Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Irritating movie props

My wife is watching this Sylvester Stallone movie Assasins, well I happened to look at the screen at the right moment.

The scene has a guy up in a building going to shoot Stallone with a scoped rifle. There is an ammo carrier on the side of the rifle. This ammo carrier is loaded with shotgun shells.

You would think with all the money they spend on movies they would get the props right.

Of course I did see a movie about the Gold Rush some time back. Placed in the 1849 era they were carrying 1873 Winchesters. That crap ruins movies for me.

When I started watching movies/Tv on my computer, I started saving a few things when I thought of it and had the time.

The Horse Soldiers... SAA's (probably Great Westerns) with fake loading rods welded to them to make them look sort of like cap and ball guns.




Last week watching Narcos... he's got a bent suppressor and only one scope ring! (other angles show it's an airsoft rifle)



A shot from LOST. That front sight will make it hard to hit with.



The X-Files... okay, forgetting for a second the question of what he's doing to her to make her make that face.... he disarms Scully and we see she only carries one round in her magazine.



The other thing I've noticed, maybe it's intentional, a lot of prop guns don't have sights on them.

Stuff like that happens all the time. Movies and TV shows aren't shot in chronological order. The close up of the gun could have been shot weeks or months from when the wide angle shot was done. Different prop guy working that day. Not anything new, in fact they are doing a better job than years ago.

On a lot of the TV series the actors always wore the same clothes for a reason. Bonanza is a good example. This way they could always recycle scenes filmed for one show and use them again in a later show.

In one of the Bourne movies he is pointing a Sig at someone when the scene cuts away for a few seconds, it is a Glock when they come back.

That Ive seen few times, the worst being the awful "Pure luck" where an auto (Beretta 92 maybe? ,heck it was 1991 when I saw it) changes to a S&W revolver and back, depending on the camera shot.

I love it when a chick strokes the fore end of an AR-15 and you hear the sound of a shotgun racking a round.

I have a hard time watching John Wayne in The Comancheros. They are all carrying Winchesters and Colt SAA's yet the movie is supposed to be set in 1843.....

I remember a Barnaby Jones episode where the plot revolved around hand loader ammo for the perp's rifle. When the camera zoomed in on the perp's loading room, there was a MEC shotshell loader. Boom, case closed we have the evidence.

Those fall into the "Anything John Wayne used was OK" category.

Worst firearm idea ever was the Mare's Leg Winchester 92 Steve McQueen used in Wanted Dead or Alive.

Someone must have never had to depend on a firearm to survive a situation to have thought that one up....

Of course it's well known The Rifleman's, Chuck Connors, big loop Winchester wasn't yet invented. But he shot a hell of a lot of folks with it anyway didn't he?

Follow up: Val Kilmer and crew on Toombstone apparently had twenty round magazines in their single actions at the OK Corral. Look for it...

In the Vietnam War movie "Rain" one soldier is armed with a Hi-Point 9MM carbine.

And the ammo in the belt loops couldn't fit the rifle. Looked like he was carrying .45-70 ammo for the little .44-40.

Especially since he carried ammo for a different caliber weapon on his belt.

I always hate the empty holes on revolvers. Some movies I just like to look at ALL the old stuff, not just guns, some I can remember, some I just know about, and some I wonder about. I still like to look at the gun rack on Mayberry to see what is in it.

This is where the public gets their education; sparking bullets, auto pistols that sound like belt fed and carry that many.

I have seen a few movies where they actually had the proper guns, proper loading sequence for a muzzleloader, but even "History" channel has a guy priming a flintlock before loading a new ball.

Not an irritating prop, but here's one that I'm sure escapes a lot of people.

In the famous Dirty Harry opening shootout, Harry does his "how many shots did I fire" routine. When the robber "gots to know" if Harry had a round left, Harry points the gun at him and thumbcocks the hammer, and when he pulls the trigger on the cocked gun the cylinder rotates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I530sPVQSc8

I've seen more than one Indian riding a shod horse.

Along those same lines, count [b][color:#3333FF]how many shots[/color][/b] Costner gets off in the next 25 seconds..





This cobbled together 2x4 monstrosity always makes me laugh, what is that like 6" between the bore and the line of sight?



I always found this shot in the final scene from th Good,Bad, and the Ugly interesting..





Ha, I never noticed that before...

You gentlemen just do not realize. All our western hero were armed with custom Colts made expressly for the movie industry. They're made to shoot 222 time before they have to be reloaded. This was insisted upon by the prop gun reloaders union.
Paul B.

"I have seen a few movies where they actually had the proper guns, proper loading sequence for a muzzleloader, but even "History" channel has a guy priming a flintlock before loading a new ball."

kenny, that may not be an error. Muskets like the Brown Bess used a "cartridge" in which the ball and powder were wrapped in a combustible paper tube. The loading procedure was to tear off the rear of the paper with your teeth*, then dump a small amount of the powder into the pan before shoving the rest of the powder, paper, and ball into the barrel. They didn't carry separate priming powder.

* This bit of trivia is why a full set of teeth was an enlistment requirement for British soldiers.