Movie gun -- Red Heat

looks like some kinda mutated Desert Eagle to me.

Tim LaFrance built the pistols in question. The base gun is a Desert Eagle (.357 Mag) with an extended barrel. LaFrance's goal was to make the final product look like an oversized P38.

The gun in the movie actually looks like that.

It's a HollyWoodized older model Desert Eagle with a long barrel, and what looks to be an open top slide (like the Beretta Model 92)

The cartridge it fired was the fictional "Podbyrin 9.2mm".

Red Heat is one of the best buddy cop films of all time. What they said about the Desert Eagle is correct. But how about that big boy Model 29?

Speaking of Red Heat, in it Arney's character mentions a Russian 12mm pistol cartridge that's more powerful than the .44 Mag. Is this round fictional or have some basis in reality?

fictional "Podbyrin 9.2mm".

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This is the fictional ctg that Arnie's character mentions is the most powerful in the world.

All fake.. there is no 12MM Russian handgun cartridge, no 9.2MM either.

George Hill wrote:

All fake.. there is no 12MM Russian handgun cartridge, no 9.2MM either.

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Not true, the 9mm Makarov actually use a 9.2mm bullet. It is of course, not world's most powerful handgun.

That is my all time favorite Arnold movie, not the highest production value, but no other movie made use of his accent and foreign features so perfectly. I regret they didn't make a sequel, set in Russia, would've been badass!

Imagine my disappointment when I discovered there was no "Podbyrin, 9.2mm". I often wonder what a fictional Eastblock magnum would look like. I imagine it would be a 9.2x30mm bottlenecked cartridge with brass from cut down 7.62x39. That would give the 44Mag a run for its money, and be a superior armor buster too.

I mean there was no "Podbyrin, 9.2mm".

It is up to the producer and director, but more and more the guns in the movies are either not real or not fireable, even with blanks. The tragedies that have resulted from misuse of blanks on the set have made the risks too great and the insurance costs too high, not to mention the lawyers breaking out in cold sweats. Few directors will risk the death or injury of a major star just for added realism.

So most "gunfire" in the movies is done by digital editing, which puts in the muzzle flash and sound. The actor points the gun and fakes recoil if appropriate (super photon pistols don't recoil, of course).

The same tricks were used for the "light sabres" in Star Wars. The actors waved hand grips at each other on the set; the back room boys and girls added the light and sound.

Jim

Jim, do you have a source for the info you posted? As kind of a hobby I've tried to dig info up on guns in movie production, but have generally come up empty-handed. Most of the info I've been able to get has been gleaned from secondary sources- either from watching and analyzing a movie, checking special features, or from industry trade publications. For whatever reason it seems to be a very secretive portion of the film biz, even regarding the use of non-guns. No one in the biz seems to have spoken up, which is a shame. I'd really like to know how people like Rock Gilotti (sp) got into that particular line of work.

Based on what I've found it seems that most indy and low-budget flicks seem to use a lot more stand-in weapons and post-prod tricks than some of the higher budget flicks. High budget productions generally seem to use the real thing, or have much better techniques of hiding it.

Also it seems that a lot of productions are going to foreign countries, though whether the gun thing has anything to do with it is probably debateable.