Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
::Today's soundtrack: Wings "Live and Let Die" ::
You might have noticed that I like to watch movies. Yeah, it was a big secret. And as a guy who has seen many movies, I have seen my fair share of deaths on screen. When it comes to death scenes, movie makers have my deepest sympathies. Coming up with a really good death scene is difficult enough, never mind the problems they might encounter when actually executing it (is that a pun? maybe.). You could have bad actors or poor special effects which have rendered what could have been a really cool death scene utterly silly. Every now and then I'm sure a death scene is ruined by a director simply because he "interpreted" what was in the script differently than how the writer intended. Sometimes, a death scene is just plain bad, even when on paper and you wonder how they decided to produce it like that at all. So, this is me, analyzing some of the bad death scenes I have had the unfortunate "pleasure" of viewing over the years.
Has anyone here sene that old Vincent Price movie, The Abominable Dr. Phibes? While this movie poses an interesting premise, one which I think may have inspired the people behind Seven, in that Dr. Phibes gets revenge by staging murders in the style of the plagues of Egypt, but one of these deaths just doesn't sit right with me. The doctor who is killed by "the plague of hail" is frozen to death in the back of his car by a device invented by Phibes. The way this was set up, the device, which looks kind of like a gramophone, was sitting on one seat in the back and the doctor got into his car seated next to it, and the device spewed hail at him. He was not forced into the car (if memory serves), and it wasn't locked. He was taken by surprise and pretty much just sat there and took it. Now, I don't know how cold that thing was set, but I don't think it worked instantly. I see no reason why that doctor couldn't have escaped. This was one death that was doomed from the start, a poorly written scene.
Speaking of just sitting there and taking your death, Patrick Troughton's priest character from The Omen does that, too. The church's spire is struck by lightning, comes loose, tips over and impales the priest. However, he looks up and sees this all happening. He even shouts "noooooooooo!", so how silly is that? He stands there, sees the spire coming down right at him, but does he move? Nooooooooooooo! This is one death scene that could have been saved. If only the priest had NOT looked up. If it caught him completely by surprise it could have been so awesome. But "nooooooooooo!"
If you are the sort of person watches movies expressly for cool death scenes, then you are probably familiar with Friday the 13th. The recent 2009 redo of the franchise is a film I generally liked, except for one death. As we all know, Jason Vorhees likes to kill people who camp, and if you are in a sleeping bag you are just plain doomed. The sleeping bag death in the new movie was very bad. Jason ties off the end of it and hangs it over a camp fire. It catches and the girl inside is squirming and screaming and then stops, presumably dead. The thing is, she dies really, really fast. That bag was barely on fire. It is a long and painful demise to be burned to death in such a way. I mean, I suppose there could have been something else going on with her, like maybe the threw up and choked on her own vomit, or perhaps Jason stabbed her a few times before hanging her up, but on its own it was poorly put together.
Have you ever noticed that all the Part 2 sequels to scary movies in the 1980s were goofy piles of crap (ie Poltergeist 2, House 2, etc)? Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 is of course no exception. The greatest scene in this film, as anyone who has seen it will tell you, is the infamous and often quoted "Garbage day!" massacre sequence. This whole bit teeters the line between hokey and ridiculous, and totally cool. The way he goes around shooting people, chuckling to himself maniacally the whole time... how he manages to get his eyebrows to somehow overact... and his hair is poofy and perfect the whole time.... the bizarre "evil" organ music score... it's kind of surreal even. The part I just don't like is right at the start of all that. The preppy douche guy is dissing his girl and he totally snaps. He grips the douche's neck tightly, tips him backwards over the exposed engine of his own car, and manages to electrocute him with what I think I remember being a jumper cable attached to his teeth. This is all accentuated by cheesey 1980s glowing blue electricity effect, and then climaxing with the guy's eyeballs exploding for some reason. Bad effects aside, the whole premise to this is completely impossible. I mean, he is STILL choking the guy with one hand, and electrocuting him with the other. How is it that HE doesn't feel any electricity? What the hell? I get that there are some bizarre deaths on books, but I can't stand it when they completely throw physics out the window. But I am totally cool with that out of control car that tilts, flips over, and then explodes for NO REASON AT ALL. I do have to draw the line at something.
And while I'm drawing lines, the original Halloween 2, also crosses it with the death of that lady in the tub. Michael shoves her head under water which is temperatures of upwards of 120 degrees Fahrenheit. When she is dead and discarded to the floor like she's yesterday's hooker, we get a shot of her face which has flesh all peely and blistered and such from the hot temperatures. Michael held her head under with his bare hands. Granted, up to this point Michael has been cut, stabbed in the eye with a coat hanger, shot about six times, fallen out of a second story window and then walked across town to the hospital, faster than the ambulance carrying Laurie, I might add, so I am willing to suspend my disbelief somewhat. Okay, more than somewhat. But that is where I draw the line: at the scalding hot water hot affecting Michael's hands. Maybe he got into "the good stuff" at the hospital before continuing his rampage. Who knows?
So far, I've covered some scary movies, but they are not the only offenders. The next big offender of the bad death scene is the action movie. Do you know what I hate? When they really go over the top with the death of the big bad guy at the end. Granted, he's the big bad guy and we want his death to be... um... worse?... than all the henchmen we had to kill so far, but some movies take it too far. Good big bad guy ending: Die Hard. Oh yes. Bad bad guy ending? Let's try Powers Booth's demise in the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Sudden Death. Man, that scene takes freakin' forever! Or maybe it just FEELS like an eternity because it's so bad, but to me, I've never seen a helicopter fall so goddamn slow. Then there is the way that Powers and Jean-Claude exchange looks as Powers falls past. I didn't think two people looking at each other could be acted poorly, but there you have it. Jean-Claude's pulse pounding reaction of "dull surprise" doesn't exactly scream action hero. Then, to cap it all off, the next shot is of Powers screaming as the helicopter continues to fall, tail first, into a hockey rink. Men screaming to their deaths is never good, and rarely well acted, and the way the shots jump from pull back of helicopter, to close of Booth's face so we get scream-no scream-scream-no scream-scream, is pretty lame. Then of course, he dies in a giant helicopter explosion. How often do big bad guys get 'sploded to death? Too often. It's just bad writing, people!
Over the top is not necessarily always a bad thing if it is done well. One of the biggest purveyors of over the topedness (?) is of course none other than Mr. Bond, James Bond. Of all the crazy death traps, of all the crazy take-over-the-world schemes, the one thing that totally takes me out of the movie and screams bullshit the most is the death near the end of Live and Let Die. As James is in the clutches of the villain, about to be lowered into a tank with a shark in it, we are reminded of the timely inventions of the British government. With his wrist watch gizmos and the utterly stupid "auto-inflating compressed air bullets." Why the fuck someone would invent this is beyond me, and I watch science fiction which is utterly riddled with weird inventions, included the deus ex machina of the sonic screwdriver, but that's really neither here nor there. The fact of it is, they invented a bullet that if you were to shoot, say, a raft with this bullet it would inflate it right quick, totally glossing over the fact that the raft was shot, thereby compromising the integrity of the rubber and making its ability to hold air nonexistent. All that pesky logic and physics aside, the real purpose of the compressed air bullet for the story was so that at the end, James Bond could activate one of them and force a guy to swallow it, causing him to inflate, float to the surface of the pool in which they were fighting, hang in the air for a moment and then explode. Nothing of this guy's death makes any sense whatsoever. The invention that killed him makes no sense, the fact that James was able to make him swallow it (it was pretty big and made of metal), or the way in which he filled with air, also, if it is meant to inflate rafts and such, the compressed "air" inside would therefore NOT be "lighter than air" that would cause the bad guy to float in the air for a moment before exploding. In a James Bond movie you almost expect a bit of over the top in some scenes and to have to suspend disbelief, but even I have my limits and inflating a man is it. Who greenlit this death scene? For shame!
Okay, I need to stop. Yes, I know there are many hundreds more "worst movie deaths" out there, but these are the ones I always find myself thinking about. If I had a bit of time, I could actually, you know, research this or something, but I'm just going with what's on the top of my head here. I know, you think I have no life and nothing better to do than rant about bad death scenes, when in fact I could be playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, so there. The subject of the death scene is interesting to me, though, and perhaps I shall expand upon it at a different angle at a later date. So until then...
William the Bloody (death defiler)
