Quiz: Can You Identify These Crime Movies From Their Taglines?
Just when you thought it was safe to take another quiz.
There’s nothing… nothing… more satisfying than when a movie has a perfect tagline. Take A Nightmare on Elm Street’s ““If Nancy doesn’t wake up screaming, she won’t wake up at all.” After all, a good tagline ought to be more than either wordplay or a plot synopsis delivery system. The best ones do both at the same time.
So, we thought we’d assemble some of them… and arrange them as a quiz for your guessing pleasure.
The answer key is way down at the bottom. As you take the quiz, I’d write down your answers next to the corresponding questions’ numbers (on a sheet of paper or in your notes app) and then grade yourself in one swoop when you’re done, so that you’re not constantly scrolling down and up again as you go, thereby risking seeing some of the other answers.
Well, happy quizzing!
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Questions:
1. “Life is in their hands. Death is on their minds.”
2. “Even a hitman deserves a second shot”
3. “A comedy of trial and error.”
4. “From the moment they met, it was murder.”
5. “Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.”
6. “They’re young, they’re in love, and they kill people.”
7. “There is more than one way to lose your life to a serial killer.”
8. “You don’t assign him to murder cases. You just turn him loose.”
9. “Here comes the bride.”
10. “This is the weekend they didn’t play golf.”
11. “Her life was in their hands. Now her toe is in the mail.”
12. “On every street in every city in this country, there is a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.”
13. “When he said I do, he never said what he did.”
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Answers down below.
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Keep scrolling!
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Answer Key:
1. Twelve Angry Men
2. Grosse Point Blank
3. My Cousin Vinny
4. Double Indemnity
5. The Shawshank Redemption
6. Bonnie and Clyde
7. Zodiac
8. Dirty Harry
9. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
10. Deliverance
11. The Big Lebowski
12. Taxi Driver
13. True Lies
Olivia Rutigliano
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads. Her other work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, AirMail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from the departments of English/comparative literature and theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. She hosts the podcasst "Culture Schlock" at Lit Hub Radio. She is on instagram at @oldebean, twitter at @oldrutigliano, and bluesky at @oliviarutigliano.bsky.social.
