Last night, we watched The Worst Movie Ever. Kid you not. “Area 407” should be banished, erased, burned, SOMETHING.

The basic premise, annoying girl-child aside, was that a plane crashed in a government testing area. Roughly six or so people survived the crash: the annoying one (I can’t stress this enough), her sister, a fat guy who complained about everything, a US air marshal, a photo-journalist, a flight attendant, and a couple others.

Spoiler alert: they all died. Doesn’t matter—you really don’t want to watch this anyway.

So they’re sitting there in the middle of nowhere, no one has cell service (didn’t occur to them to check that for a good 30 minutes), everyone is injured (presumably, there’s a lot of blood), and guess what happened?

A lot of screaming and yelling and running around. After the flight attendant is killed by whatever-that-thing-is, they decide to all go for help. In fairness, the whatever-that-thing-is was still running around somewhere in the dark. Then the air marshal shoots at the—well, hell, it was some kind of dinosaur; spoiler alert again—and THEN announces, “It’s okay, I’m an air marshal.” With an Australian accent.

But I digress.

The point is that they were all idiots.

Let’s forget the dinosaur part for now, and the fact that they’d crashed into a government testing facility. That pretty much guaranteed they weren’t getting out alive, period. They’d seen too much.

But they could have lasted a lot longer, and without all the running around, finding abandoned cabins with sort of working radios, and finding an SUV too, which the annoying one’s sister used to accidentally run over the air marshal.

Oops, more digression.

What should they have done?

One, shut up. Oh, please, please, shut up! Now, bless her heart, the surviving flight attendant tried to get everyone to work together, but she just wasn’t up to the task. I get that. Some people aren’t. The marshal sure could have identified herself sooner—like right away. Whoever takes charge in a situation like this must 1) know what he’s doing, and 2) get control. All that racket probably drew the dinosaur—and that holds true for a lot of danger out in the middle of nowhere, dinosaur or not.

Moving on: attend to the immediate needs of the injured. Do not put a tourniquet on a scrape/cut on a whiny kid’s arm. Slap her out of her hysteria and whining. Seriously. She was about 13 or 14 and acted like an 8-year-old who’d missed a few days of Ritalin. Oy.

So, in this situation, no one was badly injured, nothing life-threatening. Next step, shelter.

They had half a plane sitting there, for crying out loud—why leave? Plane crash, black box, flare gun. Right there. Get comfortable, barricade the gaping opening, keep people busy. Next, check supplies.

Isn’t the galley usually in the back somewhere? Crew quarters, carry-ons, etc. Find water. Find some food. Hunker down and wait.

Sure, the military would have killed them later, perhaps, if they caught sight of the dinosaurs, but maybe not. At least it would have been a clean shot, instead of being ripped apart, or barfing up dinosaur eggs like the photo-journalist. Oops, my bad. Too graphic? It was pretty disgusting, for sure.

There are some situations where you might want to get the hell out of Dodge, but this wasn’t one of them. Sometimes, it’s best to stay put, especially if you know people might be looking for you.

Assess and take care of injuries, find shelter and supplies, and wait.

And watch out for mutant dinosaurs.