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Ever been watching a movie, probably a bad one, and you're like, okay, this is just barely good enough to keep me from changing the channel.  Then along comes some scene and it's "Oh good grief, enough of this."?

One I remember is Warbirds, a Sci-Fi Channel original.  We've got a Women's Airforce Service Pilots crew ferrying a bomber to an island in the Pacific.  Seeing as the writer was uncreative and obvious, this is of course the plane carrying the atomic bomb.  When our female lead finds out about the A-bomb, she freaks.  "Thousands could be killed!"  she exclaims.  Something like 300,000 Germans had been killed by Allied bombing raids up to this point in the war, but I guess that never occurred to her.  People dying is only bad if it's done with a nuke apparently.  That was just enough for me, sticking some 2008 political correctness into a movie that's supposedly taking place in 1945.  Goodbye, channel change time.

What are your picks?

The first scenes that come to mind are not ones that caused me to leave in the middle of the movie, but only because they came at the end. What really ruins a movie for me is when scenes are awkwardly included to keep an otherwise watchable movie within the boundaries of Hollywood convention.

The ending of AI: Artificial Intelligence that just feels like a happier ending was tacked on. Happier for the robot anyway; humanity seems to be dead and gone. It's been argued on here before, but I still think ending under the water would have been far more poignant, and kept the movie to a better length. If it had been made in the 70s, it would have ended there.

Same problem with Pearl Harbor. Really, that movie was ruined by all the scenes that had nothing to do with the bombing of Pearl Harbour (crappy love triangle), but that's beside the point. The real killer there was tacking the entire Doolittle raid onto this already-too-long movie so it could finish with the USA fighting back. We know they won the war, leave it at that. Tora! Tora! Tora! did it better by just having Mako suggest at the end that the sneak attack was probably not the best idea. As if adding a whole other story wasn't bad enough, they fixed the love triangle by killing off one of the guys, leaving his buddy to get the girl and raise his son. Seriously, that's a win-win situation? It seems to be presented that way. Didn't care for the movie as a whole, but the ending put me firmly in the "hated it" category.

It was the first death scene in Frogs, with Michael somehow dieing at the spider's hands for some unknown reason.  From that point on, I knew this movie was really going to suck.

Also,  in Mortal Kombat 2 with Raiden trying to explain Shao Khan's plans to everyone.  I got lost, didn't understand what was going on, and it took me out of whatever enjoyment could have been salvaged from the movie.

Any scene with the Batmobile in Batman Begins.  Every element of that movie sucked plenty hard but I hated, hated, hated the Batmobile most of all.  (When it got blown up in TDK, I stood up in the theater and cheered.)

The scene in the 2005 King Kong when Hayes tries to take Jimmy's rifle and GOES ON A LITTLE SPIEL ABOUT GUN SAFETY.  A f**king GUN SAFETY message in King Kong!  If I hadn't ridden with someone to the theater, I definitely would have walked out and gone home at that point.

When the samurai hordes showed up in The People that Time Forgot.  It had just been a standard-issue crappy movie up to then but that just took me out of it completely.

The endless scene of the fly crawling around on Jack Elam's face in Once Upon a Time in the West.  It made me long for the taught pacing and thrilling action of, say, 2001.

You just described every Sci-Fi original movie ever made.   :wink:

Actually I started to watch their most recent mini-series, something of Bloodsteel, and I think I bailed on that barely 40 minutes into it.  But that was a combination of the lead actor's (the guy from J.A.G.) accent coming and going and just plain derivitive awfulness.

But the gold star of movie ruining scenes has to go to the opening scene from Black Candles (http://sites.google.com/site/miseenscenecrypt/reviews/black-candles-1982) (possibly NSFW) was pretty jarring, mostly because it's so poorly edited followed by the first dream sequence.  The movie only got worse from there.  I suppose you could argue that when a movie starts this bad you only have yourself to blame for keeping watching such a train wreck.  And then there was the goat.  :buggedout:

However the movie that really got irksome was Alexander (http://sites.google.com/site/miseenscenecrypt/articles/alexander--a-pointless-rant).  Still haven't watched that all the way through to the end.  And I have TWO versions of it on DVD!

And, if I'm going to rip on Alexander, I have to mention that 300, despite being based on a graphic novel, was epic level bad.  Every criticism that's leveled at this movie gets countered by it's fans with "but it's based on a graphic novel", especially where complaints about it's total lack of hisoricity are concerned.  I'll leave it at that.

I also agree with akiratubo that the "samurai hordes" from The People that Time Forgot seemed totally out of place.

In AVP when the guy says Arnies "You UGLY S.O.B." , , at that point I knew the film had nothing in it but the momentum set by the two movies it took from.

Snakes on a Plane: When the chick gets bit on the boob and the guy gets bit on the weemer. Was that part written by 6th grade boys?

Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny: The part where the idiot is stoned on mushrooms and they glorify him doing something that in the real world would result in him dying 10x over. God I hate stoner movies.

The tripout sequence in Redneck Zombies which just goes on-and-on and is made with crappy in-camera effects...  I think if I hadn't been watching it with a friend, I would have turned it off. 

The death of Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

He gets flipped over the rail into a trash compactor.


....Without a fight scene.....

LAME!                                     :hatred:

Don't forget his second death in Turtles 2!  That was even lamer!

Umm ... the four turtles had been fighting Shredder for several minutes by that point.

The ending of Identity..
Why did the whole movie have to take place in the psychos head!
I loved the movie and then this travesty takes place.

That movie has the ONLY boob scene I avoid. The one where the idiots are watching porn. It's just weird and nasty. .

There are days where I could marry you  :teddyr: :thumbup:

I was loving the Matrix right until Trinity wakes Neo up with a kiss.  Probably one of the top 5 scenes I call "bullsh*t" on with feverish hatred.

Star Wars, Episode 1 - The minute Jar Jar arrived.
Star Wars, Episode 2 - The minute Anakin and Padme head to Naboo.
Star Wars, Episode 3 - The minute Anakin and Padme had any dialog.
Star Wars, Episode 6 - The minute the Ewoks arrived. 

Theres more, I just have to brainstorm. 
That film lost me when they killed Johnny Cage...or perhaps I when I noticed 3 of the 4 main players didn't come back for the sequel. 

The prison love scene in Edmond...really, my eyes are still burning....

 :bluesad:

I just came up with some more and most of them are from my Video Game Review Month.

With DOA: Dead or Alive, when Max had to figure out a Slider puzzle in order to break into a vault, it kind of ruined the mood for me.

With Pokemon: The First Movie, it when the Pokemon start cry and somehow that turns Ash back to normal.  It bugged me.  That and the unplesant nature of the film in general.

Then there was Street Fighter where the final fight scenes were very poorly edited.

Moral Kombat 2 I already explained, but I might as well throw out the part with the horrible CGI fight between Khan and Liu when they go all monster.  It was just terrible.

When the aliens appear in EXPLORERS. I was really enjoying that one up until then. Very disappointing reveal.

When I noticed that 75% of the main characters from the previous film were replaced, it was lost to me as well.

Oh man. I'd forgotten about that one. The movie goes along nicely as a childish fantasy that takes itself somewhat seriously and isn't that hard to swallow, then suddenly turns to outright cartoon silliness at the climax. Dumb. I liked the movie in general, but that part just blew it.

Reminded me of Contact. Long, fairly dry movie with some interesting ideas and a few cool moments. Started out well, then gradually ran out of steam. I watched it plod along in good faith, expecting some kind of payoff in the end. What happens? Sweet diddly. The alien appears as her father and answers none of her questions, she returns home empty-handed. Nice little message about faith, but not worth sitting through two and a half hours of pretentious BS.

Actually, I'm not sure what the aim of this thread is. Is it about otherwise-good movies that are ruined by a single scene, or about one scene being the last straw in an otherwise mediocre movie? Two different things, I think.

I kind of started it to be about bad movies that are tolerable up until a certain scene that completely ruins it and makes you regret being so patient with it up until that point.  But, pretty much any movie that has a "Okay, that's it.  I'm outta here." scene is fine  :teddyr:

The Lost World: Jurrasic Park
When the T-Rex breaks loose in a city, I saw that the script writers had stopped reading the source material and jsut finished the rest by watching Carnasaur. I was in the theater when I saw this and walked out asking for a refund.

For me the film went south when JCVD said something like "I have something for Bison" and gave the f-you arm symbol on the newscast.   Then again, I think they lost me when they said Shadowloo was a city.   :question: 

Oh yes, that movie was a huge disappointment. I read the book, and was actually looking forward to it. Besides skipping over most of the intelligent stuff, and making up their own bits, the writers also kept recycling scenes from the first novel that didn't get used in Jurassic Park. It's one thing to cut material to fit a movie format, but to make room for scenes from an entirely different book? Hard for me to say what the defining "OK, this is crap" moment was for me, since I was asking WTF? for most of the movie.

For me its the moment Anakin arrived.


The moment when they were talking about the first kiss? She was 16 and he was 8?


Fighting on a pool of lava... Boring!


Me too!!!

If Jar Jar didn't get me, "Little Annie" would have.  He kind of fired the last shot on a semi-destroyed vessel of a plot.


I have to say the train almost went off the tracks for me when he said, "You too have grown, only you have grown more beautiful..."  I was willing to forgive a lot until they got on that train for Naboo then forget it.  George Lucas can't write dialog, he just can't.   :hatred:

You know that movie where Harvey Keitel is naked and waddling around like a baby?

No?

Well if you ever catch it on cable while surfing through channels I guarantee- once your eye sight returns and your stomache stops dry heaving- that scene will ruin ever wanting to watch that movie.

Just thinking about it. .

(http://www.overthegardengate.net/forums/chat/images/puke.gif)

I didn't lose it then.  What got me was every scene on Corusant.  Very boring.


That got me there, along with every scene on Naboo, and when Anakin went to find his mother.


I got taken out of the movie more when I saw Anakin kill those kids with his lightsaber.


I didn't get lost there.  Heck, nothing from that movie really got me lost.

In a matter of fact, none of the things I said really ruined the movie for me, they just brought the fun or excitement value down to zero before it shot back up for the action scenes.

Since I'm here anyways, I might as well bring up another one.  Any of you have moments from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?  There are tons of moments that stopped my enjoyment in the movie for a while.  The biggest one I can think of came when I saw the kid swinging in the trees with the monkeys and everything.  Luckily, the scene with the ants brought me some enjoyment again after that horrorific sight.

You know, funny you mention this movie.  I got it in the other day and found even after the first scene in the warehouse, I wasn't feeling it.   Yes it was a well shot movie here and there but Harrison Ford, IMHO, has devolved as an actor the past ten years.  Where at one point he could make Indy a fascinating character with simple mannerisms and expressions, I simply couldn't buy into him in this film.  Hell, I couldn't even suspend disbelief for the stuntmen.  As for monkeys and furry animals...Lucas is to thank for that BS. 

I havent seen Crystal Skull yet. From what I'd been hearing Indy seems too old and the cold war story is 20 years too late for it to be fun. I also think I need to be in the mood to suspend reality for it to work.


When Anakin went back to find his mother, I was thinking why is Anakin's mother still a slave? And then I was thinking Anakin saved everybody's ass in ep1 and his mother is still a slave? And if you follow Queen Padmé Amidala character in the first movie you would then realize that she wouldnt feel comfortable knowing that Anakins mother is still a slave after all Anakin did save her PLANET.

The only shocking idea that I could assume that would make sense is Amidala is the dark side designed to find and seduce the chosen one. It would be the second most shocking sceen since Empire Stikes Back and I really thought this is how the 2 stories are made... sadly i didnt happen that way... :(

But I guess I have a better imagination then Lukas...

The ending of The Mist :thumbdown:

That would have been sooooooooooo much better than what was in the movie.   :teddyr: 

In Transformers; the very first scene that ran like a commercial-- I think it was for the Camaro, but the Mountain Dew Bot really ruined it for me, it was so far from redemption.

The Wizard of Gore when we find out the whole movie was "All an illusion" -- what a cop-out!

 

Especially after throwing in all sorts of random nonsensical stuff we naturally assumed was going to get explained. Sure, steal the bodies and carry them into the mysterious building. It doesn't matter why, because it's all an illusion. Still, a cheesy ending suits a cheesy movie.

I don't know at what point I decided I hated that movie, but I know that when it was close to the end, I said aloud to myself, "What the hell is this?"  I am completely baffled as to why people love that horrible movie.

It had potential to be cheesy but with a decent story-line/ concept.


Not to mention how the lead characters voice kept breaking-- how could the directors not catch that one? I also loved how the chick he was after looked almost 30, when he was 15-16. What a piece of crap that was.

He's devolved as a symbol of manliness as well.  First he's getting an earring then he has his chest waxed to protest global deforestation (I am NOT making that up.)

Oh, Ford, what happened to you?

And what's REALLY crazy is how if you point this out on a Star Wars chat board, you'll get people rabidly DEFENDING the film, and "explaining" away all the plot holes and the gaping leaps of logic.

For me it was Shia Lebouf's arrival. 

I was enjoying Superbad until the two cops arrived.
I simply could not suspend my disbelief that those two cops would act the way they did in that movie.
Drinking on the job?  Yeah, right.
Driving the police cruiser and shining their flashlights on each other like a couple of dumb kids.  Don't think so.
Shooting at stop signs and then letting McLovin give it a try.  No way!

The inclusion of those cops in that film just smacked of bad writing on the screenwriter's part and totally ruined what could have been a great movie.

I think the fact that police officers wouldn't act like that in real life is why I found them to be quite funny.  Though the movie was good but not as good as others make it out to be.

I watched bits of THE BIRDS again last night for the umpteenth time and noticed a couple of moments, that while not ruining the film for me, certainly took me out of 'the moment'. One I only just last night noticed how awkward it was and the other had bugged me for years.

The first odd moment comes during the classroom scene where Suzanne Pleshette spots the gathering crows and announces to her class they are going to have a fire drill and leave school and they are to run home. As she announces this the kids ask in unison "FIRE DRILL?" "LEAVE SCHOOL?" "RUN HOME?".   :lookingup:

The second bit has bugged me for years: it's during the seagull attack on the town when 'Tippi' Hedren watches the progress of the fire along the trail of gasoline to the gaspump. There are three cuts to Hedren, each with a different expression of concern/shock on her face. I think it's supposed to be something of a 'Hitchcock Moment' but it comes off really artificially and laughable.

Still - I do love THE BIRDS. It was my grandmother's favorite movie!

 :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

Think maybe you just haven't known enough police officers...  Especially the former.  Just a little while ago ago, one of the local city cops here finally got fired after they found him drunk and passed out in his patrol car.  I might add this was far from the first time either.

 
You know I love Star Wars as much as the next guy, saw the original 9 times that first year, my youth revolved around the original trilogy yadda...yadda... but there is just something about these last three movies that gets under my skin. I don't mind all the convoluted political machinations, and huge sprawling cities because face it in the original trilogy all we saw of the universe was the boonies, but there was just some details I couldn't overlook. The unequivocal damage done by Jar-Jar, and the stupid introduction of midiclorians do not need to be expanded on any further by me.

I 'get' that George Lucas has a fascination with retro sci-fi stuff, but the anachronism of the robots saying 'roger roger' all the time annoyed me. That half the time the heroes got out of a jam due to some accidental goofs by R2-D2, C-3PO. or Jar-Jar was plain awful, and the thing about Anakin's mother still being a slave all that time was preposterous, Amidala could have loaned him the cash to get her out of hock.

I thought at the end of the third one that Anakin ironically did indeed fufill his purpose as the chosen one, the Jedi had become too powerful and complacent, by helping to destroy them he was bringing about this balance to the Force, evening the playing field if you will. No, that is not the case as explained by many a fanboy. The Dark Side is considered an aberration of the Force, and Anakin did not bring about the true balance until he killed the Emperor at the end of Jedi ending the Sith. This explanation does make sense, but it smacks of some moral grandstanding on Lucas' part regarding his creatons.

I watched Star Wars: A New Hope last week for the first time in a decade, and it occurred to me that it is not a movie that George Lucas would have made now. There is something distinctly '70s about his style then, and any attempts to replicate that with all his greenscreen acting would have come off as well Episode 1  :bluesad:

Yeah, it has to do with the direction of the performance, the clear weight of the film (back when most of the sets were real), the much lower budget nature of the production, and just differing standards.  Lucas is one of a number of directors who changed as time went by - and not for the better.  He also could not make American Graffiti (a period piece, even when he made it over 35 years ago) now either, at least not nearly as well. 

I don't know where it happened, but I can give a list of moments in Raggedy Ann and Andy that made me go crazy either way and took me completely out of the movie.
Moments include:
+ Anytime the twin brown dolls appeared
+ The Camel's weird mindtrips in which I think he sees toy camel heaven
+ Every single moment with Greedy
+ The appearance of Sir Leonard Looney and everytime he talks
+ The entrance trip into Looney Land
+ The appearance of the laughing Jack-In-A-Boxes
+ The fact when King Koo Koo laughes, something on him gets bigger
+ The pie fight
+ And when King Koo Koo says, "Ready... Aim... TICKLE!"

These moments really took me out of the movie and made me feel insane.

For me, it was the scene where Shia was trying to get the glasses and the autobots where outside his house just walking around. NOBODY NOTICES THEM! Come to think of it, there where a few other scenes like that.  Why was it so hard to miss the giant robots?

That's the scene that that let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I was watching a kiddy movie.

A lot of people have really turned on Transformers, I've noticed.  I'm no big fan of Michael Bay, but I'm still able to forget about the "dumb" things in this movie, and enjoy it just for what it is.  If that makes me some kind of brainless moron, then so be it.   :teddyr:

As for George Lucas, the guy's completely lost in his technology.  When he created the original trilogy, he at least had some elements of his storytelling ability left.  Plus, he had Irvin Kirshner and Richard Marquand to take over on directing in two of the movies, and fix the dialogue when it needed fixing.  That's something that hurt big time when George refused to give up the directing reins on the prequels.

Plus, I knew from day one that Lucas should have never made Episodes 1-3, for this simple reason...PREQUELS NEVER WORK!  When I know what's ultimately going to happen to a character in the future, it really takes away a lot of the drama for me.  This is also why I'm hesitant to see Wolverine, and Terminator: Salvation.

There are a lot of movies that I enjoy that have individual scenes that I think take away from the movie.

Midnight Meat Train - Loved the movie, but didn't like actually seeing the monsters.  If only the ending left a little more to the imagination.

28 Days Later - That obnoxious freeze-frame as they hit the gate during the big escape at the end.  Again, I loved this movie... I just wish I could excise the "crash" and the freeze frame. 

Troma's War - Senior Sida and the AIDS Brigade... poor taste even for a Troma movie, especially the rape scene.  I like the rest of Troma's War (as stupid as it is).  If not for this bit, I think it would be my favorite Lloyd Kaufman movie.

Come to think of it, a lot of rape scenes.  The rape scene in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed was just plain out of character, and did nothing to advance the plot.

The ending of Signs

The whole water melts the aliens was just stupid.  And I think it helped pigeon-hole M.Night (I'm not even going to bother trying to spell his last name) into making movies with twists at the end. 

Personally, I might have ended the movie where Phoniex comes out of the basement and tells everyone they could come upstairs.  I know it might have been a bit of a cop out-but then it would leave the audience wondering just what the world was like now after the alien invasion.

Gamera 3 Revenge of Iris  where it was revealed that Gyaos was responsible for the one girl's parents death instead of Gamera like she believed.  I mentioned this in another thread but I thought it weakened the story.   

April Fool's Day- The ending...

Jeepers Creepers- The whole kung-fu-over-the-car scene.  It just felt so silly and out of place.

Spider-Man 3- The dance scene. Again, out of place.

The Outing- Actually seeing the djinn.

Balls of Fury- Just before the protagonist goes to face The Dragon, and everyone's all "we have faith in you," when they were just bashing him a scene ago.  There didn't seem to be any build to them having faith in him; one minute they hate his guts, next minute he's their only hope.  Lame...

Star Wars Episode 2- The completely unbelievable "I love you" sequence.  I didn't buy it for a minute.

R-Point- The long, boring middle that consisted of different shots of the soldiers looking around and saying things here and there.  Nearly put me to sleep.

Ultraviolet- The graveyard fight scene when the guy says, "Are you serious?" in the most over-expressed voice I've ever heard.  I turned the movie off after that, and gave it to a friend who actually enjoyed it.

Night Train to Terror- Any scene with the band. 

Killing Birds- The out of place 80's montage. 

Visiting Hours is a pretty good movie, and I do like it by the way, but there was one scene that told me “okay, this isn’t gonna be that good” and IT WASN’T when Michael Ironside showed up at the hospital dressed up like a member Creamy Hank’s Gay Leather Patrol. It was the scene where Ironside gets his knife stolen by the final girl.

If there’s one thing a slasher shouldn’t do, it would be that.

Another was the Mist. When the guy ties a rope around his torso to go outside and tells Ms. Carnby or whatever the heck her name is about believing in God, but not believing in the same tyrannical way she does. I KNEW he’d be killed and that set up the whole moral tone of the movie, which p**sed me off to no end.

Very few movies get to me like that, but this one did AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY.

There is no such thing  :wink:
Any 80's montage is a great montage.

Chuck Norris' movie Code of Silence. I was so excited when it filmed here in Chicago years ago, because Chuck was coming to my town. They seemed to want to make a gritty, somewhat authentic crime drama like the type common in the 70's. Chuck's fighting prowess was dialed down, it was shot in Chicago and many of the actors were actual Chicago cops, or retired cops. I thought for sure Chuck was going to make a real crime movie and not a martial arts slaughter fest, although I love those too.
   Then they brought in the robot. A robot! :hatred: WTF! Could you imagine a robot in Serpico or The French Connection or even Fuzz? What happened? Was it some knuckle-headed studio executive who thought a robot was needed to drive ticket sales! Damn, every time that robot is on the screen it's like a dagger thru my heart.

I would have to say any scenes without the band and their painfully catchy song.
"Everybody's got something to do, Everybody but you!"

You know, I really liked The Frighteners, but I just freaking HATED that part right after the bad guys get their punishment and we turn to whatshisname (70s Black Dude), who just has to ruin it with one of the lamest dialog deliveries ever.

And for that matter, where's the Judge?  Wouldn't he be in heaven as well?

Beware! The Blob: The scene where the Blob kills and eats the little kitten.  That was cruel and mean.  That kitten was so cute.

Actually, you get the answer to that in the special edition... Apparently in deleted scenes Judge "survives" getting sliced, momentarily saves Frank in the graveyard, and at the end decides to travel the globe with his ghost dog (Another extended-edition exclusive, if I remember correctly).

Terminator 3

"Talk to the hand"

Yeah, that's it.   :thumbdown:

Spider Man 3- The whole movie. It hurt me.

I gotta agree. There is a substance that melts their skin, so they go to a planet where 2/3 of the surface is covered in it, as well as it regularly falling out of the sky, not to mention an atmosphere with giant clouds of it virtually everywhere. Those guys just weren't that bright, were they?

Reminds me of a theory that the Martians from War of the Worlds were actually the homicidal moronic rejects of Mars exiled from the planet, not the head of a true invasion force.

The ending of "A Boy and His Dog". Took only 2 lines to ruin the movie for me.

I found Signs to be one of the most idiotic film endeavors I've ever been through.  I keep promising myself that I have to write a scathing review of it but just can't get up the will power to watch it again.  For me, the movie was over when they first showed the aliens on the newscast.  The image just reminded me too much of the famous Bigfoot footage.
(http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u194/bigbadbenji/signs.gif)

I only watched 10 minutes of it and came to the exact same conclusion  :teddyr:

Really?  That MAKES the movie some people, myself included.  I found the ending supremely satisfying.  Just a little surprising that it ruined it for you.

I agree, the ending put it over the top for me.  Even though I saw it coming, I thought it the movie could end in no other way and I was happy they had the courage to do it.  But to each his own.

That scene is one of the few scenes that worked for me'. I always felt that when/if that thing happens for real, it won't be a perfectly lit/focused shot with an entity cheesing up to the camera, it'll be caught by an amateur under less than ideal conditions.

Yep, I seem to be in the minority on this one, but that's how I felt.

I liked Signs the first time I saw it, other than the water-melting.  They deside to attack PA in summer where the humitiy is like 90%?  How did they even get out of their craft?  Had the characters said something about it being an over abundance of some mineral in the water (that Beau could taste and no one else could and said she should be able to either), that would have made some sense.  But how do aliens keep slaves that need large quantities of water daily?  They'd be giving the humans the very thing they need to revolt!

But, once you start examining everything, none of it makes sense.  If this is some intergalactic invasion by "intelligent" life forms, surely they have the discipline and the smarts to not be walking around where they can be seen.  I loved the corn field chase where you see the alien's leg and the alien walking out on camera the first time I saw it...but then I thought, "what superior invading force would let themselves be seen?"

Oops, we forgot to turn on the cloaking device before coming into earth's atmosphere - better switch that on now and hope there aren't any flying things that might run into our craft.

Aliens so strong they can outrun decently athletic men and jump onto farmhouse roofs, but they can't break a pantry door?  Given a few good shoulder rushes, I'd have been out of the pantry in a couple minutes.  Too close to really shoulder rush it?  The get your back against the wall and leg press it/kick it.  Those things are generally hollow and common household hinges/door locks aren't meant to withstand much force!

And the cellar door?  The aliens fly across space on a raiding mission and bring nothing that can break through an old wooden door help closed with a pickaxe?  They could have gone to Mel Gibson's barn and gotten an ax - he's a farmer: he's got at least one ax in a woodshed somewhere!

Like I said - enjoyed it the first time.  Upon any analysis, the whole thing becomes laughable.

Here's my outlook on it: People assume that some UNKNOWN forces, from an UNKNOWN place, with UNKNOWN intentions, would do things exactly how WE would do them, therefor the flaw; applying the "why didn't they" to their methods. This kind of movie is made for the "maybe they. .. " that comes right after the "why didn't they". People assume the aliens seen are the invading race, , I really don't think so, I think they are the WEAPON used by the invading party. There's a big difference between jumping high, running fast, and being able to break down a door. The aliens look fragile to me, take a look at Olympic runners and high-jumpers, and tell me they're built in a way that leads you to believe they can knock down doors. Speed and jumping ability does not automatically mean strength. It doesn't take much thought to see the many paths around the "can fly a spacecraft but can't operate a doorknob". Personally, I think the intentions are that what we see are drones, designed or intended to kill people/do whatever, then die off shortly thereafter. They obviously aren't intelligent enough to fly a spacecraft, and they have a means for suppressing humans without the need for that much brute force. We never saw the alien try brute force on the door and fail, I think it just wasn't intelligent enough to know what to do there, which supports the idea they are drones. Also, in regards to the cloaking device: the word 'malfunction' comes to mind, simply as I see it.

Don't get me wrong, the movie generally sucks, but there's plenty of room to dally around without hopelessly falling through the plot holes.

You sir have brought up more great points about M. Knight Smamalamadingdong's cinematic travesty.   One other thing I'd like to add.  A seven foot alien needs to gas people to hurt them.  M. Knight has become a parody on to himself. 

I think was the repeated usage of the same shark attack or when the sharks flee scenes over and over again that ruined Shark Swarm for me.

Your drone aspect does add a certain layer to the idea; that the alien race would send stupid drones down does make sense, and even hits Darksider's point about the gas.  The drones might not be designed to be strong enough to subdue humans without the gas.  Of course, for durability, that alien took a few good hits from that bat, and when you have someone known for being a homerun hitter, one good swing would take out most people.

But running (fast sprints as the alien did around the house) and jumping are both explosive force leg work, rather then marathon running.  Most sprinters/jumpers have pretty large quads particular in comparison to their size (which is kept lighter).  I would think anyone who is six feet tall and can jump onto a house roof would be able to take out a pantry door.  You are right; they may not have the bulk to batter it down, but they should have the leg strength to kick in a door.

So I guess it really must come down to: the smart aliens sent the already conqured, water-toxic, stupid, gassy aliens.  At least there is a way for it to make sense!