Payoffs Big and Small

A couple of months ago a couple of newer Rifftrax movies provided a good object lesson on having payoffs for plot elements.  Sometimes those elements can be small or sometimes they can be much larger.

First up the 1995 horror movie Ice Cream Man where Clint Howard plays a crazy ice cream man who murders people for little to no reason before being killed by a kid he abducted.  The kid then carries on his legacy.  Or something.

Anyway, in the movie there's a group of local kids who call themselves "Rocketeers" because they have toy rockets that can launch from the front of their bikes.  Like what Chekhov (the author guy not the Star Trek guy) said about a gun, these rockets will have some use in the final act, right?  Nope.  The most they're used for is one kid accidentally shoots a cop car and is nearly killed.  Which contributes almost nothing to the plot--such as it is.

One of the "Rocketeers" is a girl whose father is British (played by David Warner, who you might remember from Star Trek V/VI and the "Four Lights" episode of Next Generation) and a minister.  At one point she comes home and he's psyched because her mom is foaming and speaking in tongues.  This is going to have some relevance to the plot, right?  Maybe she'll warn them about the ice cream man or something?  Nope.  It's never mentioned again and the next time we see the mother she's fine and dandy.  And why is her father British?  And why waste money on a recognizable actor like David Warner when they could have hired any community theater schlub for that tiny, unimportant part?

The same weekend I also watched a 1990 dystopian "thriller" called Omega Cop where a bland guy who looks like a cut-rate Ben Mendelssohn fights a gang of slavers and rescues three women while Adam West almost literally phones in his role as the guy's boss holed up in a bunker that's supposed to be the last vestige of civilization.

At the start of the movie the bland cop and a dispatcher in the bunker are bantering about retro music.  She left a tape in his Jeep that he puts in and it plays...some vague sorta doo-wop song.  Nothing recognizable like Elvis or the Beach Boys or Buddy Holly or something.  Pretty weak payoff for that bit.

But the longer-term plot that doesn't really have much of a payoff is at the beginning the bland cop's comrades are killed by the henchmen of some big dude called "Wraith."  A couple of times the bland cop even screams, "Wraith, it's not over yet!"

So at the end they're going to have an epic throw-down right?  Um, no.  Wraith and his goons invade Adam West's bunker and the bland cop blows up the bunker with him in it.  They never actually fight each other!  I mean, at the end the bunker blows up and then it shows bland cop jumping into a lake in Montana with his new girlfriends who I guess are going to repopulate the Earth now and it's like, wait, that's it?  That's it?!  He didn't even quip, "It's over now, Wraith."  Weak.

When editing stories sometimes I'll notice a character or plot thread that doesn't really have a payoff.  Maybe I forgot about it or maybe I decided to make some change to the plot and that got left behind.  But it's important to make sure whether it's something small like a gag about music or rockets of kids's bikes or something big like an end with no confrontation between hero and villain that you have some kind of payoff for your audience.  For the small things you can just delete them if your story is running long.  The big things are definitely something that you'll need to rework. 

See, as I keep trying to tell you, you can learn a lot from bad movies. 🙀