Trivia: The boardwalk scenes were filmed on location at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California.
Trivia: Not really a mistake, given the need to maintain the story arc in the first half of the film, but in real life, Pyle would have been discharged from the Marine Corps within days of his starting basic training - for his own good. It happens all the time - dropout rate of boot camp recruits varies but is generally around 10%.
Trivia: Victoria Tennant hated the scene where her character was to be killed off so much that she refused to film it and walked off the set. The scene then had to be done by a stunt double.
Trivia: Mark Knopfler, who composed the music to the Princess Bride, only agreed to do so if Rob Reiner could include the baseball cap he wore in the film Spinal Tap. The director placed the cap in the boy's bedroom, beside the bed.
Trivia: Kevin Peter Hall, who plays the Predator, also appears as the pilot of the general's helicopter at the end of the film.
Trivia: Mel Gibson references the Three Stooges several times in the film. In real life, Gibson is a big Stooges fan, and in 2000, he produced the biographical TV movie "The Three Stooges."
Trivia: There are two different endings to this movie. In the first one (released on video and DVD in the US), the shark (inexplicably) explodes after being rammed by the boat and sinks to the bottom in a reuse of footage from "Jaws." When the camera cuts back to the survivors floating in the water, we see that Mario Van Peebles, though badly wounded, is alive after all. In the second ending (which can be seen on American Movie Classics in the US), Mario Van Peebles does not survive his fall off of the boat; when he falls, he lands in the shark's mouth and is killed. Also, when the boat rams into the shark, it does not explode but is more "realistically" impaled, blood pouring from its mouth as it dies. After the survivors are knocked off the boat, there is a shot of ship and shark sinking to the bottom, prow of the ship stuck in the side of the shark.
Trivia: Andy Garcia was originally brought in to read for Frank Nitti, but he asked if he could play George Stone instead.
Trivia: During Joey's nightmare, he is seduced by a topless nurse who then captures him before turning into Freddy. As originally conceived, only her face was going to transform at first, thus having Freddy's burnt male head on top of an otherwise perfect topless female body in order to create an eerie, otherworldly look. The actress portraying the nurse even took part in some test shots and performed the scene under heavy prosthetics to make her face look exactly like Freddy's. However, the effect was cut as the crew felt it looked far too weird, and that it diminished the moment when Freddy fully appears on-camera in the scene.
Trivia: When Ash is possessed of the evil presence and beats up the girl, he throws her on the couch and chuckles evilly (or hornily, same dif). He is stopped from committing further molestation by the sight of that ugly piece of jewelry that he gave to Linda earlier. When the necklace gets a closeup, the chain forms the outline of a skull.
Trivia: In his regular cameo role, producer Michael G. Wilson appears in the audience at the Opera which Bond and Kara attend in Vienna. He can be seen sitting next-but-one to Saunders.
Trivia: In the scene where Foley first visits Rosewood's apartment, he at some point pauses and looks at a poster of Sylvester Stallone from the movie "Cobra" (1986). Stallone was originally supposed to star in Beverly Hills Cop (the first one) as Axel Foley (or his name was going to be Axel "The Cobra" Cobretti). The script was changed for Eddie Murphy, removing a large amount of the action sequences from the movie. Many of those sequences were later used in "Cobra." The shot of Foley looking at the poster is a reference to this fact.
Trivia: The opera that Glenn Close buys the tickets for is Madame Butterfly. That is the song she is listening to when we see the first signs that she is losing it. Note: At the end of Madame Butterfly the heroine kills herself over a lover. In the director's cut of Fatal Attraction Glenn Close cuts her throat in the bathroom of Michael Douglas' house thereby killing herself over a lover.
Trivia: Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez were having a movie trivia contest on the set one day. Estevez asked Dreyfuss to identify the movie that the line "This is no boating accident" was from. Dreyfuss didn't recognize the quote, despite the fact that he was the actor who said it in Jaws (1975). Deciding that this was too good to pass up, this incident was re-enacted for the film.
