Dan pointed me to a list of Movie cliches that seem a bit out of date. Since such a list has been beating around my head for a while, I'll add a couple to their list:

1. Flying through the CG tunnel.
   • Man oh man I can't even tell you how sick I am of this. I never need to see that again. Ever. The first time I saw it was in 2001: A Space Odyssey and now almost every action/sci-fi movie has a version of it. The intro in X-Men, Serenity, hell even the DVD for The Descent (more on that movie later!)
2. Cool people calmly walking toward the camera while something explodes behind them.
   • I thought this was well established as a cliche long ago. But I still see it all the time! Gimme a break already! It's not cool anymore, if it ever was.
3. A large group of protagonists walking in slow-motion towards the camera in a wide shot.
   • It was tired in Armaggedon, why is it in Old School and Anchorman and tons of other movies I've seen recently?
4. The push-pull.
   • Hitchcock made it famous. Steve used it in Jaws. Pete used it in Fellowship of the Ring. Now it's everywhere in every movie and I'm really tired of it. (Are you listening Shamalamadingdong?)

Another cliche these days is horrible movie trailers which brings us back to The Descent. I saw this movie at BNAT in Dec and knew nothing about it. I can easily say that it's one of the, if not the scariest movie I've ever seen. Of course no-one will agree with me if they see the trailer. The trailer has one of the scariest scenes in the film in it! If you haven't seen it and intend to, avoid the trailer/ads and the rest of this blog entry!

If the stupid ads didn't show you the mutants, and made the film out to be about a group of women who get trapped in a cave and how scary that would be (and IMO, that'd be scary as hell,) I think people would still go see it. I mean, fuck they went to see the remake of The Hills Have Eyes and that was about as scary as The Tonight Show. Perhaps I give them too much credit, but I think the modern audience would keep the secret. I think they'd tell their friends "Go see that, even if you think it looks boring." But instead we get the whole fucking movie cut down to 90 seconds.

The same shit happened with The Sixth Sense. I'm one of the unfortunate souls who spotted the twist without even trying right at the beginning of the film, but even still, how much better would that film have been if the trailer didn't contain the phrase "I see dead people." If they'd sold that film as a child shrink helping a troubled kid, the scene at the beginning with the drawers and cupboards that are suddenly open would have had way more impact. Since everyone in the theater knew that there was a supernatural element to the film, that scene falls completely flat when it could have scared the crap out of us.

And they're dumb enough to take it even further. I never saw The Others, but I didn't need to. The voice-over in the trailer said something about a twist ending that would leave me stunned or have me talking about it for weeks or some other stupid shit like that. Wow, they're the dead ones. I don't even need to see the movie to guess the stupid twist ending that I wouldn't have known about except for the trailer.

If you can market Shamalamadingdong's Signs as an alien movie and The Lady In Water as a horror film, how about remembering the marketing for Psycho. It worked. There were lines around the block and the secret was maintained.