Factual error: Grandpa Johnson's .30-30 Winchester rifle was apparently bent by the giant ants during their attack on his store. But as we can see later, the ants' mandibles are too thin and too curved to provide enough gripping and leverage area for bending a metal rifle barrel that severely.
Daniel4646
10th Jun 2014
Them! (1954)
Suggested correction: Impossible. When Ben Peterson is killed near the film's end, you can see that the ant's mandibles leave too much space even as they clamp shut. And their slender form is made for grabbing bites, not sturdy enough for crushing jobs.
That's just what I was talking about, if not quite correctly worded.
1st Jul 2023
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
Corrected entry: While some suspicious agents are searching an office at the University, one of them shoots a woman in the back, and she falls face down. When Indiana Jones discovers the body, she is on her back.
Correction: If you watch closely, you will see that, for whatever reason, the killers have moved the body, dragging it a bit out of immediate sight of the doorway to the office.
Got it. I did not see that.
25th Feb 2019
Guns of Navarone (1961)
Plot hole: The huge guns are set high up on a cliff face facing out to sea and it is obvious that they cannot be depressed to fire at a downward angle - the massive gun carriages set on rails would prevent that happening. They cannot be elevated to fire at an upward angle, too, because they fit pretty snugly in the hole cut into the cliff face to accommodate them. This means that their maximum and minimum ranges would be quite close together, covering a strip of maybe a few hundred metres either side. Given that the sea is completely open on the side of the island they are protecting, why don't the ships targeted by the guns while passing the island simply sail inside or outside of the narrow stretch of sea the guns can hit?
Suggested correction: The guns are firing across a strait. A strait is a "narrow passage." Since the targets must appear at a limited range, the guns only need a limited elevation angle.
Watch the film again. The guns are facing the open sea. There is no land visible anywhere behind the ships. If that's a strait, it's a very, very wide one.
Other summaries explain that the strait is only deep enough for the ships at the place which matches the guns' range. So ships could not take advantage of further away or closer in.
Suggested correction: That the gun carriages are supposedly set on rails is not correct. In the novel template, as well as in the film, it is shown that the guns were installed on turntables. And as for their variable angles of fire - it could be due to (fictional) modifications.
15th May 2013
Them! (1954)
Corrected entry: When they are in the police Captain's office, he picks up the bent rifle that Gramps had. He says that Gramps got some shots off before they did that to the rifle. Then he says that "Blackburn was a crack shot, he could hit anything he could see". Gramps' last name was Johnson. The cop that got killed was Blackburn.
Correction: It isn't a character mistake; rather, the Chief was talking about two different facts here: That Old Man Johnson got four shots off with his Winchester; and then referring to Blackburn's gun skill as a police officer. Upon first hearing, though, this does sound like he was talking about the same person.
Join the mailing list
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.