Total Recall (1990) - 34 mistakes

Revealing: Doug has the hologram when inside the alien nuclear reactor, and a bunch of bad guys encircle the holographic image and fire at it at point blank with automatic weapons, and not one bad guy gets hit. If they encircled the 3D image, at least a few bad guys would have been hit by their own men.

Revealing: When Arnie uses the dead body as a human shield, watch the corpse's mouth - he grimaces every time he gets hit (the squibs hurt).

Continuity: When Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rachel Ticotin are being attacked by the giant drilling machine, Arnie grabs a pneumatic drill and cuts the main oil line of the machine, getting the left side of his face and his shirt doused in oil. Yet throughout the remainder of the film, there is no oil on Arnie's face or shirt.

Continuity: When Arnie is taking off his woman's head he presses a switch by the ear and the ear comes out. The device reaches right inside the fake head and there would be no room for Arnie's real head.

Continuity: Soon after the woman costume malfunctions, you can see the blue screen through the windows, which in the next shot is coloured orange.

Continuity: In the escalator scene when Arnie uses a corpse as a shield, there's a close-up of Arnie's gun firing, and we can see there's blood on the side of the corpse's head. However, in the wider shots there isn't.

Continuity: A few minutes before Quaid kills his "wife", there's a shot of her with bright pink lipstick. Immediately before he shoots her, her lipstick is burgundy.

Continuity: When Arnie is giving his info about what his Mars woman should be like, there are two things to look at on the screen in front of him: The screen zooms in on the woman's face, cuts back to Arnie, cuts back to the screen when it zooms in on the face again. Also, look at the sequence when he's selecting her personality: "demure" is lit up before he mentions it.

Revealing: In the scene where Sharon Stone attacks Arnie in their house with a knife you can see that the knife is a fake because it bends.

Revealing: When Quaid throws the bullet-ridden body down the escalator, you can see Richter and Helm have both been replaced by stuntmen. Their hairstyles are totally different. You can also see that the 'dead' man is still alive as he's flying through the air (slow motion helps).

Audio problem: Just after Arnie accepts the cab driver's offer and the other one complains, Arnie's driver gives him the finger and says something like, "Eat this", but his lips don't match what he's saying.

Continuity: When Arnie uses the hologram projector in the alien reactor, there is a brief shot of him facing his own hologram image. Note that the gun and the projector switch positions in Arnie's hands - the bloodstain on his shirt's sleeve does not.

Continuity: When Sharon Stone cuts Arnie's left arm with the knife, he starts bleeding. Right afterwards he grabs Sharon's neck with his wounded left arm. When he lets go, Sharon's neck has no blood stains from Arnie's wounds. How come?

Continuity: When Hauser/Quaid returns to Mars, some of the people that knew him before as Hauser call him Quaid.

Revealing: In the last scene, when Douglas Quaid and Melina are holding each other and looking over the landscape of Mars while the sky gets colored, the camera starts from top behind them (looking down) then moves down while looking at them, so more and more of the Mars horizon gets visible. But the camera-tilt goes too far up, so at the top of the picture, you can see the blue-screen curtain and the pole and rings holding it. Douglas Quaid and Melina are just looking at a blue-screen. (This is visible on the video; on the DVD an extra black top-bar is covering it.)

Revealing: Right before Quade jumps on the train to get away from Richter, he uses a gun to break one of the train windows. His gun barely (if at all) touches the window and it shatters.

Continuity: When Quaid finishes Gary and his fellow agents, the concrete wall behind him shows a bloodstain. The only opportunity for it to appear there would have been as Quaid hits the moustache man in the face; but this guy stands up again, and it doesn't look like he cracked his skull (which would have caused a stain).

Visible crew/equipment: When Quaid and Melina hop into Benny's cab and are being chased by Richter, watch Benny. During the shots where the perspective is from behind Benny, you can see that it is a stunt driver in the car. His head is shaved neatly, yet Benny's hair is curly and frilly all over.

Continuity: When Doug is running from the bad guys after finding out what was going on from his "wife", he tucks his big gun in to his jacket pocket. When he is running through the scanner, that big gun is now in his pants.

Factual error: When a person goes out into space, their eyes wouldn't be sucked out, their cheeks puffed, etc. They would have about 10-20 seconds of useful consciousness, when they could get back to a safe area. Even after that, they'd still be alive for about a minute, although unconscious. The only major problem that being in space for about half a minute might cause is rupturing the eardrums and possible blindness (although the eyeballs wouldn't be graphically sucked out). NASA's studies on this go back as far as the 1960's and were used by Stanley Kubrick during the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Revealing: When Arnold jumps through the glass, you can definitely see a change in his face and body shape. (From the stuntman).

Continuity: When Arnie enters the hotel room on Earth, he receives a phone call from a man with a suitcase who tells him to look through the window. While Arnie is approaching to the window, we can see in the display that the mysterious man is looking to his upper right. In the next shot, when Arnie is looking through the window, we can see that the hotel room is located at the man's left side.

Continuity: In the scene where Michael Ironside's cronies are dragging Arnie to the service lift, watch Arnie's head: It changes from being flexed forward to being extended backwards as they swap camera angles. His hand positions change as well from shot to shot.

Continuity: If you look closely at the position of Arnie's arms while still on the 3D screen, they are in a different position when he breaks through.

Continuity: When Doug and Melina are being chased by Richter they leap from the catwalk in the big dome. When they reach the other side, from one camera angle, they grab the horizontal bar on the dome scaffolding. From the next angle they are holding onto the diagonally vertical bars swinging inward.

Continuity: When Arnie comes home after killing his workmate, he pulls Sharon Stone to the floor. From one angle his hands are on her shoulders, from another they're on her elbows.

Continuity: When Arnie meets Bennie, he takes him to his cab and opens the door for him to get in. At that time, there's an explosion, and Bennie pulls the door down to shield himself and Arnie. The camera switches to behind them, and Bennie is just now pulling the door down.

Continuity: When Melina comes to the rescue of Doug, she starts shooting his captors. He drops to the floor, then in the next shot, he drops again. Doug also wakes up on top of a dead guy who had landed much further away from him before.

Factual error: The title 'Publicity' is misspelled as 'Publicty' in the end credits.

Revealing: When Quade shoots Dr. Edgemar, Lori yells "Now you've DONE IT.", and the wall explodes, which is plainly made of foam. Many of the pieces of 'wall' tumble lightly across the floor.

Revealing: In the scene in the Mars Air/Spaceport, the troops are wearing Casio scientific calculators on their wrists.

Continuity: In the scene where Quaid unfolds a flyer for The Last Resort, he unfolds it with the flyer image facing the camera. When the scene cuts to him looking at it, the flyer image is facing him.

Continuity: In the scene where Quaid and Melina are strapped into chairs by scientists, Quaid breaks out and stabs a bar into a guy's head using a downward motion. In the next shot, the bar is now coming up from the under side of the scientist's face and out of the top of his head.

Revealing: When Arnie blows the old lady disguise mask on Mars Immigration, they shot him and the dome crashes. Right after the soldier gets sucked out of the room, some extra comes rolling and kicks the camera.