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.