Las Vegas Bloodbath (1989) and Four Movie Tropes

Note: Some of the images in this post will be graphic in nature.

Writers tend to rely on a certain set of tricks to get them through whatever story they are telling. This is especially true in fiction when certain tropes start to appear time and time again. It could be something small, or it could be a story beat that pushes the main character forward in their journey. These familiar elements are the foundation of building a story, and many times they stay in there when the story is complete. These tropes are everywhere. It’s time that a few of them were highlighted through the Sunday “Bad” Movies.

This idea was inspired by Las Vegas Bloodbath, a 1989 low budget horror flick. Sam Butler (Ari Levin) returned home from a business trip to find his wife in bed with another man. He killed the two lovers and then went on a killing spree throughout Las Vegas. He murdered a prostitute. After that, he tormented a group of female oil wrestlers during a party with a pregnant woman. There was blood everywhere.

There was one trope that really stood out in Las Vegas Bloodbath. It got me thinking about all the different tropes in all the different movies out there. Well, okay, maybe not all of them. There’s no way to remember every trope used in every movie. But there have been some tropes at play throughout the nearly 375 weeks of the Sunday “Bad” Movies. Some have been major tropes and some have just been small things that popped up in the movies. They’ve been there, though. They have been there. And now it’s time to take a look at some of them.

Cheating Spouse

Let’s begin with the trope that drove everything in Las Vegas Bloodbath forward. Sam Butler found out his wife was cheating on him when he got home from his business trip. He picked up the gun of the police officer she was sleeping with and shot them both dead. Something snapped inside his head and he went on to kill a bunch more people. It was a bloodbath throughout the city of Las Vegas. Maybe not throughout the city. There were only four places where people were killed.

This trope is common for pushing forward the stories of men. They’ll find their wife, girlfriend, or significant other in bed with another man. This will cause them to change their entire life. They might move out. They might move to a completely different place. They might dress up like an animal and get mistaken for a Bigfoot. Yes, this trope was used in Pottersville. The entire story happening hinged upon the man finding out that his wife was having some bedroom fun with another man.

Other movies, not featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies have also used the cheating spouse trope. They Came Together, a spoof of romantic comedies, began with the main male character finding his girlfriend in bed with his coworker. This opened up his relationship status so that he could find and date the lead woman. The trope happened throughout Boogie Nights when Little Bill kept finding his wife sleeping with different men. He eventually murdered them both before killing himself, which was the first signal of everyone’s lives taking a turn for the worse.

Random Musical Moment in 80s Movies

In a lot of 1980s movies, there was a moment where, in the middle of the movie, a musical number would happen. Just one musical number. It wasn’t necessary to the story in any way whatsoever. It was just placed right in the middle as if it was supposed to be there the whole time. Think back to The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. The kids in the movie sang a song about working with each other for no reason other than putting a song in the movie. It was weird.

Mac and Me went a different way with the musical number. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie had the characters singing a song. Most of the movies that put in the random musical moment had the characters singing the song. Mac and Me was more focused on the dance aspect of it. There was a giant dance scene set in a McDonalds. Mac was dressed up as a bear to sneak into a birthday party. Someone turned on the radio. People started dancing. Everyone danced, inside and outside. It was a large chunk of runtime that just didn’t need to be there.

There were a bunch of movies that did this sort of thing throughout the 1980s. One of the more popular examples was Adventures in Babysitting. When the kids got into trouble in a blues bar, they were forced to sing a blues song to leave. Elisabeth Shue ended up singing a song called The Babysitter Blues. It was a moment in the movie where they were forced into a musical number for no other reason than to have a musical number be a part of the film.

Orange and Blue

Complementary colours are a big thing when making movies. Production designers, cinematographers, directors, and colour graders are always trying to find the best look for a movie. One of the most pleasing combinations to the eye is when two colours from the opposite side of the colour wheel are put together on the screen. Green and red. Yellow and violet. Orange and blue. The one that audiences have picked up on the most is the orange and blue combination.

There are a good number of posters out there where orange and blue are thrown together, but the pair is just as apparent in movies. Michael Bay likes to use it a lot. Most, if not all, of his movies use orange and blue to catch the eye of the viewer. Think about all the explosions (orange) and sky (blue) that he tends to show in a shot. He’s always using the complementary colours.

Die Another Day was a movie that used the colours in a big way. There’s one specific scene that is nothing but an orange and blue screen. James Bond sped across the blue ice of the north while Gustav Graves fired a sun cannon down to Earth to chase Bond. The blue ice was being shot with an orange beam of light. The entire screen was filled with the two colours. It was the ultimate use of orange and blue on the big screen. Everyone knows these colours now.

Toxic Waste

Throughout the 1980s, the public was learning about the horrible health hazards that were being put out into the environment by big companies. Along with that came the idea of toxic waste, and with that were barrels of toxic waste. The origin of The Toxic Avenger involved a health club janitor falling into a barrel of toxic waste and being disfigured. He ended up becoming stronger and became a superhero in Tromaville.

Toxic waste also helped make the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a thing. The ooze that morphed them into humanoid turtles that used martial arts to fight crime was basically toxic waste that ended up in the sewers. It was revealed in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze that the ooze was toxic waste from Techno Global Research Industries. The bad guys used it to make Super Shredder, as well as Tokka and Rahzar. Toxic waste was all over that franchise.

Many, many of the 1980s movies involved toxic waste. The villain of Batman became Joker because he fell in a vat of toxic waste. The end of RoboCop involved a character having an acid bath and getting exploded when his toxic waste washed body was hit by a car. It was a decade where acid and toxic waste ruled the movies, becoming a trope for people, or turtles, to fall into or stumble upon. Real life disasters gave that trope to films.

There are many other tropes that could probably be noted, if this post was to go on. High school bullies, Adam Sandler’s Sandler screaming, the chubby friend in a romantic comedy, the wise child in a romantic comedy… All these tropes are worth discussing. But there’s only so much time to write a post. Not everything can be discussed in one post. It would be the longest post ever. But these four tropes scratched the surface of how many things get repeated time and time again.

Each generation of filmmakers has their movie tropes that make writing easier. If someone is trying to tell a story, they’ll think of the easiest path possible to the end. Sometimes they don’t replace that with something more complicated. They end up leaving in a story beat that has been used many times before. Audiences pick up on this. They notice the tropes. They love them or hate them. But, in the end, movies wouldn’t be the same without them. That’s all that matters.

These posts wouldn’t be the same without notes like these:

• Pottersville (week 316), The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (week 345), Mac and Me (week 125), Die Another Day (week 153), The Toxic Avenger (week 110), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (week 310) were mentioned in this post.
• Have you seen Las Vegas Bloodbath? What did you think? What other big tropes are there in movies? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
• You can also find me on Twitter or in the comments if you want to leave a suggestion for a movie I should check out for this blog. I’m always looking for new suggestions about what to watch.
• There’s an Instagram account for Sunday “Bad” Movies that you should check out if you like the blog. I try to update it regularly with all kinds of stuff.
• Next week is week 375. That means I’m going pretty big with the movie being featured. What’s a well known bad movie that I haven’t covered yet? Plan 9 from Outer Space. That’s right. Next week, I’ll be writing about some Ed Wood. It should be fun. I’ll see you then, with another post.

The Emoji Movie (2017) and New Worlds Within Our World

Cinema is a place where endless new worlds are imaginable. There could be far off, distant planets and solar systems that hold countless stories to entertain. The stories could come from underwater or in the air. There could be unknown islands and foreign countries. But what about going in a different direction? What about turning something that wouldn’t normally be a world into one? Children’s movies do that all the time.

The thing about a kids’ movie is that the people behind them are willing to give anything a personality and tell its story. Toy Story took the toys that kids would play with as they were growing up and turned them into fully formed characters. These characters interacted with each other, hid their life from the humans so that they couldn’t be found out, and went on adventures. Frozen brought a snowman to life. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer made the reindeer into the characters that were followed. Anything can become the main character in a kids’ movie.

Take The Emoji Movie, for example. The majority of the movie took place within a phone. Sure, there were scenes with the kid who owned the phone, but the story was about what was happening within the phone. Gene (T.J. Miller) was a meh emoji trying to secure his job as being the meh that ended up in his phone’s text messages. When Smiler (Maya Rudolph) found out that Gene had a malfunction that allowed him to make many faces, she wanted to destroy him. Gene teamed up with Hi-5 (James Corden) to find a hacker named Jailbreak (Anna Faris) and get to the cloud to be reprogrammed into a proper meh.

The world that was brought to life with The Emoji Movie was the world of the cell phone. The emojis were given personalities and lived in their own texting city. Their jobs revolved around providing the best texting quality that they could to the boy who owned the phone. It ain’t much, but it’s honest work. The city had a class system within it as well, which depended on the popularity of the emojis that were being used. The popular ones got into the nightclub area while the unpopular, forgotten emojis (which included the eggplant, for some reason) went to the basement. It was like the popular kids and the nerds.

The city wasn’t the only part of the phone that got the world building experience in The Emoji Movie. When Gene ran away with Hi-5, they entered the desktop of the phone. It was sort of like a well-planned grid city, where each block was a tower that housed one of the apps on the phone. The characters could travel down the roads and enter whatever apps they wanted to. Each of the apps was designed like its own specific smaller world. The Just Dance app was a giant dance floor over a pit, with a hologram host. The Spotify app was like traversing rivers. They rode a boat down the soundwaves. The pirate app was a dive bar town where it was easy to find the seediest characters in the phone. Every app was a world within the larger world of the phone within the larger world of the human world.

This wasn’t the only instance in film history of an animated film building a world around something that wouldn’t normally be thought of in this way. There were a few other films in the 2010s alone that did the same sort of thing. One of them was Wreck-It Ralph. The main character was the villain of a video game called Fix-It Felix Jr. In the game, Felix would fix things while Ralph tried to wreck them. It was a pretty simple concept. However, Ralph didn’t want to be the villain anymore. He wanted to be a hero. Thus, his journey to find his heroic role began.

Much like with The Emoji Movie, there was a bigger world to Wreck-It Ralph than just the game he was a part of. Fix-It Felix Jr. was one of many games in an arcade. A bunch of the games, including Fix-It Felix Jr., were connected to the same power strip. The characters could travel down their power cords to the strip, and an area called Game Central Station. They could interact with one another before going back to their games and their programmed roles. Ralph went on an adventure to different games because he didn’t like always being the bad guy, and he needed to find himself.

The world built in Wreck-It Ralph wasn’t one that people would normally think of as a world in which to tell a story. There were video game movies before it, sure, but they were adaptations of video games. Wreck-It Ralph was a story about video games set in an unseen world in an arcade, where a bunch of arcade games were connected. It built a world where the games were all a part of a community. And it told a story in this newfound world.

Inside Out did the same sort of thing. It took a concept that people knew about, this time emotions, and built a world around the concept in order to tell a story. Inside a girl’s head was a control centre where five different emotions helped the girl to share her feelings with the world around her. The five emotions were joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. They would push buttons on a control board to push her emotional state in the direction they felt was right.

This control centre was a new world that people hadn’t considered as a place to tell a story. Nobody had thought that a person’s emotions could be characterized in a way that they could become the protagonists and antagonists for a conflict. Sure, people have conflicting emotions about all kinds of things, but that was never considered a way to tell an adventure story. That’s what Inside Out managed to do. Joy and Sadness were thrown from the control centre into the memory banks of the human mind and had to find their way back to the control centre. It was a whole unseen world being brought to the surface through a kids’ movie.

One final animated kids’ movie that should be noted for the new world it built in a place that wouldn’t normally be a world is The Hero of Color City. It was a movie about what crayons did in their box after people were done using them. Inside the box was a world where the crayons lived. It was like a big city with a rolling country landscape beyond the city limits. That country landscape was much like the world from a fantasy movie and the crayon characters travelled through it to stop two unfinished drawings from destroying their world.

The world building in The Hero of Color City was within the crayon box. No human was going to be able to witness that world. It was a world within our world that was completely foreign to us. It was colorful and filled imagination, much like the drawings that a child creates with crayons. It was a world built out of something that most children did, create their own imagined worlds on blank pages as they filled them with wax etchings.

Each of the four movies managed to create a new world within our world. The characters weren’t in a world that a human could enter and be a part of. The worlds were built within the human world, but the humans couldn’t be in those worlds. No human was going to be inside the software of the phone where the emojis lived in The Emoji Movie. People could not enter the video games of Wreck-It Ralph and interact with the characters. Nobody was going to be setting their eyes on the control centre of Inside Out or jumping into the crayon box world of The Hero of Color City. People have their own world and these movie characters had one within it that the people weren’t a part of.

Kids’ movies are the perfect place for new worlds to be brought to life. The imaginations of children are unending. They go on forever and come up with new things all the time. Children’s movies take inspiration from the kids who watch them. Many times, the worlds are outward. But the worlds within worlds are a great source of storytelling as well. Whenever kids play with their toys, they’re creating new worlds and new characters. The adults behind movies do the same thing, just through a bigger, more public platform. And the results can be magical or a downright disaster. That’s up to the viewer to decide. I think these worlds are interesting enough to warrant being around.

These notes are warranted as well:

• The Emoji Movie featured the voice of Phil LaMarr, who worked on Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3: Viva La Fiesta! (week 70) and Bio-Dome (week 124).
• Laraine Newman was a part of The Emoji Movie cast. She was also in Jingle All the Way (week 160) and Perfect (week 195).
• Three actors from The Hero of Color City (week 114), which was mentioned in this post, were in The Emoji Movie. They were Elizabeth Daily, Jess Harnell, and Tara Strong.
• The Emoji Movie featured two actors from New Year’s Eve (week 57). They were Jake T. Austin and Sofia Vergara.
• There were also two actors from Son of the Mask (week 207) in The Emoji Movie. They were Mona Marshall and Steven Wright.
• Fred Tatasciore was in The Emoji Movie after showing up in Zombeavers (week 142).
• Did you hear Bob Bergen’s voice in The Emoji Movie? You may have recognized it from Foodfight! (week 143).
• Date Movie (week 164) featured Jennifer Coolidge, as did The Emoji Movie.
• Alicyn Packard lent her voice to both Chop Kick Panda (week 167) and The Emoji Movie.
• Free Birds (week 209) had Carlos Alazraqui in it. So did The Emoji Movie.
• The Emoji Movie was the second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance of Anna Faris, who was in Movie 43 (week 243).
• Finally, Eric Bauza made a quick turnaround. He was in The Emoji Movie, only a couple weeks after The Banana Splits Movie (week 371).
• Have you seen The Emoji Movie? What did you think about it? Did you think they did a good job with the world building? Are there any other movies that build a hidden world within the world like these did? Let me know on Twitter in the comments.
• You can find me on Twitter or in the comments if you want to leave a suggestion for a movie I should be watching as part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’ll take any suggestion into consideration. I’m always looking for movies I might not know about that I can add to the schedule.
• Check out the Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. There’s usually something fun there that you can see.
• That’s the post for this week. Now we get to look forward to the next one. In one week, I’ll be dipping into a box set that I have of low-to-no budget movies. There’s a movie called Las Vegas Bloodbath that will be the topic of next week’s post. I hope you’ll join be for it because it should be fun. See you then.