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Editorials > Dead Meat (The Best Worst Death Scenes)

The long kiss goodnight. The big dirt nap. Buying the farm. 187. There are many names for death, and it is an inevitability we can only postpone. So, when we see someone “eat it” in the movies, it better be good. But this is a bit of an oxymoron isn’t it? A “death” being good? Seems a bit morbid to me.

Yet, it's not. We want our deaths real and we want them gruesome and, most of the time, Hollywood delivers. Here are some of the best “worst” ways characters in movies have been put out of their misery.

(Note: We have NOT included Horror or sci-fi movies, as both of those genres should have hard-core deaths to begin with, and would dominate this list otherwise. So keep your chainsaws, axes and light sabers in your pocket for this one.)

8. Last Samurai – Decapitation.

 

Lose the battle and lose your head. That would be the way of the Samurai. Yeah… no thanks. We’re still having trouble buying the fact that Tom “Scientology” Cruise is the last fucking Samurai. Seriously? I guess he sells tickets.  But losing our head over crazy Samurai traditions is about as crazy as terrorists killing journalists the same way in real life. Gulp. It’s no wonder we write for FilmWad.

7. Saving Private Ryan – The Face-to-Face Super-Slow Knife to the Chest.

 

War is hell. There have been hundreds of murders, deaths and kills on the battlefield and we’ve pretty much become desensitized to them. So when a war death makes this list, it better be pretty damn grueling. I can’t shake the German solider slowly, deliberately driving his knife into the exhausted Pvt. Mellish (Adam Goldberg). He fights him for some time, but the Nazi has the upper hand and even coos softly to the soon-to-be skewered G.I. as he kills him – creepy and all too real. No thank you, we’ll pass:  don't stab me in slow-motion, Bald Cowardly Nazi From Earlier in the Movie.

6. Casino – Beaten to Mush, Buried Alive With Your Brother.

 

Sleeping around with and otherwise messing with the mob is never a good idea. And when you’re a wise guy and you do mess with said people, bad things may happen to you. For example:  you might get beaten half to death alongside your brother, tossed together into a ditch in a corn field and buried alive.  So, Joe Pesci, you enjoy getting beat to within an inch of your life with a baseball bat? Well, further enjoy your last breath being a mouthful of dirt. Not the best way to punch your ticket.

5. Lucky Number Slevin – Suffocated.

 

Once again, gangsters play with fire and get burned. Badly.  When will they learn that if you kill a kid’s family and leave him for dead without killing him, it will come back to haunt them?  In this case, we have enemies sitting back-to-back in a chair, each thinking the other is responsible for their predicament. But no, it’s their victim that has gotten revenge, and before they can even apologize appropriately, all they see is a obscured by a plastic bag and secured by duct tape.  Welcome to the wonderful world of slowly being suffocated to death. Trumped by the very victim they pursued:  this is a very bad way to go.

4. Full Metal Jacket – Blasted in the Head by 7.62 mm of Conscripted Fury.

 

This is my rifle and this is my gun. This is for fighting and this is for fun. The fun ends when a 7.62 mm bullet takes the brain train through your head and ends up embedded in the wall of the latrine.  Pick on the crazy, slow Marine long enough and he’ll take matters into his own hands and re-decorate the bathroom. HGTV is not impressed with the results.

3. Jaws – Eaten Alive by an Enormous Shark.

 

Yes, you damn well will need a bigger boat.  When battling a giant killer shark, the prospect of getting eaten alive is a real one. And when Quint gets his fingers pinched by some loose oxygen tanks and slides into Jaws' gaping mouth, we started to think that sushi was the way to go. And that’s eating sushi, not becoming it.

2. Man On Fire – An Bomb Up the Ass.

 

So, a Mexican gang is into kidnapping little girls for profit. Everything seems to be going great… until they pick the wrong girl. They should have weighed the possibility that maybe, just maybe the bodyguard was an ex-CIA hit man. Well, they didn’t and he’s not very happy. So he takes a plastic charger with some C4, uses a pager as a detonator and produces a big boom. The boom is even worse considering the charger is up said kidnapper's brown-star. This gives a whole new meaning to the term colon cleansing.

1. American History X – Getting Curbed.

 

It’s the middle of the night and you're banging your white Aryan supremecist girlfriend. Everything seems to be going swimmingly. That is of course, until your annoying brother busts in and tells you two “niggers” are jacking your car. Well, what’s a proud white Nazi to do? Kick some black ass, that’s what. Grab your gun and get to business. But you know, in situations like this, shooting just isn’t enough, is it? No, what you need to do is place the offending perpetrators head – check that – teeth on the curb and proceed to stomp the life out of them. And thanks to 5.1 surround and a killer subwoofer, you too can almost feel what it’s like to have the life snuffed out of you in probably the best worst movie death ever. EVER!!!