Trivia: When Skroob's ship arrives at Planet Druidia, Colonel Sandurz says the ship is preparing for metamorphosis to which Lord Helmet says "Ready, Kafka?" Franz Kafka wrote the book "The Metamorphosis."
Trivia: In the scene where Johnny and Baby practice dancing, and she keeps laughing when he runs his arm down hers, it was not part of the scene, she was actually laughing and his frustration was genuine. They left it in the movie because it was effective. Baby falling over in this scene was unplanned too.
Trivia: The boardwalk scenes were filmed on location at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California.
Trivia: Victoria Tennant hated the scene where her character was to be killed off so much that she refused to film it and walked off the set. The scene then had to be done by a stunt double.
Trivia: Mark Knopfler, who composed the music to the Princess Bride, only agreed to do so if Rob Reiner could include the baseball cap he wore in the film Spinal Tap. The director placed the cap in the boy's bedroom, beside the bed.
Trivia: This movie was originally supposed to be part of the TV series "Amazing Stories" but Steven Spielberg like the story so much that he decided to make it a full length film.
Trivia: Kevin Peter Hall, who plays the Predator, also appears as the pilot of the general's helicopter at the end of the film.
Trivia: R. Lee Ermey actually wrote all of Gunny Hartman's dialog himself. Ermey was involved in a serious car accident right before shooting, so Kubrick invited Ermey to come stay at his house in England to recover. While recovering Ermey read the script over and over, and he remarked that the Drill Instructor's dialog that was in the script was obviously the work of a screenwriter with a cliche imagination who obviously had no idea what boot camp was really like. So Kubrick allowed Ermey to re-write all of the dialog himself.
Trivia: When Danny DeVito is on the payphone in Hawaii the cab he's standing next to is from the Sunshine Cab Co. from "Taxi", where he played Louie the dispatcher.
Trivia: Mel Gibson references the Three Stooges several times in the film. In real life, Gibson is a big Stooges fan, and in 2000, he produced the biographical TV movie "The Three Stooges."
Trivia: There are two different endings to this movie. In the first one (released on video and DVD in the US), the shark (inexplicably) explodes after being rammed by the boat and sinks to the bottom in a reuse of footage from "Jaws." When the camera cuts back to the survivors floating in the water, we see that Mario Van Peebles, though badly wounded, is alive after all. In the second ending (which can be seen on American Movie Classics in the US), Mario Van Peebles does not survive his fall off of the boat; when he falls, he lands in the shark's mouth and is killed. Also, when the boat rams into the shark, it does not explode but is more "realistically" impaled, blood pouring from its mouth as it dies. After the survivors are knocked off the boat, there is a shot of ship and shark sinking to the bottom, prow of the ship stuck in the side of the shark.
Trivia: Pinhead is not named in this movie, and is simply credited as lead Cenobite.
Trivia: Andy Garcia was originally brought in to read for Frank Nitti, but he asked if he could play George Stone instead.
Trivia: Stan Winston's face was the model for the Wolfman.
Trivia: M. Emmet Walsh plays John Lithgow's father in the movie, even though in real life he's only 10 years older than Lithgow.
Trivia: During Joey's nightmare, he is seduced by a topless nurse who then captures him before turning into Freddy. As originally conceived, only her face was going to transform at first, thus having Freddy's burnt male head on top of an otherwise perfect topless female body in order to create an eerie, otherworldly look. The actress portraying the nurse even took part in some test shots and performed the scene under heavy prosthetics to make her face look exactly like Freddy's. However, the effect was cut as the crew felt it looked far too weird, and that it diminished the moment when Freddy fully appears on-camera in the scene.
Trivia: During the making of this movie Christopher Reeve and Sidney J. Furie didn't get along at all and often clashed with each other.
Trivia: The biker that gets hit by the Devil driver, then later gets to beat him up is the film's director, Samo Huny.
Trivia: When Ash is possessed of the evil presence and beats up the girl, he throws her on the couch and chuckles evilly (or hornily, same dif). He is stopped from committing further molestation by the sight of that ugly piece of jewelry that he gave to Linda earlier. When the necklace gets a closeup, the chain forms the outline of a skull.