dumbest looking thing I've ever seen.

Cheers!

Cops never have caller-ID, they always need some elaborate set of boxes and wires in order to trace a bad guy.

You can always safely land a crashing plane as long as there is someone chatting to you a control tower room.

Only a virgin will survive in a horror movie

When you're in a dark room a matchstick can light up the whole room as if you've just switched on the lights.

Off the top of my head I can think of a "Hollywood" Time Bomb. The Harvey's Bombing in 1980 had your standard "overly elaborate time bomb" which the FBI were unable to diasarm and which detonated. Thankfully, the area was evacuated and no one was hurt.

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

Oh I don't know the IRA were fairly partial to them - I go my eardrums rattled by one back in the 1970s. Oh course the earlier poster was correct. Most bombs with a time delay do not have pretty flashing lights or digit counters telling you exactly when they are going to blow, they just go bang when the time comes.

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Well of course back in the days when that particular cliche became part of movie lore (1930s/40s/50s/60s/etc) they did not have it.

This of course opens up a whole new avenue in this thread:

What about those movies where the technology is not harmony with real life development.
By that I mean where the heroes or villains have some pieces of technology which is clearly more advanced that would have been available at the time the story was set. Whilst at the same time there were continuing to exploit or be frustrated by a technology which at the time the story was set was already obsolete and replaced by something better.

I think of all those movies made from the 60s through to the 80s in which there is some form of AI (something we don't have) but where people are still using analog gauges and monochrome CRT displays (things that are already on their way to the antique shops). Even in the 1960s people could see that something like the flat panel LCD would be coming along in future - which is why Kubrick had mock-ups of such things in 2001 (one of the reasons 2001 has aged better than nearly all of its contemporaries).

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Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.

You'd be surprised how many brand new analog gauges there still are out there; as long as we have old operators, will have old fashioned operator interfaces. My personal favorite is when a customer demands an old-fashioned light board—basically a grid of light bulbs with labels—instead of “fancy shmancy” LCD monitors with HMI screens.

Oh, and engineers really do love to put blinking lights on everything. I’m sitting in front of a 8’ x 24’ panel with about 1000 of them right now (most are blinking red—another long day )

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Speaking a small, hand-held explosive devices; I always growl when I see one blow up with a pretty orange ball of flame.

I've thrown a few of those in real-life. All you see is a puff of smoke and a cloud of debris.

What's worse is when said device is capable of practically blowing down a small shed. THAT is definitely not the case with the standard issue devices.

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Worst offender for hand grenades I can recall was Die Hard 2. Willis is trapped in the cockpit of an old, broken down plane (C-123?). The bad guys lob a grenade into the upper skylight-like window which was broken out. Willis sees the grenade land nearby, then begins to strap himself into the ejection seat. Over the nest 20 or so seconds, a lot more grenades come in through that little window. Willis is able to eject away just in time to ride the fireball up and manages to come down far enough away to avoid the bad guys.

20 second grenade fuse
All grenades go off in unison, despite coming in over a 20 second period. (maybe the first set off the others)
Working ejector seats in the crashed out fuselage of a 1960s era military transport at a civilian runway
A 0-0 ejector seat in a 1960s anything. (zero airspeed-zero altitude)
Huge fireball

Oh and not a cliche (how do I make the accent?) but Starship Troopers has a tie in rant here. Nuclear warhead RPGs. I'll accept that they might one day exist, given the Davy Crockett weapon, but my issue was that the Hero was the one to fire it, after another character brought the launcher and a third one brought the grenuke. Too much sense to have the guy that carries the weapon actually have the ammo for it, AND be able to fire it? Or some silly failsafe to prevent one guy from having that amount of firepower all to himself?

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A Geek with think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Very true but all movie explosions have the big orange ball of flame. That is why real life pictures of warfare of look dull, people see an artillery shell explode and want to see a big orange fireball fill their field of view. But then of course special effects people do not generally use actual military grade high explosives on-set. Instead they employ materials which combust rather than detonate, it looks prettier that way, oh and a bit safer.

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Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.