This past week saw the release of Fight or Flight which looked like at least a decent action film that seems to have flopped big time. I’m not here today getting into the quality of the movie (did not see it yet but as an action junkie I am interested), nor am I addressing the lack of viewers this movie has garnered. Plenty of movies that do bad at the box office are good, great or in the rare instance: spectacular. No, what I am interested in with this movie is simply: the title. Fight or Flight the title of this movie and is also the term for our bodies kneejerk response(s) to danger. Fight to defend yourself, or flight/run away from the danger. In the case of this movie it is also a play on words as Josh Hartnett will be doing a lot of fighting and… flighting, or more accurately fight on a flight. Or maybe Josh Hartnett could just choose not to fight the terrorists (I am guessing the bad guys are terrorists) and just continue with his flight like watching the in-flight movie or something thus choosing flight over fight. There is even the outside chance that he will run or take flight from the fight on the flight which you may say how can he run from a flight and I would respond with a parachute, so he would be choosing flight by way of literally ending his flight if this were to happen. At this point I should point out in the interest of full disclosure I am a dad and have taken my duty seriously in the spreading of ‘dad jokes’ and general groanworthy wordplay and today will be no different.

Pun titles go way back, decades even. I remember being in a used video store, or perhaps it was a flea market, not important what or where it was, but I found a VHS copy of Blacula which may be my first introduction to a blatant pun movie (which I still own for continuing full disclosure). I had seen ones before but this time I instantly got the pun. There are so many ways to pun a movie such as just combining two words together as in Blacula or Velocipastor, you can do a play on a saying like Fight or Flight or Bee Movie. Or perhaps it is a play on another movie title such as Shaun of the Dead/Juan of the Dead referencing Dawn of the Dead. I will stop at this point because I don’t want to give away or mention too many that others might say once I eventually get around to a prompt. I mean, I could go on for some time and still barely scratch the surface of movie pun titles but I am hoping to see some good ones in the comments that I never even knew about. Like there are so many pun titles to choose from that pun titles should have it’s own sub-genres like Pun Christmas movies or Pun Disney or Pun Horror or Pun B-movies (beyond Bee Movie) that exist solely based on the pun title and seem to have built out from that. Doing the minimal amount of research and I came up with like 1000ish to choose from, many of which are movies I knew about but not the pun nature of them.

So in the interest of not going on and on too much I will ask simply: What is your favourite movie title pun? Bonus points if it is a good pun, good movie or incorporates the pun well into the actual movie. For me it is probably Face/Off. The movie features an FBI agent chasing a serial killer so we know the two will eventually Face Off. But then due to complete awesome nonsense the FBI agent takes the Face Off the killer after their initial Face Off and wears it after taking his Face Off to catch other criminals under cover as the killer. Then the killer wakes up and puts the FBI agent’s Face On, so he can go and eventually have a Face Off Face Off with the agent wearing each others faces when they have the final Face Off. The premise is over the top ridiculous and the execution is so over the top ridiculous it makes you forget how ridiculous the premise is as it seems a little tame by comparison. I love this movie while I still concede that it is completely foolish and unrealistic I don’t care, it is super fun, just goes for it no matter how silly, and allows me to type out a description of the movie that allows me to say Face Off like 10 times in 3 sentences and still be an accurate summation (I had a bit too much fun writing this one I think). Now it is your turn to discuss.