The hero is being chased by baddies in a helicopter. He's probably on a car or motorbike (rarely running). The baddies are shooting automatic weapons at him, but they've of course attended the
Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, so all they manage to hit are nearby objects and maybe other people who have the bad luck of passing by at the wrong moment.
But wait, the hero has just gotten himself into a wide open space with no exit! He's trapped!
The helicopter first comes to a low altitude, and you may think the baddies would just open fire en masse and rain hot lead all over the place because, hey, there's only so many bullets a hero can avoid. But no, that'd be too easy.
Instead the helicopter first hovers right above ground, then tilts forward at a very steep angle. It then proceeds to slowly move forward, its rotor becoming a deadly, razor-sharp weapon that slices and dices everything it touches. All sorts of objects, people, even vehicles are thrown aside and shredded to pieces by the
Helicopter Blender.
The hero seems doomed, but at the last moment he always finds a way out (bonus points if it involves jumping over the helicopter).
A variant: sometimes the helicopter is just hovering in midair, not doing anything much, and someone falls off a cliff (or something), gets blended by the blades and ends up as a red mess on the canopy. The helicopter invariably keeps hovering in place, its pilot(s) deeply disgusted by the new shade they're seeing the world through but otherwise fearing no consequence.
Now let's get out of Hollywood Land and into real life. It
is possible for a real-life rotating-wing aircraft to lean at quite extreme angles. This usually happens in either military or aerobatic maneuvers (see
here
and
here for spectacular examples) performed by high performance helicopters. Civilian models may or may not be able to perform them, but if they for some reason had to it'd be waaay up in the sky, to give the pilot time to recover from such a dramatic maneuver.
Leaning forward is how a helicopter gains speed. It is therefore physically impossible for any helicopter to lean that much and not start rapidly moving forward. Due to those pesky laws of physics, it'd almost immediately lose lift and smash into the ground.
Main rotor blades aren't very tough, either. A blade strike (that is, a blade touching any object with significant mass) is almost always enough to force a crash-landing of the helicopter if it happens at low altitude, and just a crash if it happens higher up.
No helicopter pilot with a brain would ever try to purposefully strike
anything with his blades. If he did, the result would very probably kill a few people, but not quite in the intended way.
The blades would also break up almost immediately if a man fell through them, with the same disastrous results.
Another variant: sometimes the helicopter itself breaks up, but the still-spinning rotor is used to deal damage to someone.
It should also be noted that if the rotors
are intact when a helicopter loses power, they are usually designed to autogyro (or "autorotate", the terminology varies), allowing the helicopter to land (mostly) safely so long as the rotors are intact and the pilot can find a safe place to land quickly. Many real-world helicopter accidents are caused by damage to either the rotor (which is actually a
wing, hence the alternate term 'rotary wing aircraft') or the stabilizer, which can cause the craft to go out of control if the pilot can't cut the power in time.
Dissenter:
In the war story/biography "Chickenhawk" by Robert Mason, pilots of HU-1/UH-1 "Huey" helicopters did
exactly this, to fit into small spaces. Page 210 mentions it... "The main rotor only had to chop a few two-inch thick branches off some trees, a maneuver not even hinted at in flight school. When they hit the first branches, it sounded like gunfire. Splintered wood flew everywhere. Treetops towered above us as we chopped our way down." Note, however, that the "Huey" was noted for having comparatively thick and strong main rotor blades; this is a specific exception for this particular helicopter.
Examples:
Film
- 007: Tomorrow Never Dies has this (and is indeed the movie that inspired this trope). Everybody's favourite secret agent finds himself in a large square on a motorbike, with a helicopter leaning forward and trying to blend him (and his female companion). It fails, as they manage to jump over it and motor away, but cuts up plenty of material while trying. Oh, and only after 007 and the Girl Of The Week jump over it do the crew realize it wasn't such a bright idea, as the helicopter slams on a wall and blows up.
- Later averted in The World Is Not Enough, where the helicopter just has several enormous rotary saw blades dangling from a helicopter instead.
- Possibly justified, as the helicopters in question were supposedly designed to fly above treetop level and use the rotary saw blades below it to clear branches.
- Done in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The Silver Surfer flies above the place where Mr Fantastic and Invisible Woman are having their wedding, disrupting the controls of a nearby press helicopter. It careens wildly and crashes right on the place where the ceremony is being held. As it's skidding, its rotor blades hit the ground and start throwing chairs and other assorted objects in the air. The chopper is then stopped rather unceremoniously by The Thing, who proceeds to rip its tail off. It's a bit less unrealistic, as the helicopter is not deliberately used as a weapon, but the rotor really should have broken up and/or flipped the helicopter over...
- In Grindhouse helicopter blades are used to cut through zombies.
- Ditto in 28 Weeks Later, with infected people in place of zombies the pilot doesn't recover and it's a military chopper so a little more believable.
- Underworld Evolution has the third variant of this trope: a military helicopter is hit and takes a dive down a hole in the ground. The rotor shatters upon hitting said hole's walls, which also keep the helicopter in position, nose-down, after it stops moving. Despite the crash, the impacts, the physical damage and the fact that nobody's at the controls, the engines keep working and the transmission is miraculously still intact. This causes the stumps of the blades to keep rotating, and they promptly blend the Big Bad as the heroine pushes him into them.
- The flying saucers that Syndrome's minions used in The Incredibles were apparently designed with this trope in mind. The craft fly by means of a spinning metal disc--a cross between helicopter rotors and a sawblade--around the edge. The rotor is capable of tilting (for keeping the craft upright while turning, and for trying to slice trespassers to bits) and strong enough to cut through a palm tree without sustaining notable damage.
- Near the end of the first Mission Impossible film, a baddie flies a helicopter into a train tunnel and attempts this on the protagonist. The rotors even bounce off the walls with no ill effects (only some pretty sparks).
- In the generic Bruce Willis actioner The Last Boy Scout, the climactic fight with the Dragon, the boss's toughest henchman occurs up in the lights over a crowded football stadium. Inexplicably, in the middle of the fight, a helicopter flies into the stadium and underneath the two men fighting on the highest catwalk, not only endangering those aboard, but thousands of football fans directly below them. Why would the chopper pilot do something this insane? Why, so Bruce can kick his opponent off the catwalk and downward into the Helicopter Blender. Take that, bad guy!
- Played realistically in John Woo's Broken Arrow. A helicopter strapped to a flatbed traincar is preparing for takeoff when a mook is knocked up into the path of the rotor blades, resulting in only a large gash in his chest as he is flung thirty or so feet. Notably, this happens while the helicopter is still grounded, so there are no flight issues.
- Although it violated several other laws of physics, The Italian Job played this part straight. The pilot didn't threaten the main character with his rotorblade, and when he tried to block his mini with his tail-rotor, the mini won. Of course, this brings up the question of exactly what he planned to do in a helicoptor with no method of attacking.
- An accidental, fixed-wing variation concludes Indy's fight with the Giant Mook in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
- This troper remembers Terminal Velocity ending with the main baddie parachuting on a wind generator. We don't get to see the blending, but the next scene shows one of the blades with blood on it, implying it's killed him. The blade has no damage whatsoever, despite the rather muscular human that slammed on it.
- Averted in the film Year of the Comet, in which the protagonists use a helicopter to chase the villain who is driving a car. The female lead believes that they've got the advantage, to which the male lead says "What do you want me to do, hover him to death?"
Literature
- And again in Max Brook's World War Z. The helicopter hits a car and blows up.
Videogame
- One of the missions in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas ends with both versions of this trope: a police helicopter tilts forward, threatening to slice up the protagonists' vehicle, and a police officer on the hood of said vehicle ends up minced in the process.
- Additionally, if you yourself gain control of a helicopter, you can practice this trope on any random passerbys you run across.
- In "Urban Chaos: Riot Response": after you shoot some hostage-taking psycho he will fall off the edge of the building and get cut to pieces by the T-Zero helicopter much to the annoyance of the pilot ("Damn it Mason, I only just got it cleaned!")
- In Shoot Em Up near the end of the skydiving shootout sequence Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) kicks some mook towards a helicopter that just happened to be nearby.
- Though to be fair, nothing in the movie is supposed to be remotely realistic or taken seriously.
- The heavily-armored Final Boss of the second Syphon Filter game can only be killed by using the knockback from a shotgun to knock him into a handy helicopter's tail rotor. At least this one isn't in the air...
- Peahat in The Legend Of Zelda attacks like this in some games.
Live Action TV
- In an episode of ER a careless move during a landing in a blizzard costs one doctor an arm.
Anime/Manga
- Mobile Suit Victory Gundam justifies this with humongous mecha equipped with beam rotors. That is to say, their blades were effectively lightsabers, so chopping things up with them would be rather easy.
- In the Gundam SEED Astray: Red Frame short, Lowe attaches to his Red Frame's arm the head of a dog-mech with laser-whiskers (or something). He then rigs it to spin, creating much the same effect as a Beam Rotor. May or may not have been a Shout Out, given that the upgrade was a one-shot with a shorter lifespan than most of the Red Frame's.
- Big Volfogg's Murasame Sword attack uses the blades of the Gungrue, a transforming helicopter, as a spinning sword attack, because Everythings Better With Spinning.
Western Animation
- Transformers with helicopter alternate modes can do this, in part because their rotors usually become a sword or blade weapon, and partly because they are the copter and can thus maneuver correctly without falling.
- The first episode of Metalocalypse has the band telling their current helicopter chef that all their previous helicopter chefs have died in freak accidents. Cue an unsettling grinding sound as the chopper goes off-balance and the chef freaks out -- then cut to the pilot assuring them that "we're just chewing through a few thousand doves up here; don't worry, the rotors will grind them into paste in no time."
- An episode of Robot Chicken parodies this trope; a series of quick skits throughout the episode feature a parade of increasingly ridiculous objects falling off a cliff and getting shredded by the rotors of a nearby helicopter; the final skit has the helicopter tearing apart another helicopter.
Truth In Television
- Parachutists getting killed by rotor blades is unfortunately Truth In Television.
- Not quite a helicopter but this troper's Grandfather saw a man chopped into three pieces by an airplane propeller during WWII. It was in a hanger, I believe, and the man was chasing a pack of cigarettes that had been picked up by the wind.
- This troper seems to remember a news piece about a Navy officer who was headed for a transport helicopter but - apparently due to the wind from the rotors lifting up a cloud of debris - missed the door and instead walked into the tail rotor with predictably messy results.
