10 Movies Where Characters Get Trapped In Ridiculous Places

Bruce the shark had the wrong idea. Rather than stalking the waters of Amity Island before getting killed by a jittery town sheriff for his trouble, cinema's most famous shark should have just waited for the humans to come to him. It worked (mostly) for the beast of The Shallows, and for the sharks of the forthcoming 48 Meters Down too, in which a pair of plucky young divers find themselves trapped in an underwater shark cage.

Shark or not, sometimes, a bad guy just has to take a day off. Jason Voorhees only works one day of the year, after all, and Freddy's an in-your-dreams only kind of guy. Thankfully cinema - horror and otherwise - has no shortage of fools able to get themselves killed without any help at all. And for the rest of them, all it might take is an incompetent buffoon running the show, or a nut with a grudge and a sniper rifle.

From the deep blue sea to the harshest wildernesses, here we take a look at some of the most outlandish or terrifying places movie characters have become trapped - either through dumb (bad) luck, the villainy of others, or their own sheer stupidity.

Not necessarily the one which started it all, but close to it, and arguably the most important killer shark movie since Jaws.

Often imitated, rarely bettered, Open Water is an entirely waterlogged version of the subgenre flick that sets its two hapless leads adrift and surrounds them with bloodthirsty sharks.

Swapping the big beach, bigger boat thrills and spills of Jaws and its (increasingly ridiculous) sequels for tiny-scale tension and dread, to this day, it remains an effective, influential, terrifying piece of horror cinema that should have any would-be diver thinking twice about that long boat trip out into the open water.