6 Weirdly Specific Tropes Movies Got Briefly Obsessed With

To differentiate themselves from the Marvel movies, the DC superhero films decided to be shitty piles of unlikeable misery. However, they did end up using the same blue light beams. In Man Of Steel, all of Metropolis not smashed into rubble by Superman himself is vaporized by a giant blue beam.

No matter how many cool weapons the bad guys came up with, they kept coming back to the blue beams. They even showed up in Transformers: Dark Of The Moon. Think about that for a minute: It's a movie about robots that turn into fighter jets, Laserbeaks, and dinosaurs, and some asshole still suggested, "What if we blew everything up with just, like, some big blue beam?"

Suicide Squad is a movie featuring 416 potentially interesting characters and one Jared Leto's Joker, and even that monstrosity manages to squeeze in three giant blue beams.

At this point, blue beams of light have become so common that the poster for Fant4stic featured one as the main antagonist. That really happened. They actually marketed this movie as four bored people staring at a cliche, and it was the most honest advertising in the history of the world.

The trend continued in 1995's Tank Girl, when Lori Petty snapped a guard's neck after luring him in with the promise of a blowjob. Unfortunately, the trend of dressing Ice-T up as a kangaroo started and stopped with this film.

Later that same year, Famke Janssen played a Bond villain in GoldenEye who didn't even have to get her legs around your fragile neck or brain. She killed her victims by just wrapping her legs around their body, a finishing move so unbelievable, she almost certainly discovered she could do it during a tragic sex accident.

Also in 1995, Sonya Blade leg-killed Kano during their match in Mortal Kombat. It was truly a glorious year for sexy thigh slayings. Every movie cop in 1995 had no idea if someone was murdered, or if they just really misunderstood the instructions in a Kama Sutra maneuver.

Eventually the '90s ended, and women in movies put their legs away and switched back to guns and knives -- with one notable exception: Mystique. Since the X-Franchise began in the year 2000, she has single-handedly reduced the face population with her legs. She may be one of the Children Of Tomorrow, but her murder weapon is Class Of '95 Forever.

In Demolition Man, Wesley Snipes is so impossible for the wussy future to defeat, they have to thaw out Sylvester Stallone to deal with him. Which seems strange because the future is well-stocked with liquid nitrogen and the moment any of it gets on Simon Phoenix he instantly becomes 100 percent Popsicle.

The '90s were a great decade for bizarrely instantaneous liquid nitrogen deaths. In GoldenEye, Alan Cumming is frozen so quickly he doesn't even have time to recoil in horror. Or maybe he learned from Han Solo to always strike a cool pose before being frozen so the statue of you doesn't look like it's crying.

When there was nothing original left for this trope to do on earth, 2001's Jason X naturally took it to outer space. The movie is a combination of every tired idea ever brought up during a Hollywood story meeting, including the shattering of a frozen human. But how were the screenwriters going to create a believable way for a woman to freeze in outer space? When you hear the answer it's going to seem obvious: By getting her head dunked in a conveniently placed sink full of pointless sequel-grade liquid nitrogen.

Afterwards, this uniquely insane idea was used in Sky Captain, The Golden Compass, Stardust, and Southland Tales. If it was a movie made in the 2000s but set in a futuristic or alternate-world fantasy, its skyline definitely included the most hopelessly inefficient method of travel ever invented.

And that's not even getting into the realm of video games, where airships dominate the skies of the Final Fantasy and Fallout franchises. There's something about a fictional zeppelin that just captures the imagination in the way that a real one never, ever could.

"So what?" you might be saying. "Not worrying about where to put radioactive waste helped them create more jobs!" And you're not wrong, but the only jobs they created were face-half-melted monster and CHUD.

Obviously, hazardous waste in the '80s did more than make monsters. It also made Ninja Turtles and Toxic Avengers. Getting dipped in carcinogens was probably the origin story of a disturbing number of the super-powered characters from your childhood.

Of course, no discussion of a toxic waste backstory is complete without mentioning The Joker. In the 1989 Batman, Joker falls into a hilariously lethal vat of chemicals and all it does is give him a skin condition and an enthusiasm for childish jokes. Like everyone that decade, the only thing deadly chemicals did was make him crazy powerful at the cost of looking a bit more ugly.

Obviously, this is '80s movie nonsense. Exposure to toxic waste in the real world mostly melts you into a puddle of imminent, certain death. And one might argue that a movie where that happens would be the furthest thing from entertaining. And to that we have three words and one hyphen:

Fuck you -RoboCop.

Boba Fett fell into one, Beetlejuice was eaten by one, and they even tried to kill Kevin Bacon.

Usually sandworms just pop out of the ground and stupidly gnash their teeth. Tremors was the first movie to really explore their personality. It started as an idea that came to director Ron Underwood when he was hiking in the desert. While resting on a boulder he thought, "What if, like ... sandworms?" That simple variation of "The Floor Is Lava" grew into a film series spanning two more movies than the Mannequin and Weekend At Bernie's franchises combined.

Across the Tremors sequels, the Graboids evolved from a stale Dune rip-off into one of the most layered, realized creatures in all of science fiction. They became more than just menacing tubes undone by simple rocks and floors. They developed legs and eventually the most lethal of all nature's adaptations: the rocket fart.

You can find Tiagosvn on Twitter. Nathan Kamal lives in Oregon and writes there. He co-founded Asymmetry Fiction for all your fiction needs. Jordan Breeding has a blog, a twitter, and a blimp that makes your car look like a covered wagon.

Also check out 6 Absurd Action Tropes You Never Noticed And Can't Unsee and 18 Baffling Tropes Hollywood Can't Stop Using.

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