The Film Yap Lexicon is comprised of terminology for certain cinematic phenomena that occur often enough to form discernible patterns — typically events or circumstances that are patently ludicrous to customs of narrative or known science and, on occasion, the result of misguided choices by filmmakers. Although these terms could take their name from numerous films, they are principally derived from the prime examples of this phenomena.
Bite the Cable
Bite the Cable: A reference to the precise moment in which a movie goes off the deep end of plausibility and/or sanity.
This term could be called the cinematic equivalent of "jumping the shark" and, by five years, prefaced the 2008 phrase "nuking the fridge," referencing a scene from "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" in which Indiana Jones improbably survives a nuclear blast by holing up in a test-site refrigerator.
Typically, a movie that bites the cable will have exhibited or, at the very least, foreshadowed tendencies of the sort up until biting the cable. However, the arrival of a development or plot twist so completely out of step with the rest of the film can be said to be the moment a movie bites the cable — completely and irrevocably changed, usually in a bad way, but not always. (See "Splice").
"Bite the cable" references the climactic scene of Ang Lee's misbegotten 2003 "Hulk." Nick Nolte plays David Banner, in this incarnation the father of Hulk's alter ego Bruce Banner (Eric Bana). David, after exposing himself to the same gamma radiation that transformed his son into the Hulk, gains the ability to become the things he touches, and, after Bruce is captured by the military, he finally confronts his son. David bites an electrical cable, transforming himself into a cloud of electricity and then fighting his own son, then in Hulk form, as that cloud of electricity.