Knife movie plots ... and creative suggestions?

not2sharp

not2sharp

Platinum Member
Joined
Jun 29, 1999
Messages
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Looking at our membership count I can see that many people find knives interesting. But, the general public is probably largely unaware that there are choice beyond what they have in their kitchen and the stuff sold at the local K-MART.

The quickest way to "educate" the public is through television and general cinema. So if someone where to walk up to you and say something like; "that's cool ... I'll like to make a movie featuring knives..." what would you suggest for a plot.

Just to make it a little more interesting we should give extra merit to anyone that manages to avoid the usual plot types (i.e. assassins, special forces at war, nijas, mercinaries, man in the back woods, youth gangs, psycho murderer, ... you get the idea).



[This message has been edited by not2sharp (edited 01-08-2000).]
 
"The Tragedie of Rufus MacBuff"
The main character, Rufus MacBuff, starts off as an impoverished janitor. One day, while scraping dung off the insides of a toilet, he discovers that some idiot left a nice custom knife at the bottom of the toilet (fell off of the pocket clip lets say when the person in question was removing his pants to get ready for his appointment with the porcelain king, it must have been one of those cramped stalls where you dont have any room, and the knife didn't flush with the rest of the crap because it was too big).
Impressed by the quality of the custom knife, he cleans his newly found treasure and begins to make good friends with it. He takes real good care of it, and gradually the knife and him start to bond. One day however, Rufus scares his sheeple boss when the pocket clip becomes visible (those darn pocket clips always are causing trouble aren't they?) and is fired from his job.
To complicate matters, when Rufus is returning from his depressing day at work, he finds the dead body of his hamster (who had escaped from his cage, no longer content with the hamster wheel that Rufus got for him on Christmas) in the street, cruelly run over by a car, and that his pet lizard had also escaped and was hit by a bus.
Rufus, a devout Catholic, collects the bodies of his hamster and lizard and proceeds to go to a local church where he asks if his hamster and lizard will go to heaven, only to be told by the pastor that "lizards and hamsters do not go to heaven".
Overcome with grief, Rufus goes back to his trashy apartment room and ties a noose to the ceiling, stands on a bucket, ties his neck to the noose, and proceeds to kick the bucket.
However, since Rufus is a schizophrenic and poor at the same time and unable to afford medication, he starts hearing strange voices as he's hanging. He hallucinates that his new best friend, the knife, is crying "no, Rufus! Don't leave me! Who will oil me and take care of me when you are gone?" and Rufus remembers that he still has a friend clipped to his right pocket. With a new found will to live, Rufus uses the knife to cut the rope that is slowly choking him to death.
This would be a happy movie, but we all know that good movies should be tearjerkers and so we have to make it sad. So, Rufus, alive and well, decides that he cannot take good enough care of his friend and thinks that its in the knife's best interest to be sold to a local store. The next day, he sells his knife and uses the money to get drunk because he is so depressed. After staggering around as a drunk for a week, he finally comes to his senses and sees if he can buy his friend back seeing as to how that was the only thing he lived for.
When the store owner informs him that his knife was sold to another person just an hour ago, Rufus runs out and searches for the person, only to find out that the person who bought his best friend is an assassin, mercenary, former special forces operative, part-time ninja, man in the backwoods, youth gangster, and a psycho murderer.
So, armed with a toilet plunger from his janitorial days, he searches for this assassin, mercenary, former special forces operative, part-time ninja, man in the backwoods, youth gangster, and psycho murderer in the backwoods. Just by chance, Rufus starts to hallucinate again, and is told the location by the knife through "psychic communication" of some sort with his knife (a good knife is always loyal even if you treat it poorly).
Rufus finds the backwoods man, and starts to believe that maybe his knife is happy, and doesn't yet confront the backwoods man. Patiently, he waits to see how his knife is doing, only to be disgusted by sight of the backwoods man beating his best friend against a metal pole and trying to use it as a prybar. Only then does Rufus confront the backwoods man (part-time ninja...etc. as well) and demands that he have his knife/friend returned to him.
The backwoods man becomes angered as Rufus has just found his secret drug production lab and attacks Rufus with his own best friend. Rufus sucks his face off with the toilet plunger, but is eventually killed by his own friend (sad isn't it), and the backwoods man eventually dies from the mortal wound. The knife so upset by the loss of Rufus, jumps into a toilet and flushes himself (don't ask me how, but thats what is going to happen) and dies slowly and painfully from rust and corrosion.
-- THE END
I probably made quite a few typo's I'll revise it later, it probably has some plot holes as well... but not2sharp, do you think this has any potential in becoming a 5-star movie? Tell me what parts are good and what needs to be altered/improved.

[This message has been edited by Comrade Chang (edited 01-08-2000).]

[This message has been edited by Comrade Chang (edited 01-08-2000).]
 
Oh yeah, who should play the roles? I think Malcom McDowell (however you spell his name) would make the perfect all-in-one-assassin-mercenary-former special forces operative-part-time ninja-man in the backwoods-youth gangster-psycho murderer.
Who should play rufus though...
 
Yes, Comrade! excellent work! I can see it now. Billy Blanks as the evil woodsman, Bob Hoskins as the our heroic janitor (anyone remember the Mario Bros. movie? Yea, that was Bob Hoskins as Mario, although Mario was actually a plumber.), and the boss can be played by...well I suppose by about 99% of the population; they wouldn't even have to be acting!!!

I'll get my Theatre IV class working on another idea with accompanying script immediately!

Howie
 
Hrmm. Excellent, tell me what progress for film and theater class makes. Oh, and please support a humble and poor student by giving me a cut of the profits you make (let's say maybe 10% or something, we can discuss this later if it works out) :P
 
You know what suprises me?? I bet every other form of art or craft has had a documentary made about it, except knife making. We should get ahold of someone at Discovery Channel or The Learning Channel and see if they would profile some of the premier makers and some new makers. Not exactly what you asked about, but it sure would open alot of morons eyes to what a hand made quality knife is. Take care! Michael

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"Always think of your fellow knife makers as partners in the search for the perfect blade, not as people trying to compete with you and your work!"



[This message has been edited by L6STEEL (edited 01-09-2000).]
 
Then there is the story of Dr. Billy Wilcox. Billy is now the later years of middle age, but during his younger days he had once been an assassin, mercenary, former special forces operative, part-time ninja, man in the backwoods, youth gangster, and psycho murderer in the backwoods. Many years ago, he retired from all the fun (maybe he realized he had grown too slow or too sick) to take up archaeology. Now a nearly forgotten and perhaps somewhat eccentric figure responsible for some of the minor exhibits at the National Museam of Antiquities; Billy spends his time documenting and classifying old tools (yes, including knives which he is particularly fond of).

Then there comes a faithful day when one of the junior lab rats drops off a plastic tray with some of the items recovered from an old dig in China. The lab crew routinely, documents, cleans, and tags items recovered from the field before passing them to the appropriate departments for further classification. There are only four small items all neatly bagged and labled in the tray. Not much compared with the amount of work most of the other departments get but more than enough considering his rather miniscule operating budget.

Two of the items are very typical of other examples that have previously turned up on the site, and a third although somewhat rare will probably prove yet another interesting piece of evidence of trade with a neighboring peoples which had then lived perhaps a hundred KM to the North West. The fourth items, however, defies classification.

The pattern is clearly of a type associated with Europe well before the First Millenium. Yet the technique used to produce it looks to be aboriginal - not European. Has Dr. Wilcox turned up evidence of a very early European expedition to China, or is a hoax. ...

You will have to wait for the rest of the story as the good doctor takes on the establishment (and walks us through a extensive amount of knife lore), to prove that European and Chinease contact had occurred 500 hundred years earlier than anyone suspected. Expect alot of heated manuvering as the world of archaeology resists yet another revolution. Has Dr. Wilcox taken on too much, is he crazy, is he right; maybe a little of both.



[This message has been edited by not2sharp (edited 01-09-2000).]
 
How about Sean Conery for the role of the eccentric Dr. Wilcox?
 
Sean Conery as a former assassin, mercenary, special forces oprative, and part-time ninja? That sounds a bit like type-casting to me.

How about Clint Eastwood?



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Chuck
Balisongs -- because it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!
http://www.4cs.net/~gollnick
 
Clint sounds good. How about Mel Gibson?

We are really hung up on the genre. Love story anyone?
smile.gif
 
Comrade,

Good plot, I can almost see in lights now. As for credibility, heck, stranger things have been done with a plunger!?!

Maybe we can get Cheech to play the janitor.
 
No, No...

I got your plot:

A primative African tribesman is wander a field in a primative part of deepest Africa when he sees a strange, large, loud bird in the air above him. Of course, we know that it's an airplane, but he's never seen one before. The plane is piloted by a a former assassin, mercenary, special forces oprative, and part-time ninja (a perfect cameo for Sean Conery).

Inside the luggage compartment, we see the former assassin, mercenary, special forces oprative, and part-time ninja's brief case with a custom Rainy Vallotton Sidewinder 2 clipped inside the side pocket. We see that compartment's outside door is supposed to be secured by two latches, but that one has come loose and the door is flapping at one corner. The plane hits a bit of a bump and the knife get's jarred out of the pocket and onto the floor. The former assassin, mercenary, special forces oprative, and part-time ninja then decided to bank sharply to avoid an incoming anti-aircraft missile and the knife slides along the floor of the compartment, over to the loose corner of the door, and then falls out of the plane.

The tribesman sees the knife fall from the sky and land just a few feet from him. He's never seen anything like it and assumes that it must be a gift from the gods. He takes it back to this tribe where they immediately find a million uses for "the thing". But, the quickly start fighting over it because it's the first thing they've ever seen that there is only one of. The tribesman then decides that the thing is evil and that he must take it to the end of the world and drop it off.

The remainder of the movie then chronicles his journey into a large city where he tries to return the knife to the gods.

Hey, plagiarism is often the way to go in Hollywood.



------------------
Chuck
Balisongs -- because it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!
http://www.4cs.net/~gollnick
 
I was thinking of inviting the Vampire Gerbil to post a suggestion. But, a plot which has all those undead rodents raiding the leatherman factory and then going out to wreck havoc will cost us the "R" rating for sure.
smile.gif
 
On a more serious note, how many would like to see a remake, hopefully more accurate, of the life of Jim Bowie? My love of knives traces directly to "The Iron Mistress" and I would love to see an effort to remake it, but more accurately. It probably won't happen, though. Jim, like most of his contemporaries, was hardly PC!

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Walk in the Light,
Hugh Fuller
 
The real Jim Bowie probably is probably no where near as interesting as the larger than life fantasy we have created over the years. By modern standards the guy was a crook who specialized in land fraud. It also looks like he really wasn't much of a knife guy (his brother was the knife guy).

It would be interesting though to document the hype surrounding Bowie's knife. This has to be one of the earliest successful mass marketing campaigns in the US.

Good suggestion though, you are right this subject has never been handled well on film.

[This message has been edited by not2sharp (edited 01-10-2000).]
 
Like Hugh, I got a lot of my knife interest from "Iron Mistress".

What I'd like to see is a knife movie where the knife is more than a weapon (or even a tool) ... where it completes the hero/heroine. Like Arthur/Excalibur, Valiant/"Singing Sword", Bowie/bowie, Redford(Roy Hobbs)/"Wonder Boy" (and, OK Comrade Chang, Rufus/friend).

Lots of the old Chinese flicks had the "special" sword concept also, but I don't ever recall seeing one about a knife (except Bowie).

Knives were useful (tho not special) in "The Edge" and "Black Stallion".
 
Yes! Cheech must play the janitor
smile.gif
.
And Billy Blanks should definately play the assassin, mercenary, former special forces operative, part-time ninja, man in the backwoods, youth gangster, and psycho murderer in the backwoods! Tae Bo is a crime against humanity...
 
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