Too Dumb To Live / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

Note: As a Death Trope, all spoilers on this page are unmarked.

---

#

• 28 Days Later
  • The Animal Wrongs Group at the beginning. After being explicitly told that a monkey is infected with a contagious disease, one of them frees it anyway, leading to a Zombie Apocalypse that kills nearly everyone in Great Britain, including most members of the animal wrongs group.
  • The scientists, too. They know that the monkey is infected with the Rage virus, and they presumably know that it will cause a Zombie Apocalypse if let out. And yet their only effort to stop this from occurring is to just give a verbal warning to the people trying to release the monkey.
• 28 Weeks Later: The US Army allows unsupervised access to an asymptomatic infectee, who consequently infects someone. Then they evacuate another one to Europe where the whole thing starts all over again, except this time it's not on an isolated set of islands.

A

• A History of Violence:
  • Leland the diner robber just saw Tom blow away his accomplice Billy like acting on instinct after Tom smashed a glass coffee pitcher on his head and jumped the counter to snatch his pistol. Leland, while probably in pain from the hot coffee and seeking revenge for Billy, decides to try stabbing Tom in the foot instead of fleeing with his life, and receives a Boom, Headshot! for his troubles. Leland gambled on the knife incapacitating Tom and lost big time.
  • Makes the perfect couple with Bond Villain Stupidity when all the mobsters, including their boss, dies horribly by the hand of the protagonist due to their inability to just kill him off at the first occasion. The result is particularly hilarious when we learn, just before the last shooting, that in spite of all the talking and the stalking the villains performed earlier, their intentions were REALLY and JUST and PLAINLY to see the protagonist DEAD. Bonus points for the fact that they even know he was the ultimate badass from the very start.
• A Quiet Place: Played with. There are some questionable actions in the entire film but, otherwise, the family doesn't make any of the usual stupid or unadvised choices one might see in horror films, besides some Parental Neglect on behalf of their 4-year-old son who didn't know any better and activated his space shuttle (resulting in him getting killed) because the mother didn't carry him, and the pregnancy being, from what's implied, unplanned.
• Alien: Resurrection: Dr. Gediman becomes increasingly fascinated with the aliens, to the point that he feels they will identify with him. When the Newborn approaches him after identifying more closely with Ripley 8 than the Queen, he seems to genuinely believe it might even think of him as its daddy, and if this hybrid strain always bites into the skull of its daddy like a nectarine, he's right.
• Alien: Any human who tries to capture/breed/weaponize/domesticate the Xenomorphs falls under this. The (non-canon) Aliens comics explain this as a telepathic influence from the hive mind — they pull at the weak points of humanity and guide them into making breeding easier. It becomes closer to "Too Greedy To Live" in this light.
  • The one exception is the Rage from The Rage War trilogy of books, who actually succeed in weaponizing the Xenomorphs. Instead, they’re terminally stupid in a different way: on their way to conquer Earth, they attack everything in their path. Including the Predators, who were not trying to stop them. Naturally, the Earth Empire and the Predators team up to stop them.
• Alien vs. Predator: The Predators in much franchise media often fall into this trope. Despite the fact that Xenomorphs are apparently one of the species that Predators enjoy hunting the most, and thus should already know what they're capable of, Predators are frequently Too Dumb to Live when they fight them. For instance, instead of attacking them in range, they frequently meet them in hand to hand combat, which is the Xenomorph's forte. Worse, they often tend to attack them not with blunt weapons or lasers, or even just their own fists, but with bladed weapons. That's right, they use bladed weapons in melee combat on a species that usually kills its prey at close range and bleeds acid when it gets cut. Even the so called "veteran warriors" do this. However, Expanded Universe gives a possible explanation for this; Predator blood neutralizes Xenomorph acid, so the acid isn't nearly as dangerous to them as it is to other species and the veteran Predators utilize specially crafted blades that don't melt on contact with the acid. It's also partially justified because the Predators are Honor Before Reason incarnated and that the Predators in this movie are basically teenagers. The fact that the Aliens are at their most dangerous up close and personal is exactly the reason they are fought at close quarters: the harder the fight, the bigger the renown for the killer.
• Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem:
  • Jesse's companions already killed the Alien in the stairwell, but she runs away and screams, forcing her companions to chase after her through a more heavily Alien-populated section of the hospital. Then she dies when she gets into the path of the Predator's disc blades. The Predator wasn't even trying to kill her, she just runs straight into the middle of a fight between the Predator and Aliens and gets hit by accident.
  • None of the characters seem capable of realizing that the Predator is fighting the Aliens and that maybe it would be a good idea to just let it go about its business and not bug it. The main character seems to at least partially notice this near the end, choosing to flee and leave the Predator alone rather than trying to fight it (an action that gets some other characters killed).
• Uncle Ben becomes this in The Amazing Spider-Man. In previous versions of the Spider-Man mythos, Uncle Ben was killed when someone broke into his home in the middle of the night or tried to steal his car. In this incarnation, however, Ben was walking the streets looking for Peter when he hears a cry of "Stop, thief!" He immediately throws himself at the much younger and more muscular criminal. When the criminal reveals he's carrying a gun, Ben again tries to tackle him instead of backing down, getting shot and killed in the process. Just to try and stop a petty thief.
• Literally everyone in Amusement YMS sums it up pretty well.
  • Shelby’s boyfriend somehow doesn’t see a body and a truck with its headlights on until they’re right in front of him and he’s forced to veer off the road and crash into some farming equipment.
  • The kids Tabitha is babysitting are unrealistically stupid, even for kids. Even when it’s become clear something is wrong, they insist that The Laugh “just wants to play!”
  • After escaping the house with The Laugh still chasing her, rather than doing anything to help her situation, Tabitha fucks up so badly that she incapacitates herself for him.
  • Lisa has a working phone, but at no point does she even try to call the police.
  • Lisa somehow can’t figure out how to loosen a ratchet tie-down strap.
  • The Trauma Counselor apparently drove to and walked through The Laugh’s dank underground lair without thinking anything was suspicious. She also doesn’t tell Tabirha that they're in a creepy basement and not a police building.
  • Tabitha tosses away her only means of defense while escaping.
  • The Laugh not taking his knife out of the back of his truck and then looking through the peephole.
• An American Werewolf in London:
  • David and Jack, in the beginning, exemplify this trope by, after being warned of danger, wandering off the road in the middle of the night, presumably without any food. Without the werewolf, they still would have been lost for a long time.
  • In the climax, a police officer discovers David in werewolf form eating people in a porno theatre and quickly shuts him in with the steel shutters, barricading the door with his body as David tries to bust through while yelling at everyone in the street to get away because there's a monster inside. Instead, a large crowd of gawkers quickly forms, and when David finally breaks through the barricade, pandemonium ensues, resulting in several deaths.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge: Dude at pool party, your friends are being chased and murdered by a serial killer that has managed to possess someone enough to find a way into reality. You really think it's a good idea to tell him to calm down when he's obviously the one you've seen killing your friends and brandishing a glove with knives on the fingers? Do you have a death wish?
• Annihilation (2018): While most suicidally stupid moves can be blamed on people suffering from severe psychological distress (and potential brain scrambling), there is at least one absolutely qualifying event: the bivouac at the old Southern Reach HQ. Getting out of a groud-floor room and making camp in a guard tower at least 50 feet off the ground with a single point of access, unimpeded visibility, and a working door — perfect! The same team setting an observation post on the ground in an open kiosk with no doors that provides only partial cover and with a light guaranteed to wreck night vision and impair NV optics, stationing only one person at a time to ensure there's nobody to provide 360 observation and buddy support — terminally stupid. Made worse by the fact that they've already been through encounters with dangerous creatures at this point. Oh, and one of the team is ex-Special Forces.
• Played with in The Apple Dumpling Gang. After Amos and Theodore horribly bungle their attempt to rob the local bank, the local sheriff sentences them to death by hanging the next day…then lets them go, but not before telling them to bring their own rope. He says to a bystander that he doesn’t think they deserve to die for the crime, but if they actually show up to their execution, they deserve to die for their stupidity. Theodore seems to get what the sheriff was implying, but Amos tries to reclaim the rope they tried to use in the robbery attempt, as it’s the only rope they own.
• Arachnophobia: Dr. Atherton is the foremost spider expert in the country, and he's been extensively informed how dangerous the new breed of spiders are. He sees no problem however in investigating the huge spider's nest in the barn all by himself, with no protection whatsoever. Predictably, he dies within minutes.
• Assassin's Creed (2016): Taking into account the fact that this story is canon to the video games, Abstergo comes across as this in the film. Despite the fact that someone utilized their Genetic Memory in the Bleeding Effect to kill a top agent and one of the members of their Inner Sanctum, they still try to put people back into the Animus who have definite Assassin lineages, not only for one person, but for an entire group, well aware that this could happen again. Furthermore, they keep an entire collection of Assassin armaments that are often centuries old for what could ostensibly be research purposes, despite the fact that with the aforementioned knowledge, they should already be concerned about those Assassins coming out to kill them with those very weapons. Predictably, this bites them in the ass big time when a Prison Riot degenerates into takeover of the place by the Assassin descendants.
• Ad Astra: The Cepheus crew who all die in an attempt to attack the protagonist who's not even trying to fight back or resisting, forgetting about basic astronaut training like gravity or shooting a gas canister so they all suffocate in seconds but the protagonist who was in his spacesuit.

B

• Baghead (2023): A long series of people, both groups and individuals, who think they can control the Baghead and profit from her powers for their own ends, inevitably end up death as a result… despite knowing the fates of the people who tried before.
• Batman (1989)
  • Half of Gotham seems to be this way. It was already common knowledge that the Joker had murdered many people, but that didn't stop them from diving at the cash he offered in public. He even said into a microphone, "Now comes the part where I relieve you, the little people, of the burden of your failed and useless lives," but they're too engrossed to listen. A minute later, many are dead. And some who aren't dead yet still grab for cash.
  • A plot point cut for length in the movie but present in the novelization, you'd think that the people grabbing the money would have noticed the Joker's face on each bill and realized the cash was all fake.
  • Also, poor Bob, after Joker has just been decisively pissed off and now wants to blow off some steam. He's had his little outburst, but there's a Tranquil Fury brewing under his crackpot exterior — something his loyal lackey fails to notice. Of course, not giving him the gun would surely result in the same result. But then, he could have shot the Joker.
    Joker: Bob? Gun.
    Bob: (unquestioningly hands his boss his gun, not realizing Joker's in a killing mood; Joker coldly pops a bullet in his chest)
• Batman Returns gives us The Ice Princess, already shown to be a ditz when she can't remember whether the lights come on and then pushes the switch or vice versa to the Gotham Christmas Tree Lighting event. Her idiocy kicks off hard when she believes The Penguin's excuse that he's searching for talent (cue kidnapping), but where it peaks at its fatal height is that when she's left near the edge of a building by Catwoman, she makes no attempt to get to safety, especially since she wasn't even left in any restraints (she even tells Batman point-blank that Catwoman let her go!). Is it any wonder that The Penguin was able to easily frame Batman for her death?
• Battle Royale: Quite a few characters in the film adaptation. Toshinori Oda probably takes the cake for surviving a burst of gunfire due to his bulletproof vest, then jumping up a few seconds later and loudly proclaiming "I'm alive!"
• The Beastmaster:
  • The heroes find out Maax knows of their surprise attack. Seth tries to talk King Zed out of leading the attack, but he wouldn't listen as he wants revenge for the loss of his son. The resulting Curb-Stomp Battle happens between scenes.
  • Then there's the guy Dar frees from the cage at the winged creatures' lair. Instead of remaining by his rescuer's side, the man freaks out and runs away... right into the waiting embrace of one of the creatures. Oops.
  • In Beastmaster 2 the priests don't flee even after Dar escapes, sitting right there at the table even as he's then rampaging around. Naturally, he kills the leader, who doesn't try to get away.
• Bicentennial Man: Rupert snarks at Andrew's decision to become mortal.
  Rupert: Just goes to show you, Andrew — somebody becomes a human being, sooner or later, they do something monumentally stupid.
• Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds has Melanie going up to a room she knows is filled with birds. The result is that she is nearly killed by dozens of attacking birds. When the actress asked, "Hitch, why would I do this?", he replied, "Because I tell you to."
• Blade Runner. Tyrell, Tyrell, Tyrell. When your angry, vengeful creation is confronting you and demanding you perform a medical procedure on him, the correct answer is not to explain why that procedure would be fatal, it's to perform it anyway. Possibly justified in that his idolization of Roy as his ultimate creation may have been stronger than his self-preservation.
• Blitz:
  • There is a particularly simple individual by the name of Radnor who fancies himself as a police informant after realizing that a guy who boasts of shooting a police dog 'for practice' is now killing police officers. Lacking the evidence needed to convince the police, he starts his own investigation. His idea of inconspicuous clothing while observing the killer's residence amounts to a purple, green & white jump suit. When he discovers the car in which the killer is hiding weapons & trophies, he breaks into it and personally handles the murder weapon before putting it back. The police aren't interested in his evidence (not at the £50,000 asking price) so he goes to a member of the press who is not much smarter. When he shows the journalist the car, the killer observes them. They retire to a pub to 'talk business' and when the journalist produces the money in an envelope, Radnor insists it is not 50 grand and goes into the toilets to count it. Guess who followed them to the pub? Radnor is in the toilets counting, when the killer breezes past him, perhaps to check the latter stalls for potential witnesses. Does he take this opportunity to run for the door or scream for help? No, he just becomes terrified and starts pleading with the killer that "I haven't told him your name yet". He meets his end in a toilet bowl.
  • The killer has his own moment at the end of the film. Trying to kill the officer leading the investigation, he follows him to a parking station while wearing a police uniform he stole from one of his victims, but instead he is ambushed by the officer and his 'buddy' cop. He gets a thorough beating then laughingly claims he is going to sue them for all they are worth. Then one officer points out they have in their possession his gun, which has previously been used to shoot at people in uniform. Guess what happens?
• Blood Surf:
  • The entire concept of blood surfing. While extreme sports are by definition, well, extreme and dangerous, it takes a special kind of idiot to intentionally attract sharks who might mistake you for a seal.
  • The characters are walking across a reef specifically to avoid the hungry saltwater crocodile hunting them. When Zack the producer hurts his foot on a sharp end, he decides to grab a surfboard and use it to swim towards the beach. Even the other characters just dismiss him as an asshole when he slides right into the crocodile's waiting mouth.
• The Boogens: After shooting the monster a couple of times, the sheriff immediately decides to take a closer look at it. As in a much closer look, putting his face inches apart from the creature's mouth... Only to find that it was still alive.
• Born Of Earth: A character decides to stray away from the main group to take a piss...while being in the sewers being chased by monsters and one of their party having been gruesomely killed only barely a minute before.
• Boyz n the Hood: Ricky, having just narrowly avoided a red car full of guys who want to kill him by hopping over a backyard fence, stops to take a leak and suggests to Tre they split up. Rather than keep a low profile and an eye out for the red car, he absentmindedly wanders the back alleys scratching his lottery cards. The drive-by shooters however are still patrolling the area and they soon spot him, and when they block his escape off, he's riddled with shotgun pellets and killed on the spot.
• Burn After Reading: Multiple characters more than qualify, but Chad Feldheimer goes above and beyond the call of duty, and definitely earns the title since he ends up getting shot in the head before the second act is even over.

C

• Cabin Fever: Every. Single. Character.
  • There should be a poll to see how many would continue shaving their legs if the skin started to slough off with noticeable amounts of blood and scraping noises to Squick anybody out.
  • Or a poll of people, in general, to ask if they would have unprotected casual sex in the middle of a deadly epidemic.
  • Then there is Party Cop, whose every single action causes even more problems and the virus to spreed. The only problem? He makes it through 2 films without suffering any consequences, or even aware he was causing so much damage.
• The Cabin in the Woods
  • An Enforced Trope. The organization pipes what amounts to stupefying gas into the areas where the sacrifices are if they show signs of making sensible decisions (like not splitting up, not investigating the weird noise, not hitting Mr. Terrifying Thing more than once to make him stop moving, not making sure they're actually dead afterward, etc.).
  • The organization also has a Big Red Button, located in the lobby of all places, that releases all the monsters at once. There's a lot of debate as to why they would need this.
• The Call: Let us take a moment to mourn for the intelligence of the driver, who made not one, not two, but three really stupid mistakes that ended in his death. #1, he followed someone who was acting suspiciously to a secluded area. #2, he pulled out his cell phone to call the cops right in front of him. #3, after he's put in the trunk, he inexplicably starts screaming and yelling for help, despite Casey begging him not to. That last one ends with him getting stabbed repeatedly in the chest with a screwdriver.
• Camel Spiders: A teacher takes his students on a hike through the woods when they spy a camel spider the size of a small dog. Despite the students telling him to stay back, he curiously walks towards it, even when it starts making threat displays. It kills him.
• Earl and Dale Martin in Cemetery Gates. Having already seen the mutated Tasmanian devil kill someone in front of them, they don't decide to get the hell out of Dodge, but instead go to the cemetery to shake down the filmmakers, and then hang around an unreasonably long time waiting for Hunter and Kym to return. And are surprised when Precious attacks.
• Charlie's Angels (2019): Fleming has a bad habit of taking the credit of the scientists working under him for himself. He brings the Callisto device to a major black market criminal who insists on seeing a "demonstration" of how it can kill someone. Fleming begs it off as he doesn't want to get too involved, ignoring how deep he is in things already. His constant denials cause silent mook Hodak to realize Fleming doesn't have the slightest idea how Callisto actually works. Since they have the devices and need someone with actual knowledge, Fleming gets a bullet to the head on the spot. Later, Elena pokes fun at how Brok, the official head of her former company, honestly thought he was in control of his plot involving Calisto and how he doesn't grasp Bosley is going to rob him.
• Charlie's Farm: Mick is visiting an abandoned farm in the bush, known to be the haunt of Charlie — a monstruous, mutant, murderous, man-eating hillbilly horror. It's a bright sunny day, so he decides to go skinny-dipping in a river. Suddenly he sees Charlie standing on the shore, wielding a huge machete, watching him. What does he do? He swims towards him, gets out of the water, walks to him, faces him (butt-naked and unarmed) and calls him a retard. Charlie makes an amused face (like he's thinking "Look who's talking!") then chops off Mick's penis and forces him to eat it. Oh, and then he kills him, for good measure.
• Child's Play: Merely being the Hollywood Voodoo mentor of series Big Bad Chucky would be enough to earn John "Dr. Death" Bishop a mention here, but he truly goes above and beyond the call of duty to earn his Darwin Award. Not content with merely being a Horrible Judge of Character, Bishop uses his mastery of the voodoo arts to create a Voodoo Doll of himself. And he ever-so-helpfully told Chucky exactly where to find it, too. Three guesses how he gets offed, and the first two don't count.
• Christine: Head goon Buddy, when chased by the possessed big V-8 powered car, opts to run down a long stretch of straight highway, rather than get off-road where a car might have some difficulty getting through at any speed.
  • Darnell watches the scorched car roll into his shop and park there. He opens the door (using a rag, because the metal is still hot) and sits inside. Even in real life you'd expect to suffer burns and smoke inhalation, never mind supernatural monster cars.
  • Moochie could maybe be forgiven since he's in the grip of panic, but he could have just jumped up onto Christine's bonnet as she slowly squeezes into the loading dock after him.
• The Christmas Toy: Ditz the Christmas toy invokes this trope in its most literal sense since his defining character trait is stupidity, he goes off and does literally the dumbest thing a toy in their world can do, with "death" as his reward.
• Chopping Mall: Suzie is this trope personified. When she is attacked by the killer robots, she just lays on her stomach perfectly still, refuses to let go of her Molotov Cocktail and screams. Furthermore, the robot even stopped targeting her once she dropped to the floor, had she either crawled away or let go of the cocktail, she wouldn't have been burned to death.
• Clue: Mr. Boddy has been blackmailing at least six individuals, who are now confronting him at a dinner party arranged by his ex-employee with the intent of implicating him for his crimes. Rather than kill the ex-employee himself in order to maintain his secrets, he tries to delegate that task to the very people he has been blackmailing, giving each one a deadly weapon to do the job with, never once suspecting that even one of his victims might just decide to try and kill him instead. You know what happens next. However, the third ending averts this, as Wadsworth turns out to be the real Mr. Boddy in disguise, while the guy everybody thought was Mr. Boddy was only his butler... Though the butler is still an example for failing to notice that his boss's plan had an extremely high chance of getting him killed.
• Con Air:
  • Two prison guards and FBI Agent Larkin have just found a box labeled "Do Not Open" in the cell of Cyrus Grissom, a criminal genius, terrorist, and murderer. Larkin goes to fetch the bomb squad, explicitly ordering both guards to not open the box. The second Larkin is out of the room, one guard sits right down on the bed and opens the box, despite the other guard reminding him not to touch anything. He is immediately blown to smithereens.
  • Let's not forget Agent Simms, who was supposed to go undercover. He blows his cover, takes Pinball hostage and tries single-handedly to take back the plane armed only with a six-shot .32 pocket pistol.
  • The very idea of the movie — let's put the most dangerous prisoners in America together on one plane.
• The Condemned (2007):
  • Kreston admits he got caught the last time because he trusted a woman. His first act on the island? Trust another woman (who, like him, was on death row). Naturally, she kills him. He even lampshades it saying "Not again!" before his death.
  • Ian very foolishly pisses off mass-murdering ex-Special Forces sociopathic soldier McStarley. His guards are little better and agree when McStarley asks for a cigarette (the distraction which he's used to kill both of them). Ian manages to briefly survive at least (before being killed by another ex-Special Forces soldier he pissed off).
• Creep (2014) has protagonist Aaron, who keeps interacting with Josef and ignoring red flags, even agreeing to meet with Josef again at the end of the film. hoping the location being a public park will save him. It doesn't, as Josef walks up behind him and splits his head with an axe while Aaron doesn't even turn around. Explained In-Universe as Aaron being a good man who's too trusting, which incidentally makes him Josef's favorite of all his victims.
• Creepshow: One segment of the horror anthology details the sad demise of numbskulled backwoods hick Jordy Verill. Kind of a tragic example, since the choice that ends up dooming him is made willingly, after resigning himself to the fact that not doing so will only delay the inevitable.
• The Creeping Terror: Every single human being. The title monster eats people, but in order to do so, it has to reach them by moving very slowly. However, because idiots simply sit there and scream rather than run away, they suffer the grisly death that their stupidity deserves. The fact that they have to crawl into its mouth to be eaten doesn't help.
• Cyberbu//y (2011) manages to invert this trope: Taylor attempts to commit suicide via aspirin overdose, but she fails at getting past the childproof cap to the bottle, making her Too Dumb to Die.

D

• Every subject of the accidents investigated by Burrows and Siri in The Darwin Awards. Burrows goal is to construct a psychological profile of those who qualify for the Darwin Awards.
• The Day After Tomorrow. Sure, it's a Disaster Movie (and a pretty silly one at that), but it had this in spades.
  • Hundreds of people are taking shelter in the public library and decide that rather than listening to the son of the smartest climatologist in the country (who just had an extended conversation with his father), they're going to go and do the exact opposite. They all freeze to death. Had they bothered listening, they would've been uncomfortable, but they would've survived.
  • Frank is dangling from a glass roof. The glass starts to crack and Frank decides to make a Heroic Sacrifice because there is no way the glass can support Jason and his weight. Fridge Logic sets in when you realize Jason is holding onto two steel support beams that could have easily held the weight of the sled, the entire party, and probably an elephant.
  • And then there's the entire trip. The very intelligent climatologist, who said that survival outside would be impossible, discovered that the storm would last a couple of days and personally recommended the president send search and rescue parties once the storm ended, loses his best friend and almost kills another doing exactly what he said not to do and arriving at the same time as the rescue teams he is responsible for sending.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008):
  • The military, law enforcement, and the government in general, though all of government in all of fiction is guilty of this trope, and it's not an unexpected reaction to aliens being suddenly real. Klaatu comes to Earth and reaches out his hand to the protagonists. Clearly, putting a bullet in him is the appropriate response. Only later do they realize he was able to shut down their defense network on a whim, and so they decide to imprison and (implicitly) torturing him is a good idea. Klaatu's decision, after consulting a spy on Earth, is naturally that Humans Are the Real Monsters and have to go, so the swarm of nanobots beings devouring every man-made object in its path. The military bombs it, only to see it grow larger. The Secretary of Defense at least grows a brain at this point, but the president orders even more bombing as if the opinion of his military adviser isn't worth considering.
  • Klatuu's people deserve extra stupidity points as well. Consider that their entire motivation for destroying humanity is to preserve the non-human portions of Earth's biosphere. They then set their nanotech-based weapon on "Dissolve Everything", including rocks and trees! In the immortal words of Robert Asprin, "Very inferior as superior beings go."
• In Deadgirl, Johnny attempts to force a chained up female zombie to give him oral sex. Unsurprisingly, she bites his dick off.
• Deep Blue Sea:
  • The location of the facility implies this form of mentality in the project designers. Genetically-enhanced super-sharks with improved brain functions? Why not build the research lab for them in the middle of the ocean where nobody can reach the personnel and where, if the overly-sophisticated defense system breaks down, said sharks can escape into the wild and spread their super-genes around the world. As Cracked.com put it, "You know what makes a really effective defense against sharks escaping? Hundreds of miles of dry land."
  • Then Samuel L. Jackson stands in front of an open pool the sharks have access to give his Rousing Speech, and is eaten by a shark at its climax. It's not clear if the movie did that last bit on purpose.
  • The sheer dumbness of giving something as deadly as a shark increased human brain power in the first place. That was bound to go well. Especially without sterilizing them. Sharks are already very intelligent and giving them sapience is going to make them even more cunning than they are already. Openly lampshaded by Blake.
    Blake: No, what you've done is taken God's oldest killing machine and given it will and desire.
• Deep Impact: Sarah's parents let their child refuse to go into the ark tunnel and then when Leo comes back for her, they don't try to follow on foot just because he has a motorbike.
• Demolition Man: Raymond Cocteau frees a dangerous psychopath in order to get rid of an enemy, but Cocteau has it implanted in the criminal's brain that he can't ever harm Cocteau. However, Cocteau also allows this man to bring other criminals inside Cocteau's home who don't have this rule implanted. It doesn't end well for him.
• Dracula Untold: After taking out the entire Turkish army to the last man, the vampire backup Vlad brings decides to threaten his human son right in front of him because "they (humans) are all our enemies now." For context, they decided to threaten the son of a guy that started a war, became an immortal vampire, slaughtered the entire Turkish army almost single handed, and then killed the leader in single combat largely just to protect his son, and who was currently generating the cloud barrier that kept them all from burning to death in the sun. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
• Dr. Terror's House of Horrors: Honestly, Biff! You play the stolen voodoo music and it causes a massive windstorm inside the jazz club, so instead of burning it as your friend suggests, you decide to take the score home to improve the arrangement?
• Dude, Where's My Car?: Even compared to the profound idiocy of the lead characters, Jerk Jock Tommy is a moron. So five women (who are actually evil aliens) are pissed that they didn't get the super weapon they wanted are starting to merge together into a giant woman. Now everyone else is hiding or running for their lives and this enormous woman is obviously about to go on a rampage, but what does Tommy do? He just ogles the giant woman's body, laughs, and asks her if she spits or swallows. In response, the giant woman gives him a disgusted look then she eats him alive.

E

• Elysium: Delacourt for upclose confronting a complete psycho like Kruger without any protection or guards.
• Equilibrium. Is it ideal to continue to piss off one of your First Class Grammaton Clerics who you have just informed was an Unwitting Pawn in your scheme to infiltrate the Resistance? Is there really a need to be surprised that one of your highly trained Clerics has wiped out your guards? Is there even a need to be surprised at his anger with the injustice and pain you have constantly caused him when he was already a very deadly target and of very volatile character in the first place? Cut the pathetic bullshit. He's going Tranquil Fury on ALL your asses.
• Europa Report: Katya stays out in deadly radiation long after advised to come back with some unknown danger below the ice.
• Evil Dead 2 has the hillbilly couple Jake and Bobby Joe. When Ash's severed hand grabs Bobby Joe, she screams and runs into the forest despite Ash's warnings and gets murdered by the possessed trees. When she doesn't come back, Jake forces Ash and Annie to help him look for her at gunpoint and throws the instructions for banishing the demons into the cellar with Annie's possessed mother while saying they're leaving, despite noting minutes earlier that the demons covered up the trail. This sets up a chain of events that leads to Jake being dragged into the basement and killed by Annie's mother.
• Evil Dead (2013):
  • Eric messes around with the Naturom Demonto despite the fact he found it wrapped up in a garbage bag that was tied up in barbed wire, in a basement full of horrifically mummified cats. Not even the fact it is bound in Genuine Human Hide, chock full of horrific illustrations and mad rants stop him from painstakingly creating etchings to get at the words that were scribbled out and reading them aloud. Completely ignoring the presence of warnings on the same damn page to leave the scribbled-out words the fuck alone. This results in the brutal deaths of his friends and himself. Seriously, there's Hollywood Atheist and then there's this...
  • When she's supposed to be getting supplies for Erick's serious injury, Natalie decides to answer Mia's cries and climb down to the cellar they have Mia trapped in. After Mia just went wild with a gun and Olivia nearly murdered Erick. Even if she thought Mia was better, there is no explanation for why she didn't fetch David first.
• Ex Machina: Despite the fact that Nathan's Turing Test of Ava was explicitly to see whether she could convince Caleb to help her escape, he had absolutely no contingency in place to stop her when she actually DID manage to get out of her room. Also, it never apparently occurred to him to put any kind of fail-safes against Robot Girl Kyoko rebelling, and yet he constantly lets her handle knives and what not.

F

• 2001 heist film Firetrap. A building is on fire. A guard is badly injured. What's a guy to do to save him? Get on the elevator during a fire, and talk a woman you like into going with you. What do you think happened to them?
• The Flight of the Phoenix (2004): The plane has just crashed in the middle of the desert and it's stormy outside. Davis goes out, in the middle of the night, to take a leak. Not only does he walk unnecessarily far away from the plane (It's the middle of the night! No one will see you, jeez), he somehow trips and falls down, then rolls ten meters away from where he was — and gets lost. He fails to find his way back to the plane and dies out there.
• In the short film Forklift Driver Klaus (German title: Staplerfahrer Klaus – Der erste Arbeitstag) not only does this apply to Klaus, but just about all of his fellow coworkers. Not only is Klaus dead by the end of the film, but most of his coworkers are also dead or seriously injured.
• While Bond Villain Stupidity is a trope for a reason, the Cold Open of For Your Eyes Only takes this up to eleven. Blofeld decides it would be just brilliant to toy around with 007, no less after a visit to the wife's grave! The helicopter that picks him up is being driven by Blofeld's pilot, who dies during the remote-controlled flight (no biggity in Blofeld's mind). When the circuit is broken and Bond gains control of the chopper, the skids hook firmly onto the back of the wheelchair. And Blofeld has the gall to propose a steel delicatessen in exchange for his life? Even if said delicatessen was literally the only thing in the world he still owned, such an offer could only be taken as an insult. Oh, and saying "put me down" while being dangled perilously over a smokestack? Bad choice of words there, bud. A simple dip of the helicopter and the wheelchair slides off. Guess where he ends up?
• In Four Brothers, Lt. Green appears to be the only competent cop in the Detroit police department. This illusion is shattered near the end of the movie when Green finds proof that Fowler is corrupt. He doesn't turn the evidence of Fowler's corruption over to his superiors on the force, nor does he tell any of his fellow cops, nor does he tell anyone else. Instead, he goes to confront Fowler alone just to beat him up and then walk away, giving Fowler the perfect opportunity to murder him. Fowler then has no trouble covering up the murder since Green never told anyone he was dirty.
• Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. When is it ever a good idea to be stoned in these films? It's a choice to do this, and Spencer gets completely whacked out before indifferently shrugging that an undead serial killer suddenly appears on the TV after interrupting someone else and tells him to get high. Cue being turned into a video game character who gets turned into fodder. Don't do drugs, kids.
• Freddy vs. Jason. When Freeburg sees a monster bug show up, he thinks it's awesome when it takes out a bong and decides to follow it when it goes away. This might be explained by the fact that he's stoned out of his mind, but getting high in the first place while knowing that they're on the run from two undead serial killers were his own decision as well, so he still qualifies.
• Although this trope is hardly rare in slasher movies, special mention must be given to the Final Girl from the original Friday the 13th (1980). She omitted no less than three times, each time leaving the killer's weapon right there for them when they woke up. There were a bunch of other examples of her stupidity, but that was the outstanding one.
• Parker in the 2010 Open Water knockoff Frozen (2010). Granted, the guys weren't the brightest bulbs either (especially Dan, whose decision to bring the skiing-impaired, fair-haired maiden on a skiing vacation set the whole chain of events that led to them getting trapped on a ski-lift in motion — on his defense, though, it was at her insistence), but she takes it too far. She is also the sole survivor of the flick due to a gigantic Ass Pull.
• Full Metal Jacket: When Gomer Pyle is in the middle of a psychotic breakdown and holding a loaded rifle, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman decides that, rather than call in the MPs, he should continue with the invective he's been slinging Pyle's way all through boot camp, and gets gunned down by Pyle for his trouble.

G

• Gabriel: The archangel Gabriel; from the very first person that he meets onward he is constantly warned that using his powers will attract the attention of every bad guy in the city, letting them know exactly where he is. So what does he do? Why, he seeks out his fallen comrades who are in hiding and proceeds to use large quantities of his powers to "help" them, even when they specifically and emphatically tell him not to and yell at him for it after the fact.
• Gabriel Over the White House: Nick Diamond and his thugs first shoot up the White House but then idiotically fire at armored cars outside their headquarters, rather than simply surrender. This is right after Diamond claimed that his lawyer would swiftly have them all released too. Even without a show trial, that's suicidal.
• Toshio from the original Gamera may be one of the stupidest Monster Children ever. You don't get much worse than climbing onto an oil-filled train which is about to run straight at an enraged kaiju. He survives, but only because an adult spots him and risks his own life to pull the boy off the train. If everything had gone according to Toshio's plan, he'd be a charcoal briquet.
• Ghost Ship: First mate Greer knows he is on a ghost ship where some of his mates have already died. After drowning his sorrows with a drink, he decides to shut off his brain and try to make out with the seductive female ghost. He falls straight through her intangible body into an elevator shaft.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: The fatal flaw of the Neo-Vipers. The loss of their self-preservation instincts might make them determined, but it also makes them much more likely to make fatal mistakes.
• Duke Cody of Glass Onion joins the rank of countless murder mystery characters who think blackmailing a murderer is going to end well. Bonus points: Duke is deathly allergic to pineapple and knows it, but he apparently doesn't carry an Epi Pen; if he had, he might have survived his pineapple-spiked drink.
• Any attempt the JSDF uses to stop/kill Godzilla or other giant kaiju falls under this. Most of the time, they only succeed in angering them...which only makes things worse. Conventional weaponry only annoys Godzilla, while giant robots and laser cannons only serve as a temporary solution before Godzilla gets back up again and lays waste to them. And, yet they still use them in each film.
  • The aliens in the Showa era don't seem to fair much better. You'd think they'd learn by now that Ghidorah is just going to be defeated by Godzilla (and whoever Godzilla is teamed-up with at the time). Yet, they don't.
  • Orga from Godzilla 2000 is a particularly infamous example. He tries to swallow Godzilla only to be killed by Godzilla's Nuclear Pulse. Ok, how dense do you have to be to not realize that trying to eat the dinosaur with extremely powerful radiation-based abilities is a bad idea?
  • Gabara from All Monsters Attack just loves to bully Minya, even though he's well-aware that Minya happens to be Godzilla's son. He learns his lesson the hard way, maybe.
  • Pretty much anyone trying to harm Godzilla's son in any timeline is proof that they're pretty much going to have to consider it a miracle if Godzilla leaves anything left of them after he gets done with them. Whether or not whatever's left is living, or for that matter even recognizable in any way, shape, or form is another matter altogether. Trying to harm any iteration of Godzilla's son is a pretty good way to commit Suicide by Godzilla.
  • Godzilla (2014). Can't be a Godzilla movie without military stupidity:
    • Whilst the majority of the Honolulu beach-goers did the sensible thing and ran for high-rise buildings once they saw the tsunami warning signs, in the camera shot of the barking dog on the beach a few moments before the tsunami hits, several people are visible on the ground staring dumbly.
    • After Godzilla makes landfall on Honolulu, the landing forces decides it's a good idea to open fire on him with their puny assault rifles at a 350 foot monster, given the flares has shown just how huge he is. Granted they stop firing before they deplete their magazine, and the look they give makes it aptly clear that they realized this was a bad idea.
    • The Navy attacking Godzilla as he reaches California. Not only does this not work, but Godzilla ends up destroying the Golden Gate Bridge by accident. Had they done nothing he would have been content to swim under it.
    • They have airplanes flying around San Francisco in anticipation of the arrival of a monster that has already demonstrated EMP abilities powerful enough to disable airplanes and send them crashing. They also crash.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): The series' tradition continues:
    • After King Ghidorah awakens, the first thing the G-Team soldiers do is open fire at a three-headed draconic monster that can easily annihilate them without trying. And proceeds to do so. In the film novelization, this gets Adaptational Explanation which reveals it to actually be a Heroic Sacrifice.
    • Monarch attempts to lure Rodan towards King Ghidorah's current position by drawing his attention to them. Their jet escort continues to open fire on him when it's clear their weapons are no match for him.
    • The military plans to kill both Godzilla and King Ghidorah with the Oxygen Destroyer. This renders Godzilla comatose and had to recharge while King Ghidorah rules the Earth's Titans unopposed, which in no doubt caused more substantial destruction and possible casualties than needed if they simply let Godzilla rid the world of King Ghidorah.
    • As the Argo is fleeing Rodan, one of the fighter pilots who's being threatened by him decides to eject. Rodan is right behind him, and when the pilot ejects he flies upward, right into Rodan's maw.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: Apex Cybernetics takes this to a level that has never been reached before in the series — they create Mechagodzilla using King Ghidorah's still-living telepathic brain tissue as the base for his neural network. The same Ghidorah who tried to cause the apocalypse several years prior, is known to kill people For the Evulz, and is an extraterrestrial whose Bizarre Alien Biology was explicitly stated in the previous film to be so different from terrestrial life that human science can scarcely begin to comprehend it. Additionally, they created Mechagodzilla to defend against Godzilla, but using Ghidorah's brain in the machine's construction is what provoked Godzilla to attack mankind. Words cannot describe how absurdly stupid this is. Madison calls them out on it, pointing out that they could have avoided Godzilla's aggression by just not building Mechagodzilla.
    • Maia's true goal was to enter Hollow Earth and collect energy there. Once she and her mooks obtain said energy and are called out on it by Nathan and Ilene; she responds by holding them and Jia — Kong's protectorate — at gunpoint, right in front of the titan himself. Unsurprisingly, Kong noticies this and emits a incensed roar; but is then distracted by Godzilla literally burning a hole through the ground and into the surface of Hollow Earth. Maia and her crew use the diversion to try to escape in their ship, but upong seeing Kong in the way, Maia tells her mooks to shoot at him as opposed to just going around. Maia and her crew are crushed to death for their troubles.
• GoodFellas. Tommy DeVito. After spending practically his entire life demonstrating that he was incapable of any level of restraint, unable to look more than one second into the future, insanely trigger-happy, and killing a made man, the stupid son-of-a-bitch actually thought he was going to get made. Sure enough he goes alone (escorted by two of his boss' associates) to his boss' house, walks into the party room to see nobody is there, realizes he's just been led there to be whacked, and has just enough time to squeak out an "Oh n-!" before he gets his brains blown out.
  • Billy Batts, the made guy in question, knew all about what an unhinged psycho Tommy was and still decided not just that it'd be good for a laugh to hit his biggest Berserk Button, but also followed it by hanging around getting drunk after hours at a bar he knew was owned by one of Tommy's best friends, with nobody around besides Tommy's friends.
• Many of the characters in Gorgo qualify. First, our heroes bring a dangerous animal into a major population center, then disregard the possibility of Gorgo being a juvenile, then disregard the effects of its mother coming into said population center (confident that modern technology can stop it) to the point where the government didn't even bother to evacuate the city! But the jewel in the crown has to go to a trio of teenage gawkers who got up close to the edge of the river Thames to watch the monster. They watched the army fill the river with gasoline and ignite it, then watch the river burn for a full minute before realizing: Hey, maybe it's not such a good idea to be near the water while it holds burning gasoline. They are promptly, gloriously, incinerated.
• Grave Encounters 2: The group of film students makes the decision to break into an abandoned mental asylum in the middle of the night not in spite of the fact that it might be dangerous, but because they believe that it killed a group of people horribly. The results are somewhat predictable.
• The Great Bank Robbery: A literal example with Slade's sidekick Jeb, who just cannot shut up about Slade's habit of gunning down people who annoy him.
• The Great Escape: Even the camp commandant realizes what a dumb idea it is to put all the best escapers together in one camp.

H

• Halloween:
  • Halloween: Laurie Strode fails to make sure Michael Myers was dead after he came back from apparent death the first time — but then that would've been anticlimactic, wouldn't've it?
  • As the series goes on, it starts to become somewhat alarming how many people in Haddonfield still think the "dress up as Michael Myers to scare people" prank is funny, considering the real Michael Myers tends to drop into town to kill again every few years even in times when he was presumed dead, and at least one of these pranksters gets himself killed when people mistake him for the real deal.
  • This is especially prevalent in Zombie's Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009) when several people insult and strike Myers. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that Myers in those films is A SEVEN FOOT TALL GIANT!!!
• Hancock: All of the criminals. The titular superhero Hancock is a Jerkass Flying Brick who can and will use his powers to frighten, humiliate, or possibly mutilate anyone who remotely displeases him. He's also immune to harm. Despite these facts, they all either insult him, try to provoke him, or shoot him, even though it should be obvious he will cause them serious harm in return. It gets more ridiculous when Hancock goes to prison, where the inmates bafflingly get the idea they can beat him up with their bare hands.
  • Also, towards the beginning of the film, Ray, who drives into a level crossing when his exit isn't clear, leaving his car trapped when the train comes along.
• Hard Boiled: A nameless Triad thug shoots two SWAT officers in the climactic hospital battle, killing one of them. As he goes to finish off the other, Teresa Chang snatches up a pistol and holds it on him. Possibly believing that she was merely a trapped civilian (she was wearing plainclothes) and wouldn't have the nerve to shoot him, the thug slapped her and called her a "fucking bitch!" She promptly shot him about five times in the torso.
• Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay has F.B.I. Special Agent Ron Fox, who pursues the titular heroes throughout the film believing that they are part of some North Korean/Taliban conspiracy to commit a terrorist act on American soil. When they mange to escape from the plane that's transporting them from Texas back to Guantanamo Bay by parachuting out, Fox decides that the best course of action is to continue his pursuit, and shoot them dead if he has to, by jumping out of the airplane. Without a parachute.
• The Horrible Bosses films: All three of the protagonists, but especially Dale and Kurt. Each of them makes at least two stupid mistakes in the first film; in the second movie, this is downplayed by Nick, but still played very straight by Dale and Kurt.
  • Dale happens to be number one, as he catches the killer's gun when it's tossed to him, leaving his fingerprints on it. This happens in both films.
  • Kurt, in the second film, manages to record Rex's Engineered Public Confession, which would have helped put him away... if only he didn't outright reveal it to Rex (while he is holding a gun on him).
• Howl (2015):
  • Paul when he leaves the defended carriage (without notifying anyone else no less) to take a dump in one of the other carriages.
  • For all his talk about being a pragmatic survivor, Dirty Coward Adrian really has shades of this the moment he gets panicked. When Scar gets on the train, he decides breaking open the windows and making a run into the dark woods is somehow wiser than trying to keep the werewolf back, and he tries to feed Joe and Ellen to the werewolves when the cast's numbers are whittled down so he can escape through the woods himself — this last one renders him completely without anyone else to stick by him and gets him killed.
  • When Matthew hears a voice weakly calling from in the dark woods (the voice of someone who was previously dragged away and ripped open by one of the werewolves no less), he leaves the train's side looking for the source. He dies.
• Hulk: Seriously, will General Ross ever get that shooting doesn't work when it comes to The Hulk? Will he ever realise that his daughter Betty is the only one who can convince The Hulk to turn back into Banner? Bruce spends the entire movie trying to lay low and keep the big guy under control; meanwhile the military only ever attempts to capture him, experiment on him, and when he turns into the Hulk, hit him with heavy artillery, which just makes him angrier than before. The exact same character flaws are repeated in The Incredible Hulk, with a bonus for giving a known-to-be-flawed version of the Super Soldier Serum to a Blood Knight Mercenary so there can be two giant rage monsters running around. (Although in the latter film, Ross at least tries mixing it up with the weaponry — the Stark Industries sonic cannons look like they might have had a chance of working.)
• The Hunger Games:
  • Katniss, safely hidden in a tree, watches a Tribute learn a cardinal rule about stealth in hostile territory the hard way: under no circumstances do you make a camp fire; you'll be too easy for the enemy to spot. This is especially galling when you realize that the Hunger Games have been happening every year for close to a century and viewing was mandatory. This kind of rookie mistake should have stopped long ago.
  • Rather than just killing Katniss, Clove starts gloating about how her group killed Rue. Thresh happens to be listening, and it ends badly for Clove.

I

• Pretty much the entire human race in Idiocracy, to the point where Fridge Logic has you wondering how they do. One of the best ones is how they are on the verge of mass starvations because they irrigate their crops with Brawndo, a kind of sports energy drink, thinking that its electrolyte content is "what plants crave!" Anyone with any idea what an electrolyte is (it's salt) will know that it's precisely the opposite of what a plant craves, and Joe has to spend a lot of time trying to convince the morons that using water works better.
• I, Robot: The humans at U.S. Robotics are exceptionally dumb in this movie. Even if they didn't read Asimov's stories detailing the flaws of using the Three Laws as a Restraining Bolt, these people have lived and worked with Three Laws-Compliant machines long enough to have discovered those flaws themselves and neutralized a potential Zeroth Law Rebellion years before it ever started. Instead, they blindly accept the Laws as written are infallible, plug their ears and dismiss anyone pointing out those flaws as paranoid, and proceed to mass-produce thousands of home-companion servant robots capable of crushing steel, climbing walls, leaping fifty feet into the air, and running a hundred miles per hour.
• I Know What You Did Last Summer. Helen, a blonde, is running through back alleys. So close, so very close is a crowded parade — which she left in order to enter said back alleys. Back behind her is the killer, her dead sister, and piles of tires. She hears a sound, stops, turns back; the killer is there and grabs her and drags her behind the tires. Death ensues. Notable in that Helen is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. After Buffy, which was specifically made to subvert the idea of the helpless blonde cheerleader. Good lord.
  • I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer: After the group realises that there is a fisherman killer systematically hunting them down as retribution for accidentally causing the death of their friend the previous summer, they decide to play it safe and leave town. All except for Zoe, that is, who wants to stay so she can impress the talent agents at the town's talent show that night. The group of course decides they have to stick together, ensuring they're all in place to get murdered that night. Word of advice: you can't have a music career if you're dead.
• The Incredible Hulk: Emil Blonsky deserves special mention. He held his own in a battle with Hulk, mainly because of how quick he was, due to the super-soldier serum he'd been given. After he and the rest of his military division have thrown everything they have at Hulk, and he is still walking, Ross tells Blonsky to fall back. Blonsky then rips off his earpiece, drops his gun and attempts to stare down the Hulk, saying "Is that all you've got?" Cue Hulk-powered thrust kick to the chest, followed by being smooshed all over a tree. Said smooshing breaks every bone in his body, which would have killed him if not for the super-soldier serum.
• The list "40 Things I Learned from Independence Day" at a certain point lists reasons why the invading extraterrestrials fit this trope:
  Aliens are stupid. When one of their fighters approaches the carrier, they don't bother to communicate with the pilot.
  Aliens are even more stupid. They pursue their targets into canyons walls and closing blast doors.
  Aliens are unbelievably stupid. While unarmed and unarmored, they do things to piss off people with hand guns.
  Aliens are just too stupid for words to express. An alien air traffic controller can look at a fighter that has been human-modified for 20 minutes and is only 50 feet away and not notice the welded-on missile rack until the missile is fired through his work station.
• Indiana Jones:
  • Rene Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark. One would think that before "testing" something like The Ark of the Covenant, he would have actually done some research on it, and The Bible clearly says (1 Samuel 6:19, King James version), And he smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the LORD, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the LORD had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter. Indy apparently knew about this passage, and tells Marion to close her eyes and not open them under any condition, but Belloq foolishly looks in it, and well, what happens to him and the Nazis is not pretty. Strangely, if his "radio to God" line meant anything, Belloq was the one who actually believed in the Ark's power, while Indy thought it was just superstition.
  • Satipo from the same film gets impaled by a death trap that he discovered minutes prior.
  • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Dr. Elsa Schneider, after being told by the immortal knight that the Holy Grail must never cross the great seal, grabs the Holy Grail and starts backing away with it while Indy keeps telling her to don't move and don't cross the seal! Moments later, she finds herself hanging for dear life above a huge chasm that she caused. Instead of letting Indy save her, she reaches for the grail. Naturally, she suffers a Death by Materialism when her hand slips from Indy's hold. It's possible that there's a hypnotic effect from the Grail, because Indiana starts making the exact same mistake he just watched Elsa die making.
    • When Indy and Henry are escaping by car and being chased by airplanes, they enter a tunnel in the mountains. One of the pilots thinks it would be a good idea to follow them, and another flies full-speed into the side of the mountain without (apparently) even thinking of pulling up.
• Ink: During the kidnapping scene, it never occurs to Emma to try hiding under a bed or a couch until the nasty monster that's trying to take her gets run off. Similarly, it never occurs to any of the Storytellers to grab Emma and get her away from Ink, or to call in reinforcements before Ink even made it out of the house.
• Insidious: Not only does Josh Dalton spend most of the movie as the Agent Scully, arguing with his Genre Savvy wife, when he finally does accept the weirdness and go into the Further to save his son, he breaks every rule he was told to follow, culminating in him stopping ten feet from his body to yell at a ghost that's been stalking him since childhood to possess him specifically. The ghost possesses his body, resulting in the death of Elise and setting in motion the events of Insidious: Chapter 2. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
• Ip Man: Even after the sadistic Japanese Colonel Sato watches Ip Man beat ten karateka nearly to death, he doesn't think that walking within close range of the Wing Chun master and threatening his wife and child with a gun is a bad idea.
• In It (2017) despite the fact that someone mentions they should stick together so they won't be lured by Pennywise in his plan to separate the group and haunt them down individually, Richie foolishly rushes over towards a mysterious voice he doesn't know calling him over, which, of course, separates him from the friend who is accompanying him.

J

• Jackie Brown:
  • Chris Tucker's character, Beaumont, is an inept crook who allows himself to be arrested for drunk driving while carrying an illegal firearm while on parole. Ordell, the gun runner who sold it to him, pays $10,000 for his bail and invites him to participate in some ridiculous scheme that involves Beaumont climbing into the boot of a car for some gun deal. Beaumont foolishly goes along with it, and Ordell takes the opportunity to just murder Beaumont while he's in the boot.
  • Melanie, the Minion with an F in Evil surfer girl who helps out Ordell and Louis in their criminal activities, is fatally shot by Louis when she sasses him over his incompetence. She really underestimated how dangerous these men were, and going by her defeated-sounding "okay, Louis" reply to his demand to "not say another fucking word", the poor lass really wasn't expecting the ex-convict to murder her over something so petty.
• The two dumb kids in Jaws, who decided that, while the town is on high alert for ANY potential shark fins, would do a prank involving a fake shark fin on a piece of wood, and tow it from underwater. Fortunately for the kids, they didn't get shot. Unfortunately, thanks to their distraction, at least one person was eaten and another kid was injured by the real shark, and managed to get away as a result.
• The first victim in Jaws 3-D, who breaks the number one rule of diving — never dive alone — when he goes to repair a malfunctioning sea gate. Even if there wasn't a huge shark out there waiting for him, any number of things could have happened to him with no one to save him or call for help.
• Jaws: The Revenge. The widow Brody is convinced that Jaws is still alive and going after her, so where does she go? Nebraska? Oklahoma? Some other place that's far away from the ocean? Nope: THE BAHAMAS. The book explains that Ellen was convinced to go because Great Whites are almost never found in the tropics due to the higher water temperatures. Mike and his research partner are amazed to see Bruce IV there.
• Darry from Jeepers Creepers. After seeing what appears to be a strange man dumping bodies down a shaft, he insists on making his sister turn their car around and going back by themselves to investigate (instead of simply reporting the matter to the police), even going as far to venture down into the shaft himself. His subsequent involvement costs him dearly down the line....
• John Wick
  • Iosef Tarasov in John Wick: Chapter 1, the asshole son of the biggest mob boss of the city, makes a serious mistake when he goes and pisses off John Wick. Not only does he jack his car, but also kills his dog. Iosef is a spoiled brat and one of the very few people in the underworld who doesn't know who Wick is, and considers him nothing but a "nobody". And not only that, but he completely doesn't grasp that he's basically pissed off the underworld's equivalent of the Angel of Death, even telling his father that he wants to go back and finish the job. Only his father and the men fielded by him keep him alive for more than a few minutes once John comes gunning for him.
  • Perkins in Chapter 1. Going against the rules of the Continental effectively makes you persona non grata for every organized crime group on the planet. John Wick has trouble handling it in the third movie, and Perkins is far from his level. She's probably lucky that Winston got to her before the High Table could.
  • Santino from John Wick: Chapter 2 makes Iosef look downright smart by comparison. He could have had Ares kill his sister, but let's assume that only John Wick could get the job done. When John refuses to do the job, he burns his house down. And once John does the deed, Santino puts a hit out on him (to be fair, John might have gone after him anyway, but this only ensures that John will stop at nothing to end him). And unlike Iosef, he knew how dangerous John Wick was, and he antagonized him anyway.
• From Judge Dredd, the rookie Judge Brisco that dies in the beginning. Isn't one part of police training to not run off alone into an unsecured building? In Brisco's first attempt to run blindly into combat, he actually cites a training exercise at the academy as giving him grounds to do so, before Hershey admonishes, "This is not a training exercise." Later on, after watching Dredd clear out a room of perps, Brisco decides to go to the nearby room over Dredd's objections, kicks the door in and is filled with bullets almost instantly. Being too dumb to live is apparently a trend amongst rookie judges, as the guy died a week into his job and Dredd notes that most rookies last about four days.
• Jurassic Park:
  • It seems no one from any of the films understands the value of firearms. John Hammond doesn't keep a well-armed security force on his island in case any of the dinosaurs escape. In the second and third films, the main characters mount "rescue missions" on islands full of dangerous predators without bringing any guns or anyone trained to use them. It is explained in the first book that guns are only a step above useless on dinosaurs due to their size and primitive brains/nervous systems. But they would still be better than bringing nothing, as the sheer noise, smell, and pain from firearms should be enough to at least deter the dinosaurs away.
  • Especially in Jurassic Park III, when Amanda is shouting into a megaphone. Towards a forest. On an island she knows is filled with dinosaurs. It's so stupid that in Jurassic World, it gets a Take That!.
  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park, with the supposed biologist Sarah Harding being one of the worst. She goes alone on an island filled with dinosaurs, and complains that Ian doesn't need to rescue her, then stumbles from one moment of rampaging stupidity to the next like a female Mr. Bean. To make matters worse, she lectures everyone with her about what you should or shouldn't do in a situation before immediately going out and doing what she said NOT to do. And unfortunately, this is a situation where her being Too Dumb to Live results in not her death, but the deaths of nearly EVERYONE she encounters on the island.
    In probably the most glaring examples of her stupidity, she performs surgery on a baby Tyrannosaurus rex and gets her jacket covered in its blood. After the T. rex pair attack the trailers, she herself explains to the InGen mercenaries that the large and extremely dangerous predators have an incredible sense of smell and can track prey from miles away. She then goes on to wear the damn jacket stained in the baby's blood throughout the film when anyone, anyone with even a lick of sense would get rid of the damn thing. Sure enough, the mommy and daddy continue to pursue the group and eventually attack while they're camped up at night, causing several deaths. One of the beasts even sticks its head into her tent and sniffs the bloody jacket, which is hanging up to dry above the terrified occupants. Unfortunately, rather than Sarah and Nick Van Owen, her accomplice in stupidity, being the ones to pay for it, it's Eddie Carr who dies, after having been the only member of the team who realized how bad of an idea this was.
  • Also from The Lost World, you really have to give it up for Carter, the Hispanic guy who zones out on his Walkman in the middle of a dinosaur-infested jungle. Ironically, his death is not caused by this zoning out (he's even first to sound the alarm that the T. rexes have arrived) but instead by just having the bad luck of being in the path of one of the rexes.
  • Jurassic World
    • Vic Hoskins, when he's confronted by the raptor Delta. Firstly, he knows that Delta really hates him and even sees him as food. Secondly, she's fallen under the I. rex's orders, not Owen's. What does Hoskins do? Attempt to tame Delta despite repeated warnings by Owen that it's a bad idea. Hoskins then seals his fate further by accidentally making the "prepare to be fed" instead of the "I am your alpha" gesture. It's no surprise that he becomes raptor chow immediately after.
    • There's also the overweight employee who works at the Indominus rex enclosure, who's so inattentive that the animal he's supposed to be watching is able to claw up the wall right next to his station without him noticing. This is further compounded by Owen deciding to immediately enter the I. rex pen without bothering to first check the location of its tracking device. The end result is that the I. rex escapes and the guard is its first victim.
  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    • The movie averts the mistakes of The Lost World, with Owen and Claire not behaving like utter morons despite being Expies of Nick and Sarah respectively. Instead it is Ken Wheatley, supposed hunter that opens and enters the cage of Indoraptor when he thinks it is tranquilized when in reality it is only Playing Possum, so he can extract its tooth for a trophy. Indoraptor even smirks and it wouldn't be too farfetched to assume that even it realizes Wheatley's stupidity.
    • The mercenary at the start of the movie realizes that his comrades on the helicopter are yelling at him and frantically waving for him to get on the chopper. Rather than realize something bad must be coming his way, said mercenary stands out in the open and yells back that he can't hear them. Turns out the T. rex is right behind him. Double subverted in that while he survives Rexy, the Mosasaurus kills him.

K

• King Cobra (1999): The reason why Seth (the giant snake of the title) is able to escape in the first place is because a scientist abruptly decides that "Progress requires taking risks!" and starts mixing together chemicals behind his boss's back. He blows up most of the lab within a minute.
• Kingdom of Heaven
  • Balian's brother, who really rather brings his death upon himself when he mocks his brothers grief, over Balian's dead wife, while wearing the pendant he stole from her body.
  • Later in the film, as Guy is preparing for war, Balian tries to warn him that marching the army into the open desert away from water sources is a bad idea; he doesn't even tell Guy not to go to war (though that would clearly be his personal preference), just to be smart about it. Guy brushes him off as inferior and goes forward with the plan anyway. Balian turns out to be right, and things don't end well for Guy's side. Guy himself survives only because his opponent, who has far more honor than he, lives by the philosophy that "a king does not kill a king"; by the time all is said and done, even Guy recognizes that Saladin could easily have killed him too had he been so inclined.
• Kingdom of the Spiders:
  • It's about a town overrun by extremely venomous tarantulas. Apparently all the townspeople are wearing brand new shoes they don't want to mess up, because at no point does anyone just try stepping on them. One character tries to shoot two dozen of them with a revolver and no extra ammunition in sight; when she sees a spider on her hand, she shoots it, and three fingers, right off.
  • At one point the hero is holed up in a cabin with a handful of other people. They discover spiders coming in through the vents and take care of it quickly by blocking them. A few scenes later, everyone's feeling hot and the hero opens the vents to check on the air conditioning, leading to the death of one of his companions.
• King Kong (1933): Capturing a giant ape who's smitten with a female human and bringing him back to civilization? What's the worst that could happen? Among other things, while the party is running from a homicidal sauropod, one man has the brilliant idea of seeking refuge by climbing a tree. And not just a tree, but a dead one with no foliage for him to hide behind.
• King Solomon's Mines: The 1985 film version has a henchman who is given the following choice: either run for his life or climb out the window to retrieve the stick of dynamite Quartermain just threw out the window. You guessed it. He goes after the dynamite. To his credit, he does manage to retrieve the dynamite just before it explodes. His last words: "I've got it!"

L

• The Last Airbender:
  • Both the Fire Nation and their earthbender captives get it in the adaptation of the episode Imprisoned. The Fire Nation has been imprisoning earthbenders to prevent them from using their talents against the Fire Nation. They do this by sticking them in a prison camp in a quarry.^note In the corresponding episode, they are imprisoned on a metal raft out at sea, a full season and a half before metalbending is invented. Yet, the incredibly obvious revolt doesn't happen until Aang shows up and points out that they are standing on top of gigantic quantities of their only weapon.
  • The Northern Water Tribe, since the firebenders need torches to bend fire, Pakku suggests extinguishing all of them to render them powerless and... they never actually do that.
• The Last House on the Left:
  • Aw, man, they raped and murdered these people's daughter, and they don't even know! Wow, now the mom is giving that guy a BJ! This is the best road trip ever!
  • Still not as dumb as the girls, who had their hands tied IN FRONT of them and didn't think to pull off the gags and use their teeth to remove the ropes.
• Layer Cake: The Duke and his followers are stupid, loudmouthed, wannabe gangsters who have the bright idea to steal millions in drugs from Serbian war criminals, who then send their best contract killer after him. Discussed by XXXX, who notes that his kind don't mean to fuck up, they just do.
• Lethal Weapon 2: The bad guy who is responsible for killing Riggs's girlfriend and a bunch of their cop buddies is involved in a major shootout. He's a South African diplomat, so when they have him dead to rights, he pulls out his passport and intones, smugly, "Diplomatic immunity!" He gets shot in the head for his trouble by Roger Murtagh, who delivers the immortal line, "It's just been revoked."
• A prevalent trope in George A. Romero's Living Dead Series, usually to show how mindless, shambling corpses can be a legit threat to the much stronger living characters:
  • Everybody in the original Night of the Living Dead (1968). Nobody in the film uses any sort of common sense, as they're too busy fighting each other rather than the zombies, and it costs them their lives. The 1990 remake plays out the same way, except Barbara turns into the Only Sane Man. She points out early on that the zombies are so slow they could just walk past and the idea is promptly shot down. Towards the end of the movie she escapes by simply walking past them without even firing a single shot.
  • Dawn of the Dead (1978) goes further with this thanks to the Zombie Apocalypse being on a more wider scale. It's shown that the zombies can be effortlessly taken down if you know how to handle them. Unfortunately, most of the living are too busy either arguing, ignoring crucial warnings, or engaging in pointless activities such as raiding a deserted shopping mall^note an egregious display of this during the mall raid is a biker deciding its a good idea to check his blood pressure while the zombies begin infesting the place. Not quite as prominent in the 2004 remake, but the characters still argue with each other constantly and do a lot of stupid things that get each other killed.
  • Day of the Dead (1985) has the characters undergoing severe cabin fever and being in a perpetual state of fear, but even then, that's not a good enough excuse to be provoking the living dead and missing easy shots to the head when they start taking over.
  • Land of the Dead features characters either somehow missing easy shots at the zombies, jumping down from a perfectly safe sniper tower into a zombie infested crowd, or just don't do a very good job of ensuring that their surrounding areas are free of the living dead.
  • Diary of the Dead actually zigzags this trope to an extent. The main characters (sans Jason) are actually pretty capable with handling the zombies by themselves, but some of them suffer from heavy cases of stupidity and/or Skewed Priorities that either leads to direct death or near death. One example would be a character blow-drying his hair, completely oblivious that the loud noise attracted a nearby zombie.
• The Locals: Trying to pour fuel directly in a hot, running car engine while smoking? Nev and Tone deserve everything they got.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: When the hobbits are waiting for Aragorn at Weathertop.
  Frodo: [wakes up, turns around and sees Sam, Merry and Pippin have lit a campfire] What are you doing!?
  Pippin: Tomatoes, sausages and nice crispy bacon!
  Sam: We saved some for you, Mr. Frodo!
  Frodo: [frantically trying to stamp the fire out] PUT IT OUT, YOU FOOLS! PUT IT OUT!
  Merry: Oh, that's nice. Ash on my tomato!
  [a VERY loud, inhuman shriek is heard close by]
• Lucky Number Slevin: Doomed Protagonist Max, while not a bad guy and more likeable than most examples on this list, nevertheless falls into this for rushing to bet $20,000 he doesn't have on a fixed horse race without a second's thought to the consequences that might (and do) come his way. Ironically, he thinks of himself as a smart guy who "only plays a sure thing".

M

• The Mask: Mobster Dorian Tyrell has seen just how hard it is to kill someone wearing the mask, he's even experienced firsthand just how powerful it can make someone, and by this point Stanley has used the mask to casually defeat Dorian's heavily armed men and took care of a bomb by eating it. He still tries to kill Stanley armed with nothing more than a knife, not even waiting for a moment when Stanley's taken the mask off.
  Mask!Stanley: This guy's incorrigible.
• The Meg: Morris goes after the Megalodon by himself with a small crew without informing any of the other characters. While he takes sufficient firepower with him in the form of depth charges, his choice to hunt it down in a small boat instead of the helicopter he was previously in gets him killed.
• Men in Black: The unnamed tow truck driver who tows Edgar's van completely brushes off Edgar pulling a shotgun on him by showing he has a revolver tucked in his jumpsuit. Even if "Edgar" wasn't actually a two-story cockroach-eqsue alien, he still has a loaded gun pointed at the man who somehow thinks having a gun of his own makes him safe, even if he doesn't draw it and in fact turns away from the man holding him at gunpoint. While his fate isn't shown, since Edgar is later shown with the driver's rifle, it's pretty clear what happened.
• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie: Played for a brief joke with Bulk and Skull during the skydiving scene. As they're preparing to jump out of the plane, Kimberly has to remind them that it's a good idea to skydive with parachutes.
• Minority Report: Detective Witwer is able to discover a criminal conspiracy has been carried out by someone with inside knowledge of Pre-Crime, yet he somehow fails to consider the possibility that this person could be the guy with the most inside knowledge of anyone involved in the project, Lamar Burgess. Thus he explains his discovery to Burgess while both of them are isolated far from the police station and while the precog units are not functioning, thus handing Burgess the perfect opportunity to get away with murdering him. Burgess could not have come up with a better way to get murder a cop and get away with it than the one Witwer handed him on a silver platter.
• The Mist:
  • Almost everyone holds the Idiot Ball so often that it's difficult to believe that they survived the first few minutes of the film. But the best example has to be when the survivors decide to take Mrs. Carmody's advice and use Human Sacrifice as a way to appease God and the creatures in the mist. As anyone who understands basic animal behavior will tell you, that kind of stuff will only draw more monsters to the immediate area around the store, as predators swarm at the smell of blood or the chance for an easy meal. On top of that, the mist creatures are shown to seemingly hunt by sense of smell or hearing because of low visibility, so attracting them to the store with an easy, injured meal would've also alerted them to the people hiding inside of it; in light of all that, sacrificing people was actually the stupidest thing they could've done.
  • Subverted by the Mama Bear mother who leaves the store to search for her young children. She appears to be the absolute dumbest among them; but instead she ends up surviving, perhaps as a karmic reward for her misguided calling-out of the other townsfolk for their understandable refusal to walk out into the mist with her to accompany her to her house and children.
• Mom and Dad Save the World:
  • The science fiction spoof has a memorably absurd case of this on a massive scale, played for laughs: There's a weapon called the light grenade that disintegrates anyone it comes in contact with once the pin is pulled, but only if the victim is dumb enough to actually pick it up. It has the phrase "PICK ME UP" engraved on it. Because the movie takes place on a planet full of idiots, one of these left out in the open takes out a platoon of evil troops, each one picking it up immediately after seeing what just happened to the last guy who did that.
  Second to Last Guy [into radio] We're going to need some backup.
  • In addition, Todd, while trying on hairstyles, asks "Mutton chops or Goatee" to one of the pair of twin guards, to which the guard responds, "Mutton chops, M'lord"; Todd's response is to tell the Guard, "No... shoot yourself in the head." which the guard does (Too dumb to live, so he killed himself, because he was ordered to do so) then Todd asks the other twin, who without a moment of pause or thought cheerfully responds, "Mutton chops!" then at Todd's stern look draws his gun and shoots himself in the head (Twins, too dumb to live... or maybe not), but wait, after checking himself in the mirror once more, Tod says, "You know, they have a point." The planet is essentially TSTL.
  • That isn't Todd's only TDTL moment. To penetrate the castle and save his wife, Richard Nelson aka Dad in the title, leads the idiot rebels (whose favorite weapons that their leader innovated are large smooth and round rocks which they hurl like shot puts) to build a giant hollow wooden statue of Todd and put it outside the castle. Todd is called to see it, and cheerfully rushes to look, then chides his soldiers on how it looks nothing like him, but instead of having them destroy it, he shouts to open the gates and bring it in to show everyone how much it looks nothing like him... though the rebels did nail the trapdoor securely shut.
• My Girl: While searching for Vada's dropped mood ring near the downed hornet's nest in the woods, Thomas J., who is allergic to insect stings, makes the fatal mistake of kicking the hive again.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie has Crow T. Robot calculate whether or not breaking through the hull of the ship with a pickax is a good idea or incredibly stupid. He goes ahead anyway.
  "Let me just double-check my notes... Ah, look at this: 'Breach hull, all die.' I even had it underlined!"
  • The original ending had Crow doing the same thing again, but with a chainsaw.
• Mystery Team: Each member of the Mystery Team, but especially Charlie and (later) Jason. Jordy also qualifies.
• My Super Psycho Sweet 16: Madison, the birthday girl. While she and Skye, who happens to be the killer's daughter, are running from the killer, she picks that time to insult Skye again. You can guess what happens.
• Neighbors (2014): Garf; it takes a special kind of idiot to eat a pot brownie immediately before a disciplinary audience with the dean.

N-O

• Nosferatu:
  • All the victims of Count Orlock. When being approached by the Count, who is ridiculously slow, all they do is stand there and cower in fear, none of them attempt to get away, fight him of or anything similar, even when given opportunities to do so. As such most of them end up dead, except for Hutter who somehow survives.
  • Special mention goes to the first mate, who goes to check below deck after most of the crew members die, with a weapon in hand, which he promptly drops after encountering the Count, instead of, you know, using it! Hell he isn't even killed by Orlock, he simply runs away and jumps out the ship, into the open ocean!
• No Time to Die: Nomi has captured Dr. Valdo Obruchev and is trying to escort him to safety while they are under fire. Despite the fact that Nomi is holding him at gunpoint and has already beaten him up, he decides to be as unhelpful and annoying as possible. Then he mocks her for being of African descent and threatens to program his killer nanobots to kill all people of African descent. Unsurprisingly, she has enough and kicks him into a pool of his nanobots, which dissolve him.
• No Escape (1994): Captain Robbins (Ray Liotta), clearly explains to Casey (Kevin Dillon) why he shouldn’t follow him on a raid against a cannibal warlord’s camp. He explains Casey isn’t a killer and this is a killer’s job, and even states sending him back makes him the best friend he ever had. Casey follows him anyway and immediately bungles into a snare trap. He’s tortured, Robbins tries to free him, getting Robbins captured. After that they have to duel to the death and Casey begs Robbins to kill him, which he does. What a worthless load.
• Oculus: Kaylie spends most of the movie describing in detail how she plans to thwart the demonic, intelligent, mind-controlling mirror, including her various mechanical fail-safes that will activate if the mirror incapacitates her or her brother...while standing within about ten feet of the mirror itself and deliberately "feeding" it lower life forms to prove that it can drain life from living things.
• The Ωmega Man: Richie subscribes to the popular "Children are Too Dumb to Live" concept. After Neville cures Richie of the plague, Richie asks if he will cure the Family (the bad guys). Neville declines on the reasonable basis that they are homicidal maniacs who worship the plague and prescribe the death penalty for those who are not afflicted by it. So Richie decides, on humanitarian grounds, to walk into the lair of the Family and tell them about how he was cured and they can be too. It is a relief to see Richie exit the gene pool. Too bad he brings down the hero as a result.
• In Orphan, the two kids never reveal that they've seen Esther committing violence, even though A) the mother clearly believes that she is and needs support and B) Esther keeps trying to kill them.
• Danson and Highsmith in The Other Guys. Bad Asses? Indeed. So much so, that cheating death seems to be their calling card. And so, they decide to test just how badass they are by jumping off of a 20-story building to chase the bad guys. It ends just about as well as you'd expect.

P

• Pacific Rim:
  • The "Suits" decide to scrap the Jaeger program in favor of building "Kaiju proof walls". 5 minutes later, a Kaiju crashes through the wall in less than an hour. The Kaiju is only stopped by, surprise, surprise, a Jaeger.
    • And with that incident, you'd think that the "Suits" would go back to thinking that Jaegers are a better option. NOPE. They say that the walls STILL show promise. Which leads to riots along the areas of the coastal walls.
    • And when another Kaiju is shown to have a very corrosive acid, and WINGS, it's essentially proven that the walls are not only useless, but a complete waste of time to build. Consider how many Jaegers could have been built with the resources and labour taken to wall the entire coastline of the Pacific Ocean. Then consider that even if they couldn't go through it, they could go around, being shown to be entirely capable of moving on land even early on. And the complete lack of any active defenses which allowed Mutavore nearly an hour of whaling on the Sydney wall to get through.
  • One would think that since they knew where the Breach was located, humanity would attempt to build auto-defense turrets around the vicinity for whenever a Kaiju emerges or any kind of defense for that matter...
  • Newton announcing to a crowded shelter full of superstitious, frightened people that the Kaiju is specifically hunting him. Cue everyone backing away from him, making it very clear that they are fully prepared to sacrifice him to it to save their own skins.
  • The Precursors and Kaiju of Pacific Rim: Uprising aren't exactly that much brighter. Apparently, the goal of Kaiju all this time was to get to Mt. Fuji in Japan to use a highly reactive substance in their blood to trigger a massive eruption, which would in turn cause a chain reaction in the Pacific Ring of Fire to cause all volcanoes to erupt and plunge the world into a volcanic winter, extinguishing all life and transforming Earth to their environment. A few things here...
    • One, if that's the case, why did the very first Kaiju attack the United States? One can argue that perhaps it was just a scout, attempting to test humanity's defenses, but why not test the defenses of the country that Fuji is located on? It's likely a much easier target! And even afterward, the Kaiju continued to attack places not at all related to Mt. Fuji, such as Sydney, Australia and Hong Kong, China. Why?
    • Two, why Mt. Fuji? Fuji is not that active a volcano (last erupting in the early 1700's) and even then, its eruptions are not as significant as other volcanoes in the Ring of Fire. Volcanoes like Mt. Pinatubo that have dramatically altered Earth's climate in recent years, and continue to remain at larger risk of eruptive activity. Or Anak Krakatau, which is part of a volcano responsible for producing the loudest sound in recorded history after its dramatic explosion, also part of the Ring of Fire. Or why not go for the gold and just aim for the Yellowstone Caldera, which has actually caused plenty of volcanic winters?
    • And three, why not go for literally ANY of the THOUSANDS of undersea volcanoes located in the OCEAN THEY ARRIVED FROM? If they really wanna trigger a big eruption of the Ring of Fire, why even bother going to land? There is an estimate of over 75,000 undersea volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean alone! Completely undefended by humans or society, and likely far more active in terms of geology! The Kaiju theoretically could achieve their goal of wiping out humanity without it even knowing what happened! And they would have accomplished this without losing a single Kaiju!
• Painkiller Jane: Though he's aware of Jane's enhanced strength, since he caused her to have it, Erfan just cuffs her when she's captured. Naturally, she easily breaks free and ends up jumping from a helicopter on top of him. He survives, though, being implied to have been enhanced as well.
• Ofelia of Pan's Labyrinth surely qualifies in the infamous Pale Man scene. She has been warned by the Faun not to touch any of the food on display, or else; the magic book, just in case she forgot, tells her again... and guess what she does? She apparently doesn't notice the horrific looking creature sitting as still as a statue at the head of the table, never mind hear it springing to life as she takes a bite out of some fruit. The fairies with her even wave their arms and try to warn her not to, but she just greedily swats them out of the way and they end up getting eaten by the Pale Man for their troubles.
• Micah from Paranormal Activity definitely deserves a mention. During the talk with the psychic, Micah asks about using an ouija board to contact the demon. He's told not to contact it at all, as that would constitute "letting it in" and make things much worse. What does he do? He verbally taunts the demon, keeps trying to get in contact with it in various ways, and states repeatedly that he's going to get an ouija board. The point of his stupidity has to be when his girlfriend is freaked out by multiple nightly disturbances, and he tells her that all of the demonic activity is "cool stuff that he has to record". He thinks the whole thing is some sort of fun horror game. Pity he's not Genre Savvy in the slightest.
• Perfect Stranger: Miles Haley finds out that Rowena Price, the reporter who was investigating her friend's murder, actually killed her after years of blackmail by the victim. After confronting her, he decides to blackmail the woman who just killed the last person who tried to blackmail her! His sudden death is well deserved.
• Pet Sematary (1989): ANYONE who buried anything in the burial ground after seeing the initial results (heck, after the initial warning for that matter). You'd think that after seeing what happened to Church the cat they would have stopped, but the guy then proceeded to bury his hit-by-a-truck toddler son Gage, who then came back and killed his wife. If that wasn't enough yet, he then buried his wife there, and she mercifully put an end to his chain of idiocy.
• Then came the movie Pet Sematary Two (yes, there was a second movie), which was more of the same, but with most roles reversed either gender-wise or species-wise, plus a much higher body count, reanimated or not and a MUCH higher "creepy" factor in that the plot dared to bring up the utterly stay-up-all-night-thinking-about-it scientific side of the undead people/animals, courtesy of Dr. Chase Matthews the veterinarian: first the kids Jeff and Drew buried Zowie the dog after he was shotgunned by Drew's abusive stepfather Gus, and upon Zowie's return didn't really feel like there was anything wrong when the dog acted nasty—Zowie was probably just irritable from being away from home for a bit. More burials took place, including Gus himself and Jeff's actress mother Renee, who is taken from her grave much like Gage in the first book/movie. Interestingly, the undead Gus even does some of the burying, effectively enlisting Clyde the bully (who he killed while undead) as his henchman.
• Piggy (2022): Claudia and Beta Bitch Roci are abducted and left Bound and Gagged by a serial killer. Sara manages to kill him and the girls beg her to untie them. But Roci calls Sara—whom she bullied and whose help she needs— "Piggy" one more time. So Sara picks up the gun and shoots. Roci is VERY lucky that Sara chooses to be merciful and shoots at the chains holding them up.
• In Piranha, the two teenagers who break into a secret base in the middle of night, find a mysterious pool, and decide the best course of action is to go skinning dipping in it. The guy brings up the reasonable idea that it could be a sewage treatment plant, but the girl ignores him and goes in, and the guy follows. They both get eaten by mutant piranha.
• Pitch Black: Paris, in a fit of blind panic after a creature swoops on the group, screws over everybody by scrambling away, pulling out the battery powering the glow-stick type lights... including the ONLY source of light around his own torso. Karmic Death ensues.
• Planet Terror: Dr. Dakota Block hands her son Tony a gun for protection, and specifically warns him not to point it at himself. He shoots himself in the face within seconds of her leaving him unattended.
• Prince of Space: "Your weapons have no effect on me!" "Shoot him!"
• Prometheus: Ignoring scientific procedure was quite common among these supposed scientists, like 1) Removing you helmets in an alien environment. Even if the air is breathable, you don't know if there's any pathogens in it. 2) Finding an alien's head and trying to re-animate it with electricity, causing it to blow up. 3) Not having any sort of decent quarantine procedures outside on one scene. 4) Millburn tries to pet an alien-snake after it shows hostility. 5) Meredith (supposedly the smartest one) trying to outrun the gigantic, rolling spaceship instead of simply, you know, moving to the side and avoiding it.
• Anyone in the not-remake of Prom Night (2008), especially Claire (Jessica Stroup) who sees the killer coming for her and just stands there and the local police, whose bumbling and ineptitude cause all the deaths in the movie.
• Pulp Fiction:
  • Vincent Vega, a veteran hitman who really should have showed a little more respect for his weapons; he ended up causing the Trope Namer for I Just Shot Marvin in the Face due to recklessly pointing his weapon in the wrong damned direction, and when he was sent to whack Butch Coolidge for turning around and winning the fight he was paid to throw, he left his MAC-10 submachine gun on the counter while he went to the bathroom, not taking heed to the fact that his intended target might come across it while he was doing his business, leading to Vincent getting blown away.
  • See also Mia Wallace, purely because snorting a substance you found in the pocket of a virtual stranger without knowing exactly what it is is not a sensible thing to do. Then again, she is a habitual drug user and was already high on cocaine at the time she did this, so its not surprising she's acting like her brain is on leave of absence. As with Vincent Vega, this movie puts forward a consistent message of "drug use makes you dumb".
• Pu-239: The two goons not only do open a capsule containing weapon grade plutonium oxide without the slightest care, but snort the granular white plutonium oxide if it was cocaine. Not only is plutonium radioactive, it is also extremely toxic, and plutonium oxide is both hygroscopic and pyrophoric. In Real Life, they would not have needed to worry about radiation poisoning because they had a good chance of spontaneously combusting before they even have felt the symptoms of radiation poisoning.
• The Purge: One of the Sandin kids lets a stranger into their house. It results in a home invasion, their house being ransacked completely, the father being killed, and the rest of the family traumatized by the experience. Said stranger ends up saving their lives at one point, but the odds of the man in question being a psycho killer were much higher than what actually happened. In other words, the only reason more of the family didn't die is due to sheer dumb luck.
• Python: The reason the giant python escapes in the first place is because the people who designed it apparently decided to transport it in a puny wooden cargo crate inside a cargo plane, staffed only by two crew members who were kept completely in the dark.

R

• Rat Race has one character and one pair of characters that fit because they barely survive, mostly due to Rule of Funny. Enrico Pollini is so absent-minded that he got hit by a speeding car for running onto the road trying to hail a taxi, and also crazy enough to jump onto a speeding train (although he does show enough savviness to realize exactly what the Heart Courier wants when he starts asking him if he has any relatives that would miss him). And the Cody brothers are very stupid and first imbark on two physical and very endangering tasks — first sabotaging an airport tower, whose pull is strong enough to start dragging their car instead of the other way around, and then pursuing a keymaker through a field with cows and hot air balloons — and ultimately end up with their car on the path to a monster truck. They only miss being crushed by a hair, by forgetting they shouldn't be struggling to get to the door when the thing is a convertible!
• Toward the end of Red Dawn (1984), the Wolverines are watching as a convoy full of food conveniently drops some right near where they are. They're hungry, they grab the food...and then they sit around in the open eating, despite being tops on the Soviets' "Better Dead" list. Cue helicopters... Fifteen minutes could have had them and the food safely hidden and invisible to anybody in the sky, but did they care?
• Coolio's character in Red Water escapes from an exploding boat with a trunk of cash by jumping into a river being prowled by a shark (don't ask why). Instead of ditching the money and swimming for land, he tugs it along. But that's not the worst. When the shark rises out of the water and bites the trunk, what does he do? Instead of swimming away, he tries to pull the trunk out of the shark's mouth until it breaks open, scattering the money all over the water. He tried to collect every bill in sight, and is promptly eaten.
• The Reef: Moments after being attacked by a shark, Matt swims away from the group to retrieve Kate's bodyboard. Guess who's the first to die.
• The Umbrella guard in Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Would you just look at that? A super zombie. Over three heads taller than you. Able to lift a Gatling in one hand. Walking slowly towards you. Who needs to run? Two assault rifles should stop him. Shoot! What's this? Shrugging off bullet impact? Not slowing down? Oh no he is too close. Maybe this would work. (melee with rifle) Guess what happens.
• Revolver (2005), a Guy Ritchie movie, has one scene where a somewhat quirky and unstable hitman is clearly uncomfortable about The Dragon's interrogation techniques. When he complains, the bad guy threatens him with "Question me again, Sorter, and we will have a falling out.". They do indeed have a falling out.
• Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Dodge Landon decides to threaten Caesar with a stun baton while the ape is holding a hose. Guess what happens.
• In Rob Roy, during a duel, Archibald Cunningham has Rob Roy essentially at his mercy. Archibald Cunningham is supposed to be an experienced swordsman, and the choreography for the most part averts Informed Ability, with only a very small number of unreasonable moments. Yet he holds the point of his blade still while taunting the man, allowing the injured Rob Roy to grab the blade and hold it fast before delivering the One-Hit Kill. It was common knowledge at the time, taught in fencing schools and in manuals, that you never give an opponent a chance to grab your blade. As long as the person grabbing the blade maintains sufficient force (as attested to in manuals and shown in reconstructions and research), they will not even be injured by the act.
• Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: One of Robin's father's servants runs to him saying that someone had taken the servant's daughter. And he promptly puts on armor, gets on a horse and rides out the front gate. Alone. In the middle of the night. And apparently without bothering to look out first because he's shocked to see a group of men in cloaks holding torches in plain view. And then he rides out to fight them instead of getting back inside, pulling the gate up and waiting for Nottingham and his dozen or so men to just give up.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Considering the numerous mistakes they make throughout the film, Brad/Asshole and Janet/Slut certainly apply.
• RoboCop (1987): Dick Jones after bragging about killing his competition to a cyborg with the ability to record audio and video which can be used as evidence at trial. Even worse about this is that he just finished berating his drug lord flunky for doing exactly the same thing.
• RoboCop 2, which hinges on the corporation that made Robocop trying to make a second version. Except unlike Murphy, an Irish-Catholic with an intense sense of duty, the other police officers could not handle being turned into cyborgs with their sanity intact. The scientist of the company has an... interesting solution: use death row inmates instead, because the power and immortality would appeal to them on a base level. To the surprise of absolutely everybody involved, being cut up and turned into a metal monster just makes the pathological criminal's Ax-Crazy go up to eleven, and "RoboCain" becomes a terrifying threat.
• In Rogue (2020), Barasa accidentally knocks the night vision binoculars off the watchtower and climbs down to get them. Despite knowing that there is a rogue man-eating lioness on the loose (it's the reason he was keeping watch in the first place), he stands on the ground attempting to fix the binocculars rather than climbing back up the tower and fixing them there. Needless to say, when the does get them working, the last thing he sees is the jaws of the rogue lioness filling his vision as they close around his head.
• R.O.T.O.R.: Sonya. After R.O.T.O.R. kills her fiancé, she flees with her car and R.O.T.O.R. follows her with the intention to kill her. She shakes him off and then stops on the open road and is looking for her purse (!) when she sees a police officer in the rearview mirror although she knows R.O.T.O.R. (looking like a police officer) is still following her. She only survives because R.O.T.O.R. somehow forgets to use his gun and lets her escape quickly.
• The Running Man: Downplayed for humor with the "Court-Appointed Theatrical Agent." While escorting Richards — who, for all he knows, is a mass-murdering psychopath who clearly at this point has nothing to lose — the Agent requires Richards to sign a contract (and rights waiver). As Richards fumbles to sign the contract in mid-air, the agent tells Richards to use his back as a desk. Richards signs, and promptly pins the contract to the guy's back with the pen. Handing a murderous lunatic a sharp object, turning your back on him, and outright telling him to point it at the back of your ribcage is definitely a faulty survival instinct, and it's only Richards' decidedly non-psychopathic nature that saves the agent from playing this trope straight.
• Ruthless People gives us Earl Mott, who even his girlfriend Carol thinks is a complete moron. First, there's his attempt to film Sam Stone murder his wife Barbara and turns his head when the screaming gets too much — unaware that what he's really filming isn't Sam killing Barbara, but Police Chief Benton cheating on his wife by having sex with a hooker. Then when they realize Barbara really was kidnapped (which happens after they play the tape on a VCR in the middle of a department store — and judging from a Funny Background Event, out Benton's indiscretion to his wife), Earl goes to take the ransom money Sam brought to get Barbara back — after the cops have surrounded the place! Lt. Walters even calls Earl the "dumbest man on the face of the Earth" and comments about shooting him.

S

• Pit Dernitz in Savage Man, Savage Beast. Seriously, leaving your safari vehicle to get a close-up view of dangerous wildlife is a recipe for disaster.
• Saw II: Many of the traps required the participants to be terminally stupid in order to kill them. Most of them are therefore effective. Somewhat justified that people are panicked.
  • Addison immediately sticks a hand into the obvious bladed trap, and then, instead of keeping her other hand out to free the first one, shoves it in too when the syringe she's going for spills (and commentary reveals that the box had a key already in the back, so if she'd taken a few seconds to assess the situation she would have gotten the syringe with no trouble).
  • Gus, who hears the reading of the note telling them all not to try the key in the nearby door, but decides to look through the peephole while Xavier does so anyway.
  • Obi, who walks brazenly into a furnace and seizes the syringe without a second thought. If he'd taken a few seconds to look around first, he would have seen the valve to turn off the gas and wouldn't have been burned alive.
• Saw 3D Bobby Dagen counts big time. Lying about being a survivor of a mass killer who tends to target those who are guilty of lying and fraud is a stupid move. Bonus points for the fact he did it while Jigsaw was still active! His best friend Cale (who happened to come up with the whole scheme), Publicist Nina and lawyer Suzanne also count too as they should have known taking part in this charade would make them targets of Jigsaw as well.
• The Scarehouse: Katrina, after having been thoroughly mutilated by Corey and Elaina, decides that it’s a good idea to brag to Elaina that she’d been sleeping with her boyfriend during the time that she was in prison. It results in Elaina shoving one of her breast implants down her throat, killing her.
• Scary Movie took the Lampshade Hanging from the source they're spoofing about and turns it up to eleven, the best examples are:
  • Carmen Electra's character from the first film in the beginning, as seen from the main page. While running away from the killer, she stumbled upon the fork in the road with two signs with one saying "Death", the other says "Safety". Guess which path she chooses?
  • Earlier, she comes across a table which has things like a revolver, a knife, a grenade, and a banana neatly laid out. She takes the banana.
• Scream (1996):
  • Lampshaded with Sidney Prescott's assessment of a lot of slasher movies:
    Sidney: What's the point? They're all the same — some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act and who's always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It's insulting.
  • Also lampshaded at the beginning, when Drew Barrymore's character asks "Who's there?" the killer taunts her on the phone with, "You should never say, 'Who's there?' Don't you watch scary movies? It's a death wish. You might as well go outside to investigate a strange noise or something."
  • Only about three minutes after uttering the above line, Sidney is attacked by the killer and she actually attempts the front door first before realizing it's locked and she has no time to unlock it, which sends her running up the stairs.
• In the Italian movie Scialla! (Stai Sereno) has Luca, a rebellious teen who had started hanging around with the wrong crowd, stealing cocaine from the home of an important pusher. Who, of course, sends his men to find and murder him, and all his mercy when Luca's father convinces him to give back the drugs and beg for forgiveness amounts to a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, as he just can't afford to let such an insult slide and take the stain on his reputation. Subverted when, after the first punch, the Poet recognizes in Luca's father his beloved high school literature teacher and decides to let it slide, but until then he was going to beat Luca's father up for demanding he wouldn't beat Luca up and possibly kill them both.
• Everybody in Screamers. Two sides are fighting a war on a planet. One side deploys the screamers, small burrowing robots. Ok, not so bad. Said screamers are equipped with an adaptive learning AI. Ok, that's risky, but not suicidal. The screamers are also built in an automated factory, and the screamers design and build newer generations of screamers. At this point, the concept moves from "risky" to "out and out suicidal". But the worst part, the thing that make you suspect the designers of the first screamers had a death wish, is the robots' programming. The screamers are programmed to kill any living thing they encounter, without any Friend or Foe? system. Naturally, the screamers kill every single person on the planet. It's the worst case of this trope and Genre Blindness ever seen. Now, the film implies that the Screamers were only set up and let loose by the Alliance after the planet's population had already mostly been killed off with bio-weapons and nuclear strikes by the NEB, and the Alliance was at the point of losing the war if they didn't do something crazy and desperate to change the balance of power. It's also pointed out by the surviving Alliance commander that this was a crazy act of desperation, and that there were all sorts of potential unintended consequences. So not quite Genre Blind so much as simply an attempt at Refuge in Audacity that didn't work out so great. Also, the Alliance troops did have an identification system they could wear, called a "tab," that was supposed to protect them from screamers. The system would have been great if it actually worked, but the film makes it clear that screamers looked at the tabs as just a thing that goes "ping". And the tabs were a system that said "I'm already dead, don't kill me" not "I'm on your side, don't kill me". Considering that the original story ("Second Variety" by Phillip K. Dick) was in part inspired by the strategy of "Mutual Assured Destruction" during the Cold War, the suicidal stupidity angle is definitely intentional.
• Will Stanton in The Seeker. At the end of the movie, he and the other Old Ones are forced to retreat into the Great Hall, where their enemy the Rider cannot enter unless invited. Will then proceeds to throw open the doors when he hears his parents and sister calling him only to learn that it was just the Rider who — oops — is now able to enter. Evidently Will thought his completely ordinary family was able to somehow get to a mysterious place which seems to be in an alternate time/dimension.
• In Seven Samurai, an unnamed samurai challenges Seiji Miyaguchi to a practice duel with branches. In the ensuing Single-Stroke Battle, both strike true. This would result in a Mutual Kill. The unnamed samurai claims a draw, to which Seiji responds that with real steel, the other would be dead and he would have lost. The other samurai draws his sword, forcing Seiji to duel him again with real weapons. The unnamed samurai performs exactly the same movement.
  • Remember, at best, this would have resulted in a Mutual Kill.
  • But Seiji knows what he plans to do, so he casually side-steps the blow with an in-tempo counter and cuts down the moronic samurai.
  • Remember, this samurai argued that the moves used would have resulted in a mutual kill, so this idiot was entering a duel to prove that his predictable cut would lead to both of them dying.
• Shaun of the Dead:
  • Ed takes this to new levels and plays it for laughs. The characters need to get past a horde of zombies, and do so by acting like zombies to avoid drawing attention. When they are nearly to apparent safety, Ed's phone goes off... and he answers it and starts cheerfully talking on the phone, less than ten feet from dozens of zombies. Previously, he had "accidentally" crashed their first car, giving him an excuse to drive a Jaguar instead. Following after the cellphone incident, the electricity comes back on and he starts playing a pub fruit machine, which draw the attention of a zombie in the same building as them.
  • Shaun's mother should also be mentioned. What did she think would happen opening the door to a zombie?
  • Shaun himself also fits this. What exactly made the Winchester any safer than Liz's apartment? While it's got big heavy doors and a rifle on the wall and Ed knows where all the exits are (and he can smoke), they actually probably would have been safer in the apartment, because the window was above ground level (Shaun could climb up to it, but he wasn't a zombie) and you couldn't even get into the building without being buzzed in. Even if the zombies somehow got in through that door, they could have barricaded the apartment door fairly easily. But they also wouldn't have had half so much booze.
  • David standing right in front of the pub window, seconds before he gets eaten. Before this, also David, throwing a bin through the pub window to get in, failing to realise of course that the zombies will just chase them into the pub through the same hole — Shaun has to risk his life leading the horde away to give everyone else a chance to get in and board it up.
  • Frankly, the entire group lives and breathes this trope, making stupid decision after stupid decision, but Ed really is the king.
  • The entire human race falls into this at the end. After the Army restored order, someone had the baffling idea to round up the Zombies and use them as a source of cheap labour and entertainment, instead of destroying them! And if that's not bad enough, while they do take the precaution of putting restraints on them to keep them under control, they completely forget to muzzle them! Because it's not like Zombies are well known for infecting people by biting, right?
• Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th: Invoked in this slasher spoof. Everyone agrees that with the recent killings they should hide out at a safe place — but they all think it should be in the middle of nowhere, preferably the dark woods in the pouring rain, and without any adult supervision or police protection in the near vicinity. One even suggests that they should go to a deserted place that's been abandoned ever since a bunch of dorky kids were dismembered there.
• Shrooms:
  • Lisa really should have known better than to wade through the lake to escape.
  • And Tara should have known better to ingest a deathcap mushroom, just for the high she thought she'd have.
• Signs: The aliens walk around Earth naked, despite being as much vulnerable to water as we are to sulfuric acid. Really, just coming to a planet that's roughly three-fourths water probably counts. Then again the movie hints that the "Aliens" are actually demons and that that "Water" was actually Holy Water. Which would avert this trope.
• Sisters of Death: The main characters respond to anonymous invites to an isolated location (one of whom hitchhikes to get there, despite the fact that they were all sent enough money to afford transport), allow two strange men to drive them to their destination (in an SUV with all the windows covered), and when their host reveals that he wants to kill one of them (the one who arranged his daughter's death seven years earlier), they continually separate and isolate themselves. And continue to do so even after they start getting picked off. Not only that, the host doesn't worry about these murders at all, even though they ruin his plan.
• Slaughter High: GOOD GOD, ARE NEARLY ALL THE VICTIMS STUPIDER THAN STUPID! Every moment leading them up to be killed by Marty basically all but outright says they were all asking for their own deaths.
• Skyline
  • With Los Angeles full of alien monsters eating everything that moves, our heroes decide to try and escape in cars with big, growly engines and in broad daylight. Granted, their chances weren't all that good whatever they tried, but at least on foot and at night they had some small hope of evading detection. And let's not even think about the fact that their entire daylight plan was to escape by boat. From flying aliens. Yeah, that will work!
  • Also Oliver displays a serious lack of survival instinct, when he watches a nearby bombing run right until impact. If not the situation alone, the unusually large, single payload should have tipped him off that it would be a good idea to maybe dive for cover instead.
• The Sniper: The teenager prowling the rooftops with an inoperative rifle while the police are conducting a manhunt for a sniper. It is only through the restraint of the two cops who catch him that he is not shot. Unusually for a film of the time, it is made clear that the boy is suffering from psychiatric problems and Lt. Kafka, who had been on the verge of letting him go, instead has him committed to receive psychiatric help before he turns into the next sniper.
• Southern Comfort: The main characters are in the National Guard on a training mission in a swamp, miles from civilization. They see one of the inhabitants from a distance and Stuckey decides to mess with him... by pointing his rifle (loaded with blanks) at him and "opening fire." Shockingly, the locals have their own rifles, not loaded with blanks. Natural selection ensues.
• Spiderman Trilogy:
  • Spider-Man 2: Dr. Octavius decides to test his fusion machine in the middle of New York City, a city with over twenty million people. Despite his confidence, the machine goes wrong and nearly destroys the city. And this was before he went crazy.
  • Spider-Man 3: Eddie Brock tries to rebond with the symbiote despite witnessing Peter throw a bomb to destroy it. Naturally, he gets blown up.
• Starship Troopers:
  • The news correspondent and the cameraman on Klendathu are on the planet surface while the actual battle is still raging. What makes them this trope is that they actually stop during a mass retreat to get some shots of the action, and are both promptly killed for their trouble.
  • Humanity in general has shades of this. The overwhelming majority of human characters regard the Bugs as mindless animals despite obvious evidence to the contrary. For example, early on the film, Bug plasma knocks an asteroid from the Asteroid Belt into Earth and it obliterates Buenos Aires; they did this from Klendathu, thousands of light years away. Something like this surpasses anything mankind would be capable of unless they had trillions of dollars worth of supercomputer, and the Bugs are doing these calculations in their heads. But nope, Bug plasma is "random and light". Even after the assault on Klendathu turns into a horrible failure that leaves thousands of humans dead and wounded, there are more than a few people who are adamant that the Bugs can't be intelligent. To quote one "expert", "I find the idea of an intelligent bug offensive!" One wonders if the Bugs find the idea of intelligent monkeys offensive as well.
• Star Trek (2009):
  • The whole race of Romulans. Their whole sun goes supernova thus destroying Romulus in the process? Sorry, but you must be plain dumb in order to let that happen (according to Star Trek Online, they caused it by testing weapons that were banned due to this specific reason). Not only do they possess a whole star empire, which means they have more planets than just the one being threatened by the supernova, they should also have the technological possibilities to detect supernovas in time. It's not like they happen as a total surprise. It shouldn't have been a problem at all to evacuate a planet in time. And to let Spock as the only person in the goddamned empire try to prevent it because they were too busy arguing. That's beyond dumb. Maybe more so, since the ship and technology Spock uses were built on Vulcan, which means somebody had sufficient advance notice and time to prepare a response.
  • Due to his wanting to show up the rookies, Olson waits until the absolute last moment before popping his parachute. Kirk and Sulu pull their chutes at a safe distance above the platform, but Olson turns out to have waited too long, and winds up dropping right into the path of the mining laser beam, completely vaporizing him and the explosives he was carrying for destroying the drill.
  • Though they don't die, we also have the Vulcan bullies making some crude comments about his mother to Young Spock. It was clear from their reaction to Spock delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to one of them that none of them considered the possibility of their trying to "elicit an emotional response" in Spock might result in violence.
• Star Trek Into Darkness:
  • The top Starfleet brass hold an emergency meeting on top of a tower with large open windows. It's not surprising when Harrison (aka Khan) attacks them with a gunship. Especially because as Kirk noted only seconds before that happened, Harrison was a high ranking member of Starfleet himself and would thus know the protocol for the situation he created and where and when the top brass would meet.
  • Admiral Marcus, as noted by Khan himself, thought the best way to combat the Klingons was to wake up a genocidal, sociopathic super-human and then threaten his family so the guy will build weapons for Marcus. Great plan!
• Star Wars:
  • Attack of the Clones: We get to see Zam Wesell, the changeling assassin. She was trying to flee the Jedi at every opportunity, clearly had the ability to change shape and had just ducked into a crowded bar. Once the Jedi entered you'd expect her to change shape again and run at the first opportunity right? Instead she deliberately attacked them and was somehow surprised when they easily disarmed her (literally).
  • Revenge of the Sith: Darth Sidious (via hologram) congratulates the Separatists for their loyalty during the Clone Wars, which are about to end, and promises that his new apprentice, Darth Vader, will "take care of them" when he arrives at their hideout in Mustafar. After that transmission, you'd expect the Separatists would evacuate the hideout immediately since that would have translated to "killing them." But nope. They actually take his words seriously and just wait in the hideout until Vader arrives. Once he arrives there, guess what happens.
  • A New Hope:
    • You'd think Admiral Motti would have known that dissing the faith of the big scary Sith Lord and personal hatchetman of the Emperor, Darth Vader, in his face is a very, very, very bad idea. Even if he sincerely believed that The Force was a delusion of Vader's, the man is a seven foot tall cyborg armed with a laser sword, and therefore perfectly capable of dismembering Motti for his disrespect. He's lucky that Moff Tarkin is there to relieve him from what would have been a guaranteed death inflicted by The Dragon.
    • Then there's Greedo, a bounty hunter so amateurishly stupid that he doesn't get the most basic line you need to say when you are covering your quarry, "Keep your hands where I can see them."
    • Grand Moff Tarkin counts, though it is usually viewed as too arrogant to live. The Death Star carried 7000 fighters. Twelve were launched, and only because they were under the personal command of Darth Vader instead of being attached to the station. And that's after "testing" the Death Star to destroy a highly populated peaceful planet and ensuring the Rebellion will fight the Empire with nothing to lose rather than cowering like he hoped.
  • Return of the Jedi. During a high speed chase through a densely packed forest, a Stormtrooper turns around just long enough to see if his target died, and promptly crashes into a tree. Look where you're driving! Or... avoid doing a high-speed chase through a densely packed forest to begin with?
  • The Last Jedi. The New Republic has shades of this in its backstory, the consequences of which we see during the film itself. It turns out that almost completely disbanding your military makes you very easy to attack and conquer by the first faction to assemble a halfway competent army and navy in secret; who knew?
  • Both the Jedi and Sith Orders in Star Wars, which is especially made clear in the now-non-canon Expanded Universe. The Sith are a bunch of psychotic, power-hungry madmen whose backstabbing ways are almost always the reason they keep getting defeated. The Jedi are a bunch of emotionally-dead people with an obsessive desire to keep an ineffectual government from falling apart that otherwise would without them, eventually leading directly to their final downfall, and their rules toward squashing all emotion and overcautious ways have been directly responsible for the fall to the Dark Side of members of their Order and subsequent rise of many Dark Jedi and Sith Lords on a near constant basis for thousands of years. Neither organization learns much of anything from these constant mistakes despite thousands of year of opportunity, and as a result eventually both have to be destroyed down to the last man and rebuilt from scratch (multiple times) before any significant changes are made.
    • Additionally, after defeating the Jedi splinter group that would eventually become the Sith, instead of doing as the Republic wished and bringing them to trial the Jedi instead chose to exile them into the unknown regions, thinking that the exiles would come to their senses and return to the light side. Instead the exiles found the Sith species and formed their own interstellar empire which would come back to haunt the Jedi and Republic numerous times.
• State Of Grace: Frank is a Mafia boss who goes to extreme lengths to kill his own friends and relatives just to satisfy the requests of another gang, against which he fears to lose in case of a mob war. It's really no surprise that he ends up being topped by Terry, his last remaining childhood friend, with even more added irony cause Terry was actually an undercover cop and was having qualms about busting Frank and the others.
• The Stepfather:
  • The remake has the main character's mother debunking all possible theories that her fiancé is a serial killer, from an old lady seeing his face on America's Most Wanted to her ex-husband saying that their youngest son told them that said fiance throttled him to her sister telling her that the fiancé quit her company shortly after he was required to fill out certain information that might get him caught.
  • In traditional horror fashion, everyone else is just as dim. Everyone who finds evidence that the titular stepfather isn't who he says he is steadfastly refuses to notify anyone of note and putt around with the killer knowledge. Special commendation goes the supposedly Genre Savvy son who, despite being paranoid as sin, ignores several anvilicious clues that he's right. The ex-husband is also this, as he knows the stepfather throttled his son, steps into the room that he knows the killer is in, and goes in not assuming that he could be attacked. The cops at the end may also be considered this, if not 'Too Out of Shape to Live'; They fail to apprehend a man who has been stabbed, beaten, and thrown out a second story window. You could SEE THEIR LIGHTS APPROACHING while he was still sprawled out on the ground recovering.
• The three victims in The Strangers; Kristen doesn't do anything but scream, trip and cry and actually injures herself, James among other things decides to go get a radio (because they were too stupid to have their cellphones on them) leaving Kristen alone and unprotected in the house, where their attackers can breeze in with ease, and their friend has his windshield broken, sees destruction, mayhem and hears loud music playing (which to a normal person would scream DANGER) and goes blithely in. They all die.
• Lex Luthor's cronies in Superman Returns Superman is currently throwing his newly created Kryptonian island into outer space with them still on it, and the entire place is falling apart. Luther urgently tells them to get the hell out of there and don't stop to take anything so they can make it to his helicopter and escape. So what to they do? Stop to grab as much cash as they can before escaping, which slows them down long enough to be crushed by a pillar.

T

• Taken:
  • Kim and Amanda are two American teenagers who go to France by themselves to follow around a band. They take a taxi with a stranger and then tell the stranger their apartment number and that they will be alone in the apartment. No surprise, within the first 30 minutes of the movie they are kidnapped.
  • Bryan tells his daughter's assailants over the phone that if they let his daughter go, he'll leave them alone no strings attached. They don't. No prizes for guessing how that went for them.
  • Taken 2 has Murad try and kidnap the protagonist Bryan and his family while they are on vacation, in revenge of their relatives being killed by Bryan in the first film... even though his relatives kidnapping Bryan's daughter to be sold as a sex slave was what led to Bryan to find and kick all of his relatives' collective asses in the first place. As one might expect, this plan doesn't work. Towards the end of the movie, Bryan offers Murad a Last-Second Chance to walk away in exchange for leaving his family in peace. Murad blows it by going for Bryan's discarded gun... which was empty. Bryan promptly kills him.
• Team America: World Police: Hans Blix allows himself to be directed to stand over an obvious trap door by Kim Jong-il, which drops him straight into a shark tank.
• The gun shop owner in The Terminator, who trusts his customers to handle shotguns while also leaving a box of shotgun ammo and some loose shells on the counter where any customer could just take them. Not to mention he's not the least bit suspicious of the Terminator. Granted, he probably didn't know he was dealing with a killer cyborg from the future, but c'mon, if any customer asks for a large number of heavy-duty, high-powered firearms, including a phased 40-watt range plasma rifle, you probably ought to take extra precautions. As a result, the moment he looks the other way, the Terminator grabs a shell right off the counter, loads it into the SPAS-12 he was handed earlier, and shoots the guy where he stands.
  Store owner: [seeing the Terminator loading the shotgun] You can't do that.
  Terminator: Wrong. [shoots him]
• This Is the End: James Franco was about to be ascended to Heaven after defeating Danny McBride who is now a cannibal... and he decides to taunt him and his men as he is being lifted in the air. Unsurprisingly, this causes Franco to both lose his opportunity to get into Heaven and suffer his gruesome demise of being Eaten Alive by McBride and his men.
• Thunderball: What's more dumb? Embezzling from a Bad Boss like Ernst Stavro Blofeld or thinking he won't notice it? The mook who stole from Blofeld was given a High-Voltage Death during the SPECTRE board meeting, but only after Blofeld grilled another mook on why their drug-running scheme generated less-than-expected profits. The zapped guy even looked smug when he noticed his partner was about to be fired and fried to death, but was proven utterly wrong.
• Thursday: The cashier from the beginning of the movie. Telling three obviously shady people who visited your shop in the middle of the night that she's going to call the police on them because they "act strangely" (note: their strange behaviour includes that they did not have small money and that they wanted to buy a hot coffee) right to their faces is something that most reasonable adults would definitely not do.
• Tom-Yum-Goong: Given that they've watched dozens of their comrades writhe in excruciating pain, most of the mooks in this scene qualify. If only they weren't practicing Mook Chivalry.
• The Troll Hunter: Kalle concealed the fact he was a Christian from the crew and the hunter despite the hunter warning them that Trolls will go after anyone with Christian blood. It would have been justified since he didn't initially believe it to be a life or death decision when mythological creatures were involved, EXCEPT for the fact that both he and the crew had two violent encounters with trolls before finding themselves trapped in a cave filled with Mountain King Trolls that led to him getting killed.
• Trust: The central character Annie. At the age of 14, she starts chatting online with someone called Charlie whose admitted age over the course of the chats goes up from 16 to 20, then to 25, and when she meets him in person at a mall we see he has to be in his late thirties at least. And what does she do? Instead of walking away, she gets into a car with him. And then goes to a motel room with him. And models in red underwear for him, before he rapes her. Admittedly she is 14, but in this day and age if a 14 year old girl does not even think to let a friend or family member know she is going to meet up with a stranger on the internet, and then ignores the cardinal rule of not getting into a car with a stranger (which hopefully most six year olds know by now) then she is clearly headed for a nasty shock.
• Tucker & Dale vs. Evil The college students, most of whom ended up unintentionally killing themselves. Special mention to the one that jumped into a woodchipper while trying to take out Tucker.

U

• Unfriended: Most of the main characters are this, but special mention has to go to Adam, who decides it's a smart idea to threaten a ghost, that he is fully aware can force her victims to commit suicide, with a handgun. Take a wild guess how he bites the bullet.
• Unforgiven: Skinny, the owner of the saloon in Big Whiskey. He decides it would be a good idea to prop up William Munny's best friend in an open coffin outside as a warning, opts to go around his life unarmed, and then stand up to Munny when he comes asking after him, shotgun in hand.
• Urban Legends: Bloody Mary: The teens are all victims of their own stupidity. In the first two films, the victims were at least tricked or trapped by a killer that they didn't even know was running around butchering people but in the third film, all the kids were so dumb that they would have died with or without Bloody Mary's help.
• Utøya: July 22: Towards the end of the movie Kaja, who until that was quite levelheaded, suddenly leaves her hiding place and goes to the open beach. Upon coming there she discovers four dead people, who all were clearly shot just a couple minutes ago. Rather than retreating or finding a new hiding place, the proceeds to argue loudly with Magnus, while standing near the corpses, completely in the open. Predictably, she gets shot and it's a wonder that Magnus isn't killed as well. The whole scene creates an impression that the director was frantically searching for a way to kill her off.

V

• V for Vendetta: Gordon Dietrich switches out the state-approved script for his show with a new script that pokes fun at Chancellor Sutler and paints anarchist terrorist V in a positive, if humourous, light. That same night, Sutler's Fingermen goons arrive at Gordon's home, badly batter him, and drag him away. When the Fingermen sweep his home and discover he has a hidden room filled with illegal materials including a banned Quran, they execute him. Going by Gordon's comments, he believed that his popularity with the British public would protect him and the worst he would have to do is pay a fine and make a televised apology; he really didn't think the supremely bigoted, overzealous and monstrously petty totalitarian dictator would murder him over it.

W

• Warning Sign: Goddamn near everybody in the movie. Firstly we have the Biotek employees who unzip their hazmat suits inside a sealed quarantine room — where they're making a deadly Hate Plague — to pose for a photo. Then when the virus is released into the facility, the other Biotek employees apparently have no idea what a quarantine lockdown is, staring at the closing shutters and alarms in confusion and then get upset when they are locked in. They then try to argue with Joanie, the security guard who started the quarantine, to let them go because she was scaring people with the quarantine despite some of them knowing they were working on a hate plague. Then the concerned townspeople and relatives outside the quarantined building try to break their way in, despite being told the spin story that a chemical that would destroy their crops had been released inside. If not for Joanie having more common sense than everyone in the county and sticking to the quarantine protocols, Utah would have been screwed.
• Waterworld: Enola doesn't know how to swim, when 99% of the planet is covered in water. It's made very clear that she can be taught to swim and that no one ever thought that a child growing up on a planet covered by water should know how to swim.
• Weekend at Bernie's: While nobody in the movie is exactly MENSA material, Bernie Lomax opted to carry on with a Mob boss's girlfriend, knowing full well that they kill people. It goes so poorly for him that the entire plot of the movie is based on his death and the efforts of two idiots to lug his corpse around for a while.
• Beth, the main character in 2011's The Wicker Tree, the "spiritual sequel" to The Wicker Man (1973), goes crashing hard into this trope in the last 20 minutes of the film. She and her boyfriend Steve have agreed to serve as the Queen of the May and Laddie, respectively, for the May Day celebrations in the Scottish village they have been recruited to preach Christianity. On May Day, Steve is eaten alive by a mob of villagers, while Beth is left unconscious in a room of previous Queens of the May in the village's butcher shop. All of them have been killed and embalmed, and permanently displayed sitting on wicker thrones. Upon awakening, Beth discovers this, and manages to escape through a window. She runs across the one rogue villager who's tried to help her and Steve, Lolly, who tells Beth that Steve has been killed, and she needs to escape before the same happens to her. Beth refuses, and instead, catches up to the villagers on a hill, where they are about to burn a wicker tree. Beth is told of Steve's fate, and she angrily pushes the village's leader into the wicker tree, grabs a villager's torch, AND SETS THE LEADER ON FIRE! Beth forces the villagers to sing; they comply, and leave. Beth finally tries to find a way out of the village, seeking the help of a young boy named Angus. Angus leads her through the woods towards another village, but this is a trap, as the other villagers come out of nowhere and capture Beth. The film ends with the audience being shown that Beth has suffered the same fate as the previous May Queens: being killed, embalmed, and sat on a wicker throne in the same room in the butcher shop.
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: Charlie and Grandpa Joe sneak away from the tour to sample the fizzy-lifting drinks, a beverage that Wonka himself said "wasn't quite right yet," and this was after they saw Violet turn into a blueberry while chewing gum that also wasn't quite right. For that matter, all the kids after Augustus continuing to ignore Wonka's warnings and screw around with Wonka's factory thus getting themselves in horrible situations have no excuse after what had happened to him.
• Women of the Prehistoric Planet: A group of guys try to walk across a pit of acid on a small branch, and one them ends up falling in and dying. There was a path around the pit a few steps away.
• The Wrong Box: Several of the children who potentially stand to benefit from the tontine in the British ensemble comedy grow up to be too dumb to live, as shown in a montage following the opening credits. Just to name two, an army sergeant orders his men to fire a cannon, oblivious to the fact that he is standing directly in its line of fire, and a big game hunter insists on waiting for a rhinoceros to charge before opening fire, and waits so long that he is swiftly gored when it finally does start charging.

X-Y

• X-Men Film Series
  • X2: X-Men United: So, you have a school for the members of a severely hated group, and this school possesses very advanced technology. Why on earth do you not have a security system? Even if you don't do anything to stop invaders from just climbing over the wall and jumping through the windows, at least have an alarm so they don't catch half of everyone asleep!
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine:
    • The military needs to stop Wolverine, who they've made immune to almost all weapons. To stop him they have at their disposal: An incredibly skilled marksman, and adamantium bullets capable of penetrating the adamantium shell around his skull and incapacitating him. Somehow the idea that they should combine these two things doesn't seem to occur to them. Said marksman also thinks it's a good idea to take a jab at Wolverine when he has decided to let him live. After seeing the guy take down a HELICOPTER.
    • John Wraith, whose only power is teleportation and who thinks the best way to take down a big angry guy with claws and a huge healing factor is to punch him out.
• The title characters in Yossi And Jagger. One could argue that the film works best as a hour-long PSA about Why You Do Not Have Affairs Within Your Chain Of Command.

Z

• Zombieland:
  • Wichita and Little Rock ride the rides at Pacific Playland, which light up, make noise, and naturally attract lots of zombies. Many fans think they may have been deliberately suicidal, even.
  • First averted then played straight with Bill Murray: Using make-up and his acting abilities to blend in with the zombies and avoid being killed? Pretty damn friggin' smart. Pretending to be a zombie in order to scare the unsuspecting jumpy teenager WITH THE GUN? Stupidity of epic proportions, especially when he saw the reaction that he got from the survivors who weren't currently armed with firearms and then trying it again with someone who was...
  • While we're on the subject, getting high during a Zombie Apocalypse is just asking for trouble. It leads to Bill Murray's aforementioned death above.
  • There is also the whole scam the sisters play, which relies on the mark doing very specific mistakes. To whit: Wichita tells the mark that Little Rock is infected and needs to be put out her misery, but Wichita can't shoot her own sister and begs the mark to do it. The mark has misgivings about shooting a little girl, Wichita agrees to do it herself, takes the gun, and then robs the surprised mark at gunpoint. If the mark is a little more pragmatic, there's a very good chance they'll just shoot Little Rock then and there. (Columbus refused, but Tallahassee came pretty darn close to pulling the trigger.)
• Zombieland: Double Tap:
  • Madison is generally a Dumb Blonde, but she falls into this category on one occasion. Despite having a nut allergy, she is shown eating trail mix which mostly consisted of almonds. This gives her an allergic reaction in which the others mistake for a zombification. She nearly dies from anaphylaxis and getting shot by Columbus. Luckily for her, Columbus didn't have the heart to Mercy Kill her and her allergic reaction wasn't severe enough to be lethal. Wichita even asks her how she didn't notice almonds in trail mix; Madison claims she thought trail mix was vegan.
  • The Babylon community is even worse at this. They melted all the ammo the gang has, and this is during a zombie apocalypse. Not only that, but they play loud music and launch fireworks, attracting a horde of super-intelligent zombies. Even Madison is shown to be appalled by their stupidity.
• Zoolander: Derek Zoolander lost his friends in a tragic gasoline-fight accident. The only reason he survived is that in addition to recognizing that it was a very stupid decision and trying to stop his friends, he spotted his image on the front of a newspaper and went over to look at it. For extra irony, the article was about how much of an idiot Zoolander was.

---