The MOST impractical way to load an M16, and other movie gun blunders!

N

Nightcrawler

New member
Watching "Dawn of the Dead", I noticed something. When one of the characters, a SWAT officer, stopped to reload his M16A1 (the movie was made in 1978, when SWAT was still new and they still carried M16A1s and .38 revolvers), instead of simply removing the 20-round magazine and inserting a fresh one, he did something strange. First off, the magazine had a funny knob or something on the bottom of it, unlike any AR mag I've ever seen, and I've seen plenty of them, being in the service. He seemed to open or remove the *bottom* of the magazine, and proceeded to insert what looked like a stripper clip.

IT seems to me that when you remove the floor plate of an AR magazine, the spring falls out. Unless there's some strange kind of AR mag designed for stripper clips that I don't know about, I'd say this is a pretty dumb mistake on the part of George A. Romero. I mean, hell, anybody who examines the M16 can figure out how to remove the magazine, but actually taking the magazine apart is time consuming and impractical. Plus, with a standard magazine, it wouldn't work. So, tell me, is there some kind of AR mag I don't know about, or was this just a really dumb mistake?

And since we're on the topic, any other big gun blunders you've seen on movie and TV lately? NOT including "hollywood-hi-cap" mags. You know, the 1911 with a 50 round magazine, the Winchester lever action that holds 21 rounds (Army of Darkness :), the MP5, M16, Uzi, or AK-47 tha manages to squeeze 100 rounds into a magazine made for less than one third of that...leave these obvious blunders out....
 
The movie/TV thing that always hacks me off is the hero holding the pistol muzzle-upwards right in front of his face. They do this so the director can get the gun and the face in the same close-up, but it is DANGEROUS in real life. Usually Our Hero has his finger on the trigger, one bump to the elbow and he would blow his eyebrows off or worse.
 
Not a blunder but really funny was the movie with Charlie Sheen and Samuel L. Jackson that spoofed "Lethal Weapon". I can never remember the name of it. Anyway, every time Sheen draws his Beretta out of his waistband you hear the sound of the slide racking, even though he's just holding the pistol. I thought that was funny.
 
"slide racking draws" in the movies will someday work to our advantage.

Imagin, you've had to go out late to the convenience store to get some Nyquil for your little one, it's late so you bring your trusty (insert favorite roscoe here) for piece of mind.

You are walking out of the store, with your new bottle of heaven, and you are affronted by a masked hoodlem pointing a gun at you.

"gimme" he says, and as you reach for your wallet (though your heater is right there in your waist next to your wallet pocket), you notice him take his gun off you to rack the slide (just like they do in the movies!)

Thankfully, your's is in Cond. 1 and instead of drawing your wallet, you draw your equalizer and end the situation (quite quickly i might add) right there and then.

So the moral of the story is, Hollywood, keep up the good work!!! :D

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~USP

"[Even if there would be] few tears shed if and when the Second Amendment is held to guarantee nothing more than the state National Guard, this would simply show that the Founders were right when they feared that some future generation might wish to abandon liberties that they considered essential, and so sought to protect those liberties in a Bill of Rights. We may tolerate the abridgement of property rights and the elimination of a right to bear arms; but we should not pretend that these are not reductions of rights." -- Justice Scalia 1998

[This message has been edited by USP45 (edited November 02, 2000).]
 
I loved in the old comedy "Police Squad" you'd have two guys, one hiding behind a park bench, the other behind an aluminum trash can, about five feet from each other having a "shootout" and neither of them hitting anything....

I also thought it was funny how in the old cowboy flicks you'd have buckaroos hiding behind wooden doors and water troughs when guys with .30-30 rifles are shooting at them....LOL...just as a point of reference, I purchased and old steel helmet (vietnam era) from the surplus store. Upon taking the camo cover off, I discovered the helmet was painted blue for some reason. All the better! WE took it out to the quarry and put two rounds into it, 5.56mm and 7.62x39. Both went clean through without a second thought, and the 7.62 round left quite an exit hole! I can't wait to see what my FAL will do to it...

One last little blunder. In terminator 2, when arnold is jumping off of the back of the pickup truck onto the semi driven by T-1000, he grabs a CAR-15 he took from the LAPD. He cocks the weapon, but then you see him hitting the bolt release, proving that there were actually no rounds in the magazine! :)
 
One of my favorites is in one of the James Bond movies. Not the one with the Bronson, but the guy before him. James Bond plays a rogue agent in order to catch the drug deale who killed his friend. Anyway, the drug dealer bad guy shoots somebody. You hear the brass falling to the ground. He was shooting a revolver!
 
The M16's in Dawn of the Dead were in reality .22lr look-a-likes. I am not sure of the exact brand but they could have been the ones made by Atchisson. What looks like the 20 round mags on those are fake and are not removeable. The actual .22mags are inserted in through the bottom of the fake mag as was being shown in the airport office scene.
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by AZTrooper:
Not a blunder but really funny was the movie with Charlie Sheen and Samuel L. Jackson that spoofed "Lethal Weapon".[/quote]

National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon.

What I thought was funny was the parody of the old "Why, Miss Jones, you're beautiful" cliche. The rather plain woman who runs the cookie company takes off her glasses and suddenly she's Kathy Ireland. As if!
 
In "Dawn of the Dead" the M-16's were actually Italian-made .22lr replicas. What you saw him doing was inserting the gun's real mag into the fixed dummy mag. They were called AP22's, I think. They were also available in .32acp (wish I had one of those!) and with wooden AR style stocks. They were pretty good blowback operated replicas, but didn't sell well because they were expensive compared to other .22lr autoloaders like the 10-22. For about 33% more than an AP22, as I recall, you could get a real AR-15. In any case they ran about $200-300 in a time when a 10-22 was about $100 and an AR was around $500. haven't seen one in a long time, guess they stopped importing them for some reason.
 
You say recently,huh?

Unforgiven: At the end when Clint Eastwood is at the bar having a drink, and he is alarmed by Gene Hackman cocking his single action revolver while laying on the floor shot (presumed dead). Clint turns around then it cuts to a picture of Hackman holding his revolver with the hammer uncocked. Then Clint kicks Hackman's arm, and you hear a shot go off from Hackman's uncocked revolver.

Another 48 Hours: Several clicking noises in a row as if it was a double action semi-auto being fired in double action falling repeadedly on a empty chamber. This comming from a Desert Eagle (a Single Action semi-auto).

Face/Off: Near the beginning when they are having a shootout in the airport hanger. John Travolta, and Nicolas Cage pointing their guns at each other. Each telling the other that they have 1 bullet left. Nicolas Cage pulls the trigger expecting the gun to go off. Only to find out his 1911 is empty. The slide should have been back if it was empty. Which it had shown earlier in the shoot out, and he reloads. Unless it was meant to be a bluff on Cage's part(which I don't think it was meant to give that impression).

The Negioator: Samual L. Jackson repeatingly firing his Sig, or cocking the hammer. Then a second, or so later the hammer is always down.

Kiss the Girls: At the end when the bad guy tells Morgan Freeman to pull out his GLOCK, and shoot him. Morgan Freeman carried a Sig through the show. Also when Freeman fires at the end through a milk carton to prevent the guns flame from igniting the gas in the kitchen. The hole in the milk carton on the opposite side that was shot into doesn't match up with where he was holding the gun on the other side. Also I don't know if shooting into a milk carton would have actually prevented the flame from the shot igniting the gas in the air?

Harley Davidson, and the Marlboro Man: Various degrees of recoil in Harley's converted 454 Super Blackhawk (which happened to have 6 chambers). The recoil ranged from almost hitting him in the forehead to non at all. Also at the beginning when robbing an armored car Marlboro shoots a belt off of a security gard. By shooting him directly in the belt buckle. Not to mention Harley shooting a pistol gripped shotgun one handed with his wrist, and gun pointing around a corner.

Natural Born Killers: A bullet stopping,and spinning right in front of the victim before it hits them. Oh yea that movie was meant to be strange.

Yes I viewed (or reviewed) these movies recently.
 
In the movie "Stargate" , When about 6 or 8 guys are in the pyramid on the alien planet, and they are about to be attacked, for about 30 seconds, all you can hear in the darkness is slides racking, about 20 or 30 of them!
crankshaft
 
What always amuses me in movies is when flash hiders are used to create huge star shaped flashes, obviously not using flash suppressant in the powder. I don't just mean a regular little flash either. I mean middle of the day, giant flash type thing. Watch Predator for a good example.....

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The Alcove

I twist the facts until they tell the truth. -Some intellectual sadist

The Bill of Rights is a document of brilliance, a document of wisdom, and it is the ultimate law, spoken or not, for the very concept of a society that holds liberty above the desire for ever greater power. -Me

Compromising the right position only makes you more wrong.
 
Just the other night I was watching something and guy #1, without a gun, took cover behind a car. Guy #2 fired from behind a trashcan or something, and the brass flew forward all the way to the car and hit the tire.

Then there was my favorite on Nikita. She was standing outside a building firing her semi-auto from the steps of a building. When she ran out of ammo, and the slide locked back, all you could hear was click, click, click.
 
The Matrix, in the opening scene. When the cops burst into the hotel room you can hear them cock the hammers on their Glocks.
 
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