12 Feet Deep - Two idiots decide they absolutely positively MUST go swimming in a pool after it's closed. An incredibly contrived sequence of events happens so they get stuck in a pool. So the movie can happen.
Frozen (not that one) - Three idiots decide they absolutely positively MUST get on a ski-lift after it's closed. To the point of bribing the operator who for some stupid reason doesn't say anything. Do the movie can happen. Also, Wolves are not that aggressive. They are typically shy and avoid humans.
47 Meters Down- Arguably the most believable scenario on this list. It's still really stupid.
Fall- Two idiots decide to climb an abandoned radio tower without proper equipment that would make escaping their predicament trivially easy. Stop me if you've heard this one before
I can’t handle the fact that this movie ends with the survivor sending a letter to the survivor of the first fall about doing another free climb like it’s a goddam marvel movie
And then all these movies come together to form the ultimate thrill: 100 meters above frozen 47-meter deep water under a really tall pool cover and surrounded by flying sharks
My second favorite ending of this type, after the third Kingsman movie where the post credit scene has Hitler step out of the shadows to meet Lenin, like he's fucking Thanos.
Granted at least that movie has the excuse that maybe it was meant as a joke? Which would have made sense in the first two movies, but the third movie took itself so much more seriously it's hard to say.
The movie was serious within itself, but it was still made to be whacky and funny from outside. It's just made so the characters actually invest in the situations rather than act like comedians.
If any movie just advertises "From the producers of ___" instead of "From the creators/directors/writers of ___", you know it's going to be absolute dogshit. The question is if it's the fun kind of dogshit or just the kind that shouldn't exist.
In the defense of Frozen-not-that-one, the lift operator leaves (for the life of me I can't remember why) and tells another operator who takes his place that there are still a few people up there. He sees a couple of stragglers come down the mountain and assumes that's what the other guy meant, so he shuts it down.
Most mountain resorts have ski patrol do final runs down the mountain with the specific purpose to make sure there is no one left on the lifts or trails. The chances of this happening are slim, Although I think I heard a woman got stuck overnight in a gondola last winter.
Thats crazy, at least it was a gondola. Back when I worked as a lifty in order for the Frozen scenario to NEVER happen, you just call last chair (to the lifty waiting at top) and close the entrance. Then after the chair gets to the top.... we cycle the chairs to flip them up so they don't get covered in snow/ice. Only short lifts had chairs that didn't flip up. (like the kids hill or the park trail) It would have been impossible for Frozen to happen where I worked, the gondola might be a different story.
No, the bosses were forcing him to work the next weekend which he had already requested off. So his friend covered for him while he ran off to deal with that. Friend then was an idiot.
Also in defense of that, ski resort employees are either morons or are conpletely high all the time, even the ski patrol. Ive been yelled at on several occasions at different parks when they "close" a run. They close the bottom, BEFORE they close the top, so we start going and then run up against a fence. No we couldnt see it from the top asshat.
And not just a few it was specifically three people. Then unfortunately for the main characters the guy didn’t know another three people were already on their way down so it was six people the new guy needed to wait for before shutting the ski lift.
The film revolves around a couple who is trapped in a 6 meter deep pool after the water is drained out. Their situation worsens when a crocodile enters the pool with them.
lol this also happened to my dad. He was painting the bottom of a pool and accidentally painted himself into the deep end. The paint was too slick for him to walk out so he had to army crawl out because the ladders were too high for him to reach. His clothes and the fresh paint were ruined
Especially the one on the radio tower. I've seen enough videos of daredevils climbing towers like that or skyscrapers without any gear just to show they can.
There's a real life version of this. Dude was a freeclimber who would do shit like do pull-ups at the tops of towers. Well one time (while filming for this followers), he didn't have the energy to pull himself back up and couldn't get a good grip with his feet. He fell off the tower, landed on a ledge about 40-50 feet below, and died. No one even knew until the next day when a window cleaner found him. Sounds like a plot from the show "911".
I was yelling at the TV for like half of that movie lol.
I wasn't even a 'pro' climber, I just knew the basics of how to properly explore remote/abandoned places. I just couldn't believe someone would actually bring the equipment they did yet not know how to use it.
Like, did they just look up a list on Google or something and then go "Okay, this looks good!"
irl that’s only gonna get more and more realistic from here
“Hey __(AI assistant)__, what equipment do I need to climb a cell tower?”
“To climb a cell tower, you’ll want a harness, proper clothing, ropes, and carabiners.”
“Where can I get carabiners?”
“You can purchase carabiners at any retail store such as Walmart, Home Depot, or your local hardware store for less than ten dollars.”
And stuff like that. For those who are unaware, cheap carabiners you use for keychains are NOT the type of carabiners that you use for climbing. Regular carabiners are not rated to hold the weight of a person and will be perfectly happy to snap and drop you to your death
When I asked Google AI to give me its thoughts on a Magic the Gathering deck I was building, it told me to put cards in the deck that don't actually exist so I can only imagine how it could mess up a trip and then of course:
"You are absolutely right, there is no hotel on the top of the mountain."
In defense of the film's protagonist, she was in a terrible mental state due to her husband's death; it was her friend (who had a secret affair with her husband) who coerced her into it, which is also quite idiotic on the part of the friend to take a woman in a poor mental state to an unprotected tower.
Her friend was supposedly a professional climber and the protagonist was also an extremely experienced climber. There’s no way they would’ve been dumb enough to bring as little equipment as they did (and not tell anyone)
127 Hours is not at all contrived. People climb canyons all the time. Aron Ralston didn't do anything wrong or out of the ordinary. His only mistake was not telling other climbers where he was going, which is a bad mistake, but one that is quite common. He just got very unlucky to have an accident in a canyon that doesn't see much foot traffic.
Guy decides to parachute onto the devil's tower as a publicity stunt, his plan to get back down is for a rope dropped out of an airplane to land on devils tower so he could use it to get down, rope misses, he spends a week on top having supplies air dropped to him(apparently it was a very special rope that couldn't be arranged quickly enough to try dropping him another rope) until a rescue could be organized:
https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/historyculture/first-fifty-years-george-hopkins.htm
For real and some survival stories really are crazy. I just watched a documentary about a pair of climbers who got caught in a blizzard descending down a mountain in the Andes, and one of them fell and broke his leg, then his partner accidentally dropped him into a crevasse and thought he died so he left him behind, and the broken leg guy (who somehow did not die) had to literally lower himself deeper into the crevasse and then crawl off the mountain, across a glacier, across a field of rocks, all the way to the base camp with no supplies and nobody around for miles. He only survived because his friend felt so guilty about what happened that he stayed a few extra days at the base camp to collect his thoughts and was able to rescue him.
Moreover the real 127 hours guy regularly went out into the desert alone with out telling people where he was going or when to expect him to check in. Basic wilderness safety. Had he done either of these things he actually would have had a decent chance at rescue. He wasn’t reported missing for 5 days.
Open Water 2: Adrift: Everyone jumps off a yacht for a swim without lowering the ladder first, leaving a baby alone onboard while six adults are trapped in the water. The entire movie happens because nobody remembered the boat has really high sides. So the movie can happen.
I had a friend who had a crush on my girlfriend and after we broke up some rumors were circulated by a very known liar and he went on to tell me “dude i swear I wasn’t trying to get with her” and it took everything in me not to say “yeah man like everything else aside there’s no need to convince me of anything because there’s no way in hell she would sleep with you”…… ohhh that guy
So about that. People jumping off a yacht in the middle of the ocean and forgetting to put down the ladder is the only one of these scenarios I have ever heard of actually happening.
One of my favorite statements, regarding the challenge of the design of bear-proof trash cans in Yellowstone: “There’s shocking overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”
I honestly don't get why there isn't another ladder that doesn't need to be deployed. Just a simple set of bars attached to outside of the hull somewhere. It would be slippery at the bottom but it's better than not having any way to get on the boat.
Yeah, you should realistically always have someone on board, whether it’s staff or not. Even anchored boats can float fairly far away, and it can happen a lot quicker than you’d expect, especially when you’re in the water distracted.
The first movie is actually not that much of a stupid scenario, which the protagonists are not the actual idiots, they go on a deep-diving excursion in the middle of the ocean and by accident they get left behind by the crew who took them there.
The original is less contrived and actually based on a real life tragedy: a couple gets separated from their scuba group and, due to improper safety procedures, the boat leaves without them leaving them stranded in the middle of the ocean.
I'm still just in awe at the level of logistics-tracking the writers pulled off in able to make the situation happen without feeling contrived. Everything lined up just right to leave Kevin home alone.
I feel like it's a good example of the "swiss-cheese" model of disasters. Yeah, lots of things had to go wrong for the accident to happen...just that occasionally they do all line up, and you never hear (or make movies about) the times when they didn't.
It's one of the things that really strikes me when I watch the movie (the other is "wow, Kevin's family are all complete assholes").
They legitimately cover all the obvious plot holes:
Kevin was sleeping in the attic on the hide-a-bed
When Kevin shoves Buzz he spills milk on their tickets and one gets swept into the trash, so they don't realize they have an extra.
Kevin's mom, as the only kind thing she does for him in the entire fucking movie, moves Fuller to a different bed.
The power outage turns off their alarms, causing them to oversleep and leave in a panic.
The neighbor kid was browsing through their bags and gets "counted" as Kevin.
The kids are flying coach while the parents fly first class, so they didn't notice Kevin was missing.
Then you have the other plot holes covered pretty well:
All their friends are on vacation. The entire street is. A little contrived, but they are pretty wealthy and live in a wealthy neighborhood.
The cops suck, drive by once, and decide that she's being hysterical. "Tell 'er to count 'er kids again."
Kevin accidentally shoplifts from the corner store (when he's terrified of his neighbor), and with 8-year-old logic decides that he's now a wanted criminal so the cops won't help him. Which, to be fair, with the previous point they probably wouldn't have.
A blizzard shuts down all the flights back home so she has to take a van with John Candy (fun fact - almost all of his lines in that movie were ad-libbed, he was supposed to be a throw away cameo).
There are definitely some contrivances to the story to make everything line up, but all of them are things that could reasonably happen.
Another small detail I like is that there was supposed to be one van with 7 people and one with 8 (since there were 15 people and two vans), so part of the reason why nobody realized the numbers weren't adding up was because both groups thought the other van was the one with 8 people. If it'd been an even number like 16 or 14 someone would have probably realized they were one short.
Also, "why doesn't Kevin call the cops?" Because Harry disguised himself as a cop and freaked Kevin out. Also the power outage not only knocked out the power, but all the phone lines too, so they couldn't call Kevin either
There's a Bollywood movie called Trapped where a bachelor dude moves into an apartment on the top floor in a vacant high rise building that is still under construction because the cost is cheap, making him the only occupant in that building. One day, while hurrying to get to a date, he leaves his keys outside the apartment's door, and a gust of wind makes the door shut with hs keys outside. He is now essentially locked within that apartment, his phone is out of charge, intense rains and faulty wiring (since the building's still under construction) cause a loss of electricity, and there's no one who can hear or see him for miles due to high his flat is in that tall vacant building.
The story goes into how he is stranded there as the water and food supply dwindles out, causing him to feed on insects that roam around at his place, try to hurl his furniture from the building to make people try to save him, scrawl a help letter in his own blood and throw it from the window, burn his clothes in hopes that the fire alerts people, and ultimately make an escape by scaling down the high rise building without any ropes or harness, which can lead to his death.
The movie funnily tried to circumvent the whole guard thing by showing the guard being comically incompetent at his job. For instance, the movie shows the dude moving into the apartment while the guard was snoring, so the guard had no idea some dude has moved into the apartment.
And at one time he had earphones on with his back turned, which caused him to miss the dude hurling a damn cupboard from his flat which came crashing onto the ground. I'm genuinely curious what kind of earphones can mask a damn cupboard falling from a height of 30-40 stories lol
Perhaps the same model Stan Lee was using in one of the Spider-Man movies, he was cleaning and completely unaware Lizard and Spidey were beating the everloving shit outta each other
I will stand by the fact that Fall is just 47 Meters Down but in the sky. It's the same story of "girls go on a trip to get over former lover, get stuck, main girl hallucinates, friend dies, main girl gets saved, and it turns out former lover was actually cheating on main girl with friend so she doesn't need to feel too bad about her dying".
I think the Descent counts for this though, ik it's technically a monster movie not a survival movie, but they end up down there because one of the girls decides on behalf of everybody that exploring mapped caves in lame and wouldn't it be more fun to jump into this unknown hole in the ground and just see what happens?
This like my favorite trope. I can't get enough of it. I don't know why, but movies about people getting stuck in dumb places are my jam. And yes, I am looking forward to the whale movie.
Only reason i'm not going to watch that movie is because of thalassophobia. It's interesting premise although physically impossible. Even blue whales gullet is only a size of a grapefruit.
EDIT: Spermwhales gullet is 20 inches wide, not large enough to swallow an adult whole, especially if said adult is wearing diving gear.
Protagonist is swallowed by a sperm whale and somehow survives. Since sperm whales don’t eat humans, it’s written into the plot that he got stuck in a giant squid’s tentacles and then the whale ate it.
If you’re gonna be this over the top, could at least have named him Jonah or Geppetto
That’s actually accounted for in the book. He gets stuck between the mouth and gullet, and the concern is that he’ll run out of air (he’s a scuba diver and has a tank) as the whale descends to, uh, its normal roaming depth. Interestingly there wasn’t much discussion of water pressure and being crushed if he managed to escape at depth, even though the chapters are labeled by remaining psi in the tank and the final escape is executed taking advantage of the pressurized air canister.
I've only seen the trailer for this but the thing that's annoyed me is once he gets swallowed, the stomach is apparently just full of breathable air. Why would anywhere inside of a whale that isn't its lungs have any real quantity of air?
Yeah I've seen some of these movies where someone gets stuck in a situation that seems highly implausible.
There was this one I actually liked where a woman just got out of the shower and she had put some clothes in the dryer so they'd be warm when she got out. She goes to get them out of the dryer and for some reason goes waist deep to pull out the clothes. Y'know. So the movie can happen. Then she's stuck and can't pull herself out because she's packing a dump truck. She looks like unbaked biscuits stuffed inside a Pringles can.
Anyway a guy comes along to help her. I think it has a happy ending or something. Idk. I didn't make it till the end tbh.
20 years ago it was just her brother. But they wanted to get the incest crowd and the unkinky crowd with the same video. Wider potential audience, y'know?
Survival movie about landmines that gets it wrong on how they function. Two idiots walk into a marked minefield with the protagonist being stuck on a mine incorrectly believing he cant stand off. Landmines activate while applying pressure (stepping on), not by stepping off.
I know it turns out not to be a landmine at the end but its still stupid.
Backcountry. It’s essentially a PSA on what NOT to do to avoid a bear attack disguised as a thriller movie. One of the main characters breaks every single rule in the book and gets eaten by the bear. It’s a pretty gnarly scene though, and kudos to the filmmakers for not overly-relying on CGI.
As I recall, in “Frozen,” the chair lift was being shut off early due to inclement weather. The operator was relieved and told their replacement three people were still on the lift. The latter mistakes three other skiers for the main trio and shuts down the lift without doing their due diligence.
Also, while certainly more rare than say bear attacks, wolf attacks on humans aren’t unheard of, either, especially when the latter are wounded and bleeding as was this case in this movie. They’re more likely to go after someone in the latter scenario.
While admittedly the whole plot is a bit contrived on paper, it could definitely happen in real life.
Except for the part where they can use the cable to climb to a tower and then down, which they do, but for a non-existent contrived reason it makes heavy cuts to their hand and they start bleeding heavily.
I wouldn’t call “stupid people doing stupid things” contrived. I’d say something like Primate. A couple teenagers have to survive a rabies infected chimpanzee, except the chimpanzee acts like he’s possessed by Chucky and not a rabid animal. That being said, 10/10 movie. No notes.
You’re assuming these stories haven’t actually happened before OP, which shows you have a very optimistic opinion of the intelligence of thrill seeking idiots.
Seriously. OP seems too naive to have too much faith in people's brain. That, and if read enough news you know just the right amount of bad luck can get you into any unfortunate scenario irl.
Anyway, for op's prompt, I vote 127 Hours. (Oh, wait...)
This whole film is about two dumbass surfer dudes getting trapped inside a scientific containment experiment that lasts a year just cause they thought the aforementioned Bio-Dome was a mall and had to take a piss
There's that whale movie coming out now where the guy gets swallowed by a sperm whale. I think it's funny how in one ad they repeat him yelling that he's "in a fucking whale!" a few times, which is an odd thing for a character to shout to nobody in particular but the audience for some reason.
Rich morons decided to go on a tiny submarine vehicle operated by a gaming controller to visit the titanic...oh wait that wasn't a movie that was real.
Okay, like, I get why you hate this trope. 12 Feet Deep and Frozen in particular are a little too ridiculous. But people are stupid and people have absolutely done shit like freeclimbing tall buildings with no gear or safe way to get down. People actually get themselves into these dumbfuck situations all the time.
I mean I don't think it's a good genre of movie by any stretch of the word, but a lot of them are realistic, unforch.
eta: after reading actual synopses of Frozen, that one also sounds pretty fucken feasible down to the lift operator failure, honestly. Human error has caused a LOT of insane accidents. The Smiler crash (that one rollercoaster accident) was almost entirely on operator error.
Fun fact, the scene where the whale eats the guy was completely improvised. It was just supposed to be a movie about a guy peacefully scuba diving, but then the actor portraying the whale just went crazy and ate him and the director decided to just keep filming instead of helping.
I read the book. Other than a pretty wild case of wrong place wrong time, the author went out of the way to make the premise as plausible as possible.
sperm whale is one of the only whales capable of swallowing a human (has to be unusually big whale and small human, but possible)
it's an accident while hunting its actual prey, a struggling, fighting giant squid
the tight space, crushing muscles, limited air supply, complete darkness, stomach acid, multiple digestive chambers are all accounted for and the source of all the tension and problems
Where it really lost me was the pseudo-religious near-death-experience of the character's missing dead dad helping him out and also maybe the dad is the whale.
Frozen actually had an explanation, the lift operator that sent them up had another guy take over and told him there were 3 people left. The second guy mistook three other people for the ones that got stuck so he shut it off. They wanted to go on one last run before their trip was over, that's not that contrived.
couldn't you just lie on your back in the first one? it seems like there is basically enough room for your body, and if that's tarp then you can push it out a bit more. On flat unmoving water you can float basically indefinet to the point of falling asleep and being okay, so just do that? Biggest danger of water is the water itself moving above you so you need to struggle to be alive, but not sure how I see the danger here
Edit: I just noticed the floaty ring line thing in the background that make up the 'roads' of the pool, literally hang onto them and relax lmao what is this movie
Haven't seen it either so I skimmed the Wikipedia synopsis, and it's not that they are trapped there for one night, they're apparently being kept there by somebody maliciously over more than one night and at one point the cleaning system is turned on and they could get suffocated by chlorine.
I've actually watched it (don't... It's not good) and IIRC they're actually stuck there for potentially a full season because the pool is closed for the winter holidays or something. Drowning isn't their biggest issue, starvation, thirst, and hypothermia are.
Someone knows they're trapped there and is deliberately fucking with them instead of just getting them help.
My man, I don't expect you to believe me, but that isn't even the stupidest part of the movie.
The stupidest part is when they decide to stab the thief who, while she is fucking with them, is LITERALLY THE ONLY PERSON THAT KNOWS THEY ARE TRAPPED, leading to her almost killing them with a cleaning cycle.
And I know what you're thinking - "how did they stab her when they're trapped in a pool? That must be very stupid in and of itself" and you are correct, sir
Even then, if the pool WAS closed for winter, that wouldnt mean the pool doesn’t need maintenance. Either it would need to be drained or constantly monitoring its pH levels so that you don’t get a nasty surprise coming spring.
It's been s while since I watched it, but she was diabetic or whatever and was about to pass out from low blood sugar. Probably would have been fine otherwise. Just hungry and a little cold when they get out.
Frozen is actually a hilarious movie so it gets a pass from me. Like it’s so absurd and the acting is like, passable which makes it funnier imo. But it’s just so stupid that it works.
You're not wrong, but to go one layer deeper, a lot (all, maybe?) of these movies are probably pitched with a "it'll be cheap to film since it's just the one location/few actors" aspect to it. So that's why the movie can happen.
Buncha idiots clearly never saw Jaws and allowed a crazy land-shark-on-fire terrorize their resort because they didn’t listen to the local legends smh.
The part that pisses me off about Frozen isn't just the contrivance of them getting stuck on the ski lift, but when one of the idiots suggests climbing down using the lift cable that plan gets shot down because "those cables are razor sharp". No they aren't, they're just regular steel cables.
To be honest 47 Meters Down would be more believable if it was about the chain holding the cage snapping and the tension came from waiting for someone with the equipment to bring the cage back up before the air runs out because the lock snapped shut. Dutch the sharks, please stop vilifying my sea doggos.
Yeah I think you’re seriously underestimating the stupidity of people here. 2 is unrealistic because there’s no way in hell a lifty is gonna fire a ski lift back up after turning it off. You’ve never seen someone so chill be so no-nonsense as a lifty telling people it’s closed.
As for 4 there are at least a billion YouTube videos of people with no gear climbing things they shouldn’t.
Frozen is based on a true story (Edit: it is NOT based on a true story, I was mistake. This mistake makes several statements I make later really funny). Believe it or not, reality can be contrived, and wolves will totally eat someone who can't move or defend themselves
Most of these examples are realistic levels of stupidity on the behalf of the people involved
Also I definitely thought I was getting into the popular musical when I started watching frozen
Also that dude's dialogue and delivery in "that one scene" is too stupid to have been written by a writer. Argh! My legs! My legs are fucking broken! Oh my God owwww my legs arghh! I can't fucking move! My legs are fucking broken
I'm mixed on this one. If the situatikn happens due to the characters doing something believably stupid and consistent with their character, I'm good with it. What I know about "Fall" would fit. If the scenario involves a complex web of people doing inexplicably stupid things, I'm probably turning it off.
My favorite part of Frozen is when they try to get that worker who is driving under them attention, they throw their soft stuff, like gloves and shit at him, rather then their ski poles, skis, other helmets. You know, the shit that will make a sound when it hits the vehicle....
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u/LewdDudeNewd 16d ago
I got bad news OP: