Definition lost? Shoot ‘em up posters found

Shoulda just called the movie Shmup and got it over with.

“Shoot ‘em up” has been a term I’ve heard/seen associated with pretty much all sorts of action movies for quite a while now. Nothing new, really. It’s not like they’re suddenly calling this films or any others “SHMUP”..

I spent the whole weekend playing SHMUPs with a friend. SHMUPs rule.

lol, that’s the image I had as well when I first heard the movie’s title, like Parodius or something. Whether the title fits or not, I like Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti looks like a crazy villain here.

In the olden times, I remember games like Mega Man and Contra being labeled as shoot em ups too. I think it’s come to mean space shooters exclusively more recently.

Shoot’em’up means a 2D action game. Even for modern gamers, I’m sure they don’t refer to FPS styled games as shoot’em’ups… shooters, maybe, but not shoot’em’ups.

I believe that shoot’em up was a term that has been in use at least since the 1960’s in regards to violent gun action films….if you dig around google a bit, you will find that term in film reviews of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch in the New York Times and Newsweek when those films were released.

Whether or not the term has ever, perhaps incidentally, been used to characterize a film is almost moot. The point is shoot em ups have been consistently marginalized. I`m not some big SHMUP fan (do you say that out loud -SHMUP?), my affiliation with them only goes as far as pizza hut when I was a kid, but they are a staple of video games and need to have a better place, or at least a name that isn’t consistently stolen and popularized by something else. No offense to clive owen.