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October 2005
ASK THE SMART GUY: Monthly column by Dennis Latham.
The Smart Guy after being ejected from church while giving the guest sermon at Sunday Mass.
(The sermon below and his shirt were found to be inappropriate for the Catholic Church.)
How Come You Never See…
How come you never see the guy who lights all the
candles in all the caves and dungeons in horror flicks? It pulls me right out
of an intense scene each time I see the bad guy being chased into a cave or
dungeon and there are hundreds of brand new candles carefully arranged and all
looking as if they had been lit all at once. A few for lighting effect would be
reasonable, but I always think about how they lit all those candles and where do
they get all the candlesticks?
You can have a cave full of sub-human apes and they have elaborate lighting
arrangements and candlesticks like a debutante ball at the Hilton. Does every
bad guy cave have a thousand candlesticks and ten grand worth of candles
stacked in the corner? Just once I would like to see the hero come busting in
and find a bunch of bad guys all bent over cussing because they can't get all
the candles lit in time.
Another thing is those stick torches. A guy wraps a rag or grass around a stick
and it burns like a steel foundry furnace for about a year. Every once in awhile
someone will dip the stick in oil, but most of the time they don't. Some even
use a stick taken right out of a fire. Try taking a stick right out of a fire
and see how long it burns without becoming a smoking ember.
Then how many times do you see the bad guys or even good guys get kicked in the
balls and jump back up as if nothing happened after a few seconds. I'll bet
even Superman would stay on the floor after a good kick in the balls.
Or the hero gets tied to a chair and takes a beating that would kill an adult
elephant, and then gets loose and fights like nothing happened: or the good guy
gets shot in either shoulder with a large caliber gun and then goes twelve
rounds with a guy who looks like Tyson and then climbs a rope to escape.
The absolute untruth of them all is having the good guy pull a grenade pin with
his teeth and then the grenade blows up an entire house in a huge fireball.
It's impossible to pull a grenade pin with your teeth, unless the pin has been
straightened. No one with the sense of a carrot would straighten a grenade pin
and carry it around. And grenades will not blow up an entire house or car or
most anything.
It makes me wonder why writers have to keep such a close watch on reality to
keep the reader in the story, but in movies no one cares about breaking physical
laws that will pull people out of the story. Maybe I only wonder about these things because
the Smart Guy has too much time on his hands.
(Contrary to his own advice, the Smart Guy always carries extra teeth, in case he has to pull grenade pins.)
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