Destroyer: 30 years later still holds a huge cinematic mystery

We still cannot fully comprehend this.

Over the years, films have revealed several huge mysteries that have never been properly answered. Who was the Zodiac Killer? Was this really the magical creature in The Blair Witch Project? Did DiCaprio really know what was happening at the end of Shutter Island? What the hell is going on on Mulholland Drive?

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However, there is one cinematic mystery that leaves all this in the shadows and still baffles film historians and the general public. If you recognize this image, then you already understand what we are talking about…

The Destroyer and the infamous three shell scenes

Released theatrically on October 8, 1993. Destroyer The story is initially set in a crime-riddled future in 1996, where the world’s best cop (Sylvester Stallone) is imprisoned in a block of ice for a crime he didn’t commit, along with his nemesis, the world’s most dangerous criminal (Wesley Snipes).

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Jumping forward to the hyper-peaceful, crime-free future of 2032, Stallone is unfrozen by the cops (led by Sandra Bullock, with whom Stallone has one of the weirdest sex scenes in cinema) as Snipes breaks free and begins to wreak havoc on the city of San Angeles. .

But before he can get to work, he needs to go to the bathroom, and when he heads there, he finds not toilet paper, but instead three seashells. Admitting he doesn’t know how to use them, his new colleagues make fun of him, but frankly, three decades later, we’re still not sure how they’ll work. It turns out that we are not supposed to…

Writer Daniel Waters told Live For Film about the origins of the scene: “I was calling my friends, like Larry Karaszewski, who wrote Ed Wood, and he was sitting by the toilet and I was like, ‘Oh, are you in the toilet?’ I need toiletries. And he had a bag of shells and I was like, “Seashells! I’ll work with it.”

And that was all. We didn’t think about it anymore. Except for a few people, one of which is Sandra Bullock herself. During the press tour for Gravity, MTV asked her about the three-shell scene in Destroyer, and she had a great answer ready:

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Destroyer is available to rent at home now on Google Play, Apple TV, Rakuten TV and Sky Store.

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