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Cutting between the interior of a location and the cops or other armed folks seemingly encroaching upon it from the outside, only for it to be revealed that they had the wrong house. Like the raid in Silence of the Lambs, which started a whole wave of junkier imitations.

I just saw it in an episode of Millennium (a good show! mostly...) and probably 20 times in all the Law & Orders. But filmwise I'm drawing a blank on specific imitations (or predecessors). I re-watched Se7en last year but don't remember.

Copycat? Fallen? Twisted? The Bone Collector? It's gotta be in one of these things.

Doesn't this happen in Saw 2?

Wikipedia says yes. And interesting to note that in that case, the displacement is not geographical, but temporal: the interior action had taken place some time before. (I saw at least four Saws, first two theatrically, but remember nothing about any except the first one! and Donnie Wahlberg in a trenchcoat and Shawnee Smith cackling)

There are probably a few tech-y action movies with this type of sequence too.

wonder if there's one earlier. maybe fritz lang

Indeed. I don't imagine Demme and co. originated the concept, but perhaps this particular expression of it. The pace and grammar would probably preclude something with a similar feel showing up often in most prior eras except the silents. But we'll never know for most of those...

(It's kinda fun to try and picture dead directors doing it. Like Melville! [...did he ever do it?])

I couldn't picture Lang doing it -- his action is always direct, to the gut. He didn't use this in any of his silents.

Doubly tragic, then, that among Lang's lost films there is 1925's In This One I May or May Not Change It Up and Invent That Extended Location Mislead Thing That'll Be Kind of a Thing in Seventy Years. Variety Weimar called Walter Janssen's performance "boffo".

Textbook example in s2e2 of Prison Break. We cut between the Prison Breaker-Outers seeing to their storage locker stash and the cops closing in on them until, well, y'know

iconogassed wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 12, 2020 3:16 am

Textbook example in s2e2 of Prison Break. We cut between the Prison Breaker-Outers seeing to their storage locker stash and the cops closing in on them until, well, y'know

They went for it again! Well, in the sequel series. And to their credit, they throw a wrinkle or two into it. Actual human doubles of the characters factor into the deception, and there is an additional "surprise" arrival at the other location. I wonder if that is a novel spin.

iconogassed wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 09, 2020 7:56 pm

Copycat? Fallen? Twisted? The Bone Collector? It's gotta be in one of these things.

Indeed. Untraceable. Diane Lane killer thriller right along the same lines, yet also quite derivative of the Saws in its moralistic game-playing baddie. Its use of this trope is almost identical to that of Saw II, except without even the minor novelty of time displacement. Though its depiction of the internet has aged very well...