6 Weirdly Specific Tropes Movies Got Briefly Obsessed With

5 '90s Femme Fatales Killed Everyone With Their Legs

In the 1990s, when Cobains freely roamed the Earth and Jolt Cola turned children into vibrating corn syrup, a new breed of deadly and mysterious creature emerged. Its habitat was the action movie and it hunted with a natural weapon as deadly as it was sexy. We're speaking, of course, about the North American '90s Femme Fatale who always killed her prey by wrapping her legs around its face.

4 Liquid Nitrogen Instantly Turned Countless '90s Villains Into Shatterable Ice

How do you kill an unkillable enemy? Wrap your legs around its head and squeeze? Sure, that works if you're a lady with highly trained thighs, but what if you're not so lucky? The answer is simple: liquid nitrogen. It's fast-acting, effective, and in movies, you can find it everywhere.

3 The 2000s Went Blimp-Crazy

When you picture the future or a more advanced alternate reality, what do you see? Robots? Silver bodysuits? Butt plugs that connect to your social media and calendar while cooking the perfect egg? Of course, but in the '00s, filmmakers decided there was one technology that would definitely be there: blimps.

Yes, as CGI became advanced enough to render anything a filmmaker could imagine, they all imagined a world of blimps. They were the same technology that let our great-grandparents float over NFL games and let clowns turn inflatable tubes into puppies. They're as fast as a bicycle but 400 times more flammable, and yet Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow was sure blimps would rule their oddly futuristic 1939:

This absurd idea seemed to start with Kurt Wimmer, the director of 2002's Equilibrium. It was mainly a movie about gun dancing and the nature of art, but it started the trend of using blimps as a way to sell the "futureness" of a movie.

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.

2 In the '80s, Giant Barrels Of Toxic Waste Were Everywhere Ready To Deform You

Today, our greatest political thinkers are using the environment as a place to dump coal waste until it fixes the economy, but during the '80s we considered the environment an important thing. One of the main concerns we had was toxic waste, and this was reflected in the art of our cinema. People in movies were leaving uncovered vats of hazardous materials under every catwalk and dumping leaky barrels of it into every pond they could find.

"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.

1 Desert Sandworms Went from One Distant Planet To Everywhere

The idea of a titanic worm terrorizing the desert was popularized in the '60s by Frank Herbert when he wrote Dune. It was a unique threat to the spice farmers of that particular universe, and quickly became a genre of monster infesting every single science-fiction desert to ever exist. If you're a nerd and the movie you're watching, the book you're reading, or the video game you're playing has a desert, there is a 100 percent chance it's infested with giant worms. And you owe all that to Frank Herbert.

Maybe sandworms became popular because of their toothy, inhuman mouths or their simple-minded drive to devour. Maybe it was because they're easy to draw, but for whatever reason, they became the go-to desert monster for every genre.

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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