10 Hilariously Strange Scenes In Film

A lot goes into making a feature film or television show. With hundreds of people working on different parts separately, it can be difficult to keep track of everything. This could manifest itself as animation errors in movies like Frozen or cars that magically repair themselves in Commando. Sometimes, though, things slip past that should have been obvious without anyone standing up to say: “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t film the scene this way,” or “Guys, I’m pretty sure we’re building penises.”

10 Fast And Furious 6
Vin Diesel And The Rock Become Giants

Dwayne Johnson, also known as “The Rock,” joined the Fast and Furious franchise as Luke Hobbs, a special agent tasked with hunting down and stopping Vin Diesel and his heisting ways, in the fifth movie. After the smash success of that film, Johnson was brought on for the sixth Fast and Furious movie. This time, the big difference was that he would be working with Diesel and his crew of criminal misfits. While the two action stars would be working side by side, they still couldn’t see eye to eye because they couldn’t stop exploding in size.

The scene above was supposed to show that Diesel and Johnson could stand side by side for a mutual goal, but they were still at odds and couldn’t look each other in the eyes as equals. However, due to the positioning of the actors and cameras, it ended up looking like the opposite of what the scene intended, with the two of them staring each other down as opposed to standing next to each other. Every time the camera shifted to a different angle, the actors would take turns growing their heads to massive sizes, with Johnson’s head being bigger than Diesel’s entire upper body at one point.

9 In Time
Using Actual Toys For Action Scenes

A lot of big budget films use miniatures to great effect. In movies like The Dark Knight, the use of scale model versions of the Batmobile and a garbage truck made nearly impossible scenes become a reality without putting any stuntmen in danger. The people behind most productions aren’t as resourceful as those behind The Dark Knight, and they likely wouldn’t have the same type of budget that The Dark Knight had. But that still doesn’t excuse what they tried to get away with in the poorly named Justin Timberlake film In Time.

During a chase scene in the film, Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried are speeding down the freeway in a shiny, new convertible. A spike strip appears before them, shredding their tires and sending the car flying uncontrollably off the freeway. Without explanation, the actor and actress dissolve into nothingness as their expensive sports car turns into a Hot Wheels toy car. Once the certainly fatal crash ends, they materialize in their actual car without a scratch, despite the fact that they weren’t wearing seat belts in a convertible that flipped.

8 LOST
The Polar Bear Cannon

By the time LOST ended, the island had become an insane mess of time travel, ghosts, and monsters. However, when the show began, the craziness of the plot was fed to the audience in bits and pieces. If they went too crazy too soon, they couldn’t up the ante in later episodes. A good middle ground at the beginning of the series was to include polar bears on the island, a place where polar bears usually aren’t found. But initially, director J.J. Abrams was adamant that he didn’t want CGI used for the animals. Instead, he chose to use practical effects.

It may be practical to have a man run around in a polar bear costume. But Abrams used a poorly made stuffed animal shaped like a polar bear, which he blasted out of a cannon at the actors. The resulting scene didn’t even come close to looking like a bear attack. You could see the bear prop flying through the air with its clearly empty legs flailing about. After enough online ridicule, J.J. Abrams finally agreed to let the production replace the bear cannon with good old CGI, but you can still find the original version online.

7 Robocop
The Long Arms Of The Law

The original 1980s version of RoboCop, the violent action movie about a cop who gets killed and becomes a robot cop, is well-known for its scenes of gruesome and over-the-top gore. Making use of claymation and puppetry, the film looks kind of silly by today’s standards, but it still holds up with its unique style and feel. While a lot of the movie’s special effects look weird, the movie shows the violence perfectly. Even today, the scene of Officer Murphy getting blown to bits is enough to make a person wince.

The finale of the movie (spoiler alert!) puts RoboCop back in the headquarters of the people that manufactured him. He’s there to deal out his own form of justice against an extremely corrupt employee. After getting clearance to kill the man, RoboCop shoots the man through a plate glass window, sending him falling to his death.

At this point, the actor is replaced with a claymation dummy. That replacement should have been okay because it fit the film’s overall style, but there was one very obvious issue. The dummy’s arms were about three times longer than normal human arms. With RoboCop‘s budget, they probably didn’t have the time or funds to correct it, so enjoy the first ever cameo of Slender Man in a motion picture.

6 Man Of Steel
The Prison ‘Ships’

Man of Steel introduced the world to a more grounded Superman who was willing to do what it took to save people, even if that meant killing. While not everyone was happy about this darker Superman, it was clearly the start of much bigger things as Warner Brothers gleefully announced a 2016 release date for the next film in the series, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. While that’s all very exciting, lets talk about a scene in the beginning of Man of Steel where Zod and his henchmen are sentenced to the Phantom Zone, a prison located in subspace.

After their sentencing, Zod and his men are quickly are encased in cryocapsules and blasted into the Phantom Zone. We’re just going to lay it out as straight as possible. The cryocapsules are clearly giant penises with rockets on the end that blast them all into the sky.

5 Insidious: Chapter 3
Elderly Pushing Match Decides Fate Of Souls

The Insidious films have been pretty crazy ever since the first one was released in 2010. Ghost movies aren’t just about haunting a family any longer. They need to include things like astral projection, multiple ghosts from all over the world fighting to haunt the family (like something out of X-Factor), fistfights with demons, and twist endings.

While all of those things happened in the first Insidious film, they don’t hold a candle to the final battle in the third movie. An elderly woman goes into the demon world to save the soul of a girl trapped in the Further, a type of evil limbo where demons stay. The demon that grips the girl is a sickly, elderly man wearing a breathing mask.

While that might sound and look terrifying, the elderly woman isn’t having any of it. She shoves the sickly demon out of her way like she’s in a hurry to get to the bathroom. And get this, the demon shoves her back. The entire action sequence is two elderly people pushing each other until one of them falls down.

4 Avengers: Age Of Ultron
Ultron Is Wile E. Coyote

In the Road Runner cartoons, Wile E. Coyote was always hatching plans to catch the Road Runner, but they always ended in disaster for the Coyote instead. In most cases, when confronted with the fact that he couldn’t catch the Road Runner on foot, the Coyote would simply attach himself to some form of rocket. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ultron seemed to follow this mantra as well: When things aren’t going your way, throw a rocket on it. He experienced the same disastrous results as the Coyote.

While we won’t reveal details about his plans at the end of the movie, just know that they involve attaching rockets to something. If that fails, his backup plan is more rockets.

What we will discuss is a sequence in the movie where Ultron is being attacked while transporting his new, unfinished form in a semitruck. As the Avengers descend upon his truck, Ultron’s lesser versions of himself grab onto the truck and turn themselves into rockets, blasting the truck into the sky. With a shaky cam repeatedly zooming in, a jet chases after a truck floating in the air in the middle of a city as if it weren’t the silliest thing in the movie.

The question is: Why didn’t Ultron just carry the cradle? He can fly. He didn’t have to worry about the Avengers destroying his new body because they were clearly trying to steal it, not destroy it. Besides that, the Avengers were looking for a truck or plane that could be carrying the cradle. If Ultron had just picked it up and flown away with his two cronies, the Avengers would have wasted their time checking the ground while he got away. Also, if he were holding the cradle, the Avengers couldn’t have gotten close enough to steal it.

Did he just use a truck so that he could fight the Avengers for a few minutes?

3 American Sniper
Award-Winning Movie Forgets Babies Exist

We’ve already talked about the “uncanny valley” and just how difficult it is to pass something off as human, especially when you’re trying to mimic a baby. There are so many parents in Hollywood who want their kids to grow up to be superstars that there should be an ample number of babies available for any scene in a movie. But apparently, that wasn’t the case for American Sniper.

Nominated for Best Motion Picture of the Year at the Oscars in 2015, American Sniper opted to use a baby doll instead of an actual child. While they may have done this for any number of reasons, they didn’t even try to hide it. Right away, it’s clear that Bradley Cooper, the star of the film, is holding a baby doll. You can even see him using his fingers to move the doll around, as if he were some sort of puppeteer.

2 The Rock
How Do Cable Cars Work?

Michael Bay is known for his explosions. The man’s lust for sweet pyrotechnics is so great that he’s inspired people to do studies about his unique style of filmmaking. While Bay’s hunger for bigger and better explosions probably won’t be satisfied until he gets nuclear launch codes from a world leader to use in a movie, someone should have said “no” to some of the bombs that Bay’s used in the past.

Most of the things that explode in Bay’s films have logical reasons to explode, regardless of how unrealistically large the explosions may be. But in Bay’s hilariously over-the-top film The Rock, the scene with the cable car explosion makes no sense. When the cable car is knocked off its track, the car begins to shoot sparks as it careens down the road. Finally, the cable car explodes in a huge fireball which launches the car high into the air.

Why is this so silly compared to anything else Bay has done? For one thing, cable cars aren’t powered by any sort of onboard engines. They also don’t contain any combustible fuel. So there is virtually no reason for a cable car to catch fire, let alone explode in such a manner.

This scene makes as much sense as having Nicolas Cage catch on fire for no reason. However, to be fair, there is at least one documented case of a cable car actually exploding. The cause? Dynamite. We highly doubt that someone was packing dynamite with them on their trolley ride through the city in this movie. But it was a Michael Bay film, so who knows?

1 Everybody Is A Bunch Of Dummies

If there’s one thing insurance companies frown upon during movie shoots, it’s directors killing their lead talent to film a scene. To get around these pesky insurance adjusters, most film productions resort to using CGI in place of actors for dangerous scenes or killing drifters dressed as the main actors to create the illusion of danger.

If CGI isn’t an option and the police are starting to notice that the homeless population is mysteriously thinning out near their set, then directors have a third option that’s employed much less frequently. Just use a dummy. Lampooned in films like Top Secret! where nearly every fatal scene was filmed with a glass figurine that shattered hilariously, the use of dummies has almost never turned out well because they’re difficult to control.

We’re back to that “uncanny valley” thing. Every movement of the human body is easy for us to identify. When something isn’t right, even for a few seconds, it stands out in our minds. Take the classic scene from The Fugitive where Harrison Ford dives off a dam to escape from Tommy Lee Jones. He suddenly becomes a weightless rag doll, his arms and legs swaying without any control.

This effect also happened in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street film. At the movie’s close, the character Marge, who is standing outside waving to her kids as they go to school, is suddenly pulled through a small window in her door. While terrifying for kids, the film’s final moments were clearly just a foam store mannequin being pulled through a hole, which kind of killed any suspense the scene might have had.

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