Bullethole Door

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

In movies and television, it is possible to shoot around somebody's feet, or in a door shape at a wall, and create a method of escape.

Unfortunately, as MythBusters has proven, it requires many, many bullets and a lot of time to do this. With a BFG like a Vulcan gun or large-caliber machine gun, it might be faster; but more likely than not, applying that much stress to the wall would simply collapse it.

See Shoot Out the Lock.

Examples of Bullethole Door include:


Anime and Manga

  • Trigun's Vash the Stampede uses his newly acquired arm machinegun to shoot through many floors of a starship to get at the bottom one. It works, but he ends up standing atop a tall pile of disc-shaped pieces of floor.
    • Also he yells on the way down, because that's a long way to fall and he hadn't thought it through. Still able to shoot prefect circles into the floor while falling and screaming, though.
  • Not a method of escape, but of infiltration: In Sonic X, Tails creates a perforated circle in the side of Dr. Eggman's headquarters, which Sonic "punches out" with a spindash. Perfect!
  • During the Alabasta arc in One Piece, Miss Doublefinger uses her spike growing ability to punch a hole in the wall separating her from her target.
  • In So Ra No Wo To, in order to escape a building, the girls use their huge Spider Tank cannon to blow an opening in its wall... taking down the whole building with it.
  • Wei in Darker than Black uses his power to breach walls as needed, and once cuts a "trapdoor" in the floor under himself. Also, one Contractor operative in Shikkoku no Hana.

Film

  • Underworld uses the "floor" variety.
    • It was used as the example in MythBusters. The movie used two 9 mm guns with one magazine each to escape; Mythbusters couldn't do it with over 350 9mm rounds fired by an MP5 submachine gun, even after using a 12 gauge shotgun to weaken structural support timbers. (After two guys worked on it for half an hour, including a great deal of stomping on the weakened section of floor, they broke through.)
    • She does it again with the bottom of a rapidly descending elevator in Awakening. Subverted, it doesn't work. The elevator lands on her, but the bullets made the floor weak enough (and she's tough enough) that it doesn't particularly bother her.
  • In the 1989 Batman movie, the Batmobile uses its machine guns to cut off the bottom section of a wooden warehouse door.
  • In the James Bond move Licence to Kill, Pam Bouvier (the Bond Girl of the week) fires a shotgun at a wall and creates a perfectly round hole to escape through, rather than just pock-marking it with shot. Must be a mighty thin wall.
  • In RoboCop 3 the main character, a cyborg weighing hundreds of kilograms and who has repeatedly proven himself able to smash through walls with no damage, wants to enter the room of a baddie. Instead of smashing right through the flimsy wooden door, he feels it necessary to waste many dozens of bullets (all without reloading) in shooting out his silhouette in the door, through which he then enters the room.
  • Snake Plissken carves a hole in the wall with a machine gun as part of his Escape from New York.
  • In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the weasels open Eddie's door by shooting a hole around the lock.
  • As the heroes try to escape from a pursuing helicopter in Sahara, they use an assault rifle to perforate an ancient rock wall so that their car can break through.
  • In The Fifth Element Ruby Rhod gets an oval floor exit from Bruce Willis and the opportunity to ride the piece down one level.
  • In Lilo and Stitch, Jumba uses a 'shoot-through-the-ceiling' variety, causing the large chunk of ceiling that Stitch was standing on to fall. He uses thrown dinner plates to make the holes.
  • Buzzsaw variation and subversion in Van Helsing. Van Helsing is trapped in a heavy bell, and uses his buzzsaws to cut a hole in the floor. When Hyde lifts the bell to investigate the noise and sees the hole (which is too small for Van Helsing to pass through), it turns out that it was Van Helsing's plan to get Hyde to free him by hiding in the top of the bell.
  • Dwayne Johnson does the floor variant in Walking Tall, blasting several times with a shot gun, then kicking the floor out.
  • In The Long Kiss Goodnight, Charley Baltimore (Geena Davis) uses a submachine gun to shoot out a window to use to escape a bomb, then on the way down to the frozen lake below she uses it again (without reloading, naturally) to weaken the ice enough that she and Samuel L. Jackson's character don't kill themselves by getting splattered all over the ice when they hit it. Not that falling three floors into the water is much more enjoyable, but that's another trope.
  • The film version of Judge Dredd did this when Dredd enters the first room to take out the first group of baddies in a block war.
  • Ultraviolet has a variation with an actual door: Violet uses a machine gun to shoot the hinges off a car door, and upon crashing the car into a subway entrance causes the door to go flying off.
  • Friday the 13th (film) has a scene where Kay-Em uses dual automatic pistols to blast a rough outline around Jason in the wall behind them, then kicks him through it. At least in this case, Kay-Em is superhumanly strong and Jason has to weigh a lot more than an average human.

Literature

  • In Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain Warhammer 40,000 novels, Jurgen's melta is often put to use to create these. Of course, since the melta was originally intended to penetrate tank armor, this makes a fair bit of sense.
  • Taken Up to Eleven in the original novel of Goldfinger, where Ian Fleming has the villain planning to blast open the vault door of Fort Knox with a stolen tactical nuclear weapon! (In the movie they are trying to destroy the gold, instead of stealing it)
  • In Snow Crash, Hiro carves huge holes in the side of a well-armored aircraft carrier using a nuclear-powered, Gatling-style, hypervelocity railgun. The weapon is named Reason because "everyone listens to Reason."
  • Subverted in Phule's Paradise: Despite gunfire leaving many holes in the wall, somebody has to open the door from the inside.
  • Detritus uses the Piecemaker to do this in some Discworld novels (generally removing the door entirely rather than opening it). Since the Piecemaker is a modified siege crossbow, it's plausible.
  • In a magical variant from The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, the Norse god Thor uses his flying hammer to bash through a floor to which he's been superglued by Odin's lackey. It smashes its way up and down through the floorboards until he can walk away unharmed, albeit with wooden splinters coating his limbs and back.

Live Action TV

  • In the new series of Doctor Who, Captain Jack and River Song make doors with a sonic blaster (also called a "squareness gun") that can remove sections of wall and replace them with ease. This drains the batteries heavily though.
  • CSI: NY featured a group of robbers breaking into the lab vault in this way. Done slightly more realistically than most of the examples on this page, involving a .50BMG sniper rifle (i.e. a BFG) and taking most of the episode.
  • Done too, in all things, an episode of House (it makes sense in context). Though rather than using a gun, they use something similar to the Real Life example below - a flat slab of directed explosives on wheels.
  • In an episode of "Stargate Atlantis", Larrin used an energy gun much like Ronon's to melt a door through a wall in an Atlantean ship.

Real Life

  • The 'Harvey Wall Banger' as invented by the British SAS is a high pressure air cannon that fires a plastic barrel of water at a wall, that will cause a hole large enough to walk through.
  • The British Anti Structure Munition (A version of the Singapore/Israeli MATADOR) is a shoulder launched rocket that can either operate in anti structure blast mode (leveling a building) or in penetrating/mouse-holing mode to defeat light armoured vehicles and create "mouse-holes" in double thickness urban walls big enough for men to enter through.
  • In the US Army's field manual on urban combat (or, as they call it, "Military Operations in Urban Terrain"), they suggest using the 25 mm autocannon on the M2 Bradley to make new doors for the troops to use. At least in an older version of this manual, it gives guidelines for creating loopholes (big enough to aim a weapon through, perhaps to stick an arm through, but not crawl out of) with rifle or machine-gun fire, and indicates this requires some 100–200 rounds. Creating a hole large enough for a person would probably require thousands.

Video Games

  • In the squad-level strategy Silent Storm, with destructible enviroments, cinematic physics and big guns, blowing man-sized holes in the walls and floors is a viable way to maneuver. The risk of collapse is there, too. Additionally, this makes a submachine gun a far faster method to "open" a locked door than lockpicks (though the player IS penalized for excessive collateral damage).
  • In the game cortex command shooting at doors with weapons may break them granting entry to a base.
  • Most of the X-COM series have allowed the player to blast his way through walls to get to the hostile aliens - particularly viable once you get access to powerful, alien weapons. You can even drill your way through a yards-thick wall with a powerful enough gun.
    • A lot of players take this as doctrine; as aliens only recognize existing entrances, creating new ones can allow you to surprise camping enemies. In buildings conventional explosives (and even laser rifles) do it well enough. UFO hulls and strong bulkheads aren't breached even with a satchel, though due to a bug it still hurts an alien through some walls. There's a mod making demolition charge actually useful for breaching, of course.
    • Especially good once you realize that the most powerful alien weapon can knock down the outer hull of a UFO. Combined with Flying Suits, this makes for excellent pincer attacks. Instead of going through a cramped UFO with lots of hiding places, you fly up and blast a hole in the top floor, swooping in and taking out the commander which not only makes your fight easier (commanders usually have the same weapon and high stats), it also decreases morale for the regular mooks, potentially making them panic and drop their weapons. Not to mention that UFO engines (and therefore elerium/zrbite) are usually located on the lower levels.
  • Taken to extremes in Red Faction. If it's not made by unbreakable metal (most things aren't), you can blow holes in it. Works for blowing a passage in a wall, but also for carving tunnels in rock and moving through entire areas of a level.
    • Gets especially hilarious with bulletproof glass. It's entirely possible to blast out all the concrete around it, leaving it floating in mid-air.
  • In the game Battlefield: Bad Company it is possible to break walls down by shooting them, but this takes most of the player's ammo supply unless he uses explosives or a drill.
  • This is the only way to open most doors in the Metroid series, and you need need different weapons for different colored doors. However, the blast usually just deactivates the color-coded force field and opens the door normally, rather than damaging it.
  • Black, if you wasted enough bullets. Which, of course, is the whole point of the game.
  • A major ability in The Force Unleashed.
  • The boss Puppet from Odium introduces himself this way in a cinematic, by suddenly blasting his way out of a wall with a healthy dose of More Dakka. (And then, during the actual battle, he just stands there and doesn't move.)
  • Bayonetta shoots a heart-shaped one when she, Luke, and Cereza are trying to reach Isla del Sol after one of the security gates have been shut.
  • The second-tier archery skill in Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten shoots a hole out from under the enemy this way. That's right, an archery skill.
  • Technically doable with the destructible walls in Deus Ex Human Revolution, although it takes a huge amount of ammunition and time as well as being very likely to alert any nearby guards, while Adam can get an augmentation that lets him punch straight through instead.
    • Explosions are very effective at wall-breaking, but generally the only explosives that wouldn't be wasted breaking down a single wall are revolver rounds with the exploding ammo upgrade and possibly a frag grenade/mine. The aug is still arguably better because it will point out to you hidden, breakable parts of walls.
    • Curiously, you can also destroy doors with guns and explosives, but not with the wall-punching aug.

Web Comics

Ebbirnoth: Chizulo! Liz! Evac will be outside. We're going to need a door. Give us one you can fit through.

Western Animation

  • Taken to the extreme by Purple Dragons of 2003s TMNT in Turtles Forever, when they hit the wall enough time, so 2003's Leo can drop the wall on them and their boss, Hun, during the rescue of the 1980s TMNT.
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