9 Unnecessarily Mean Movie Deaths
Warning: Contains Deadpool 2 spoilers
Movies are full of the kind of deaths you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. And usually, those people deserve it. It wasn't hard to mourn Hannibal's Mason Verger as he was eaten alive by hogs, or feel sorry for the gangster whose head was smashed into a pencil in The Dark Knight, or to pity Hans Gruber when John McClane dropped him off the top of Nakatomi Plaza.
But some deaths don't quite match the sins of the victim. Here are nine of the movie world's most unnecessarily mean deaths...
1. Kane – Alien
You could argue that most of the victims of the various xenomorphs either knew what they were getting into (Aliens) or weren't decent enough to care about anyway (Alien3, Alien Resurrection), but the crew of the Nostromo in the first movie are just simple space truckers – they didn't ask to be stuck in a tiny spaceship with a venomous alien for company.
But it's John Hurt's Kane who suffers the most grisly, agonized death as the first victim of the acid-blooded bitch. After appearing fully recovered from the attack on LV-426, he begins tucking into his first post-coma dinner when... oh f**k. Convulsing violently, the crew are shocked (and splattered with blood) when a tiny baby xenomorph blasts it way out of Kane's stomach. As tummy bugs go, that's definitely worse than gastroenteritis.
2. Zara Young – Jurassic World
Poor Zara Young. As sins go, being a tad disengaged while you're meant to escorting your boss' nephews around a dinosaur park ain't exactly up there with genocide or being mates with Piers Morgan. So we're thinking she didn't quite deserve the cruel and prolonged death she suffered in Jurassic World.
Firstly she's snatched by a couple of pterosaurs, who toss her around the sky a bit, before she falls into the park's lagoon, gets dragged back up by a pterosaur and is finally eaten alive by the park's mosasaurus. That's 34 seconds of stark terror before she's dino meat. Even Vic Hoskins, the big bad of the piece, had a quicker death than that.
3. Joyce Dagen – Saw: The Final Chapter
It's the horror series with more needless suffering than a Phil Collins concert, so take your pick. Particularly brutal however, is poor Joyce Dugan. Her 'crime' was unwittingly marrying a liar. Unknown to her, husband Bobby was a fraud. The crafty con-man fibbed about surviving a Jigsaw trap, profiting from said porkie.
He soon came to regret that boastful whopper when he woke up in exactly the predicament he fabricated. Tasked with hoisting himself up with hooks driven into his pecs (ouch), his punishment for failure was his missus' fiery death. It's the sort of situation no amount of marriage counselling will save.
Poor Joyce's final, frenzied moments were watching her bloodied husband bang his useless, lying fists at her flaming tomb as she burned to a flaming crisp. Nasty.
4. Ben – Night of the Living Dead
Having a black lead of a movie in 1968 was incredibly rare, so it was easy, if you weren't a redneck or a KKK dimwit, to cheer on the African-American hero of George A Romero's Night of the Living Dead. And, for all of the movie's cliché-dodging innovations, it looked like Duane Jones' Ben was your traditional film hero, the character who would save the day and survive the final reel.
Except he doesn't. After skilfully evading zombie attack after zombie attack and successfully facing down rebellion from within the house where he's hiding, in the movie's closing moments it looks like he's going to be saved by a posse of armed survivors.
But, assuming he's a zombie, the gang shoot him through the head in a death that brutally hammers home the film's message about distrust and prejudice. (The unspoken subtext is that because he's black, the vigilante crew don't bother to check whether he's living or undead.)
"Okay, he's dead, let's go get him," one of the guys says, "that's another one for the fire." Cue end titles.
5. Neil Howie – The Wicker Man
Being burned alive is one helluva punishment for never having put your wanger in a lady. But had Sergeant Neil Howie done the old in-out before venturing to the island of Summerisle, he'd have been fine and dandy and back in time for tea.
No, a virgin was just what the pagan inhabitants of the remote Scottish island wanted and so Howie spends his last minutes wailing to God as flames soar beneath him, a human sacrifice to the islanders' sun god. Still, it's moderately preferable to the death Nicolas Cage's character suffers in the pumped-up remake, which adds leg breaking and bee-stinging to the list of tortures before he's fried alive.
6. Nicky Santoro – Casino
It's tempting to think that pint-sized mob-enforcer and tantrum machine Nicky deserves everything he gets by the end of Martin Scorsese's glitzy gambler. But even for someone who tried to assassinate his best friend, shagged his wife, and squished a man's head in a vice, the way he buys the farm is still a bit excessive.
Forced to watch his brother turned to paté with steel baseball bats before suffering the same brutal pasting feels spectacularly black-hearted. Stripped of his clothes and dignity, his bloodied, pulverised remains breathe their last in a shallow sandy grave next to his similarly squished sibling. All in his tighty whities too. Bless.
7. Some poor gangster – Kick-Ass
Frank D'Amico is one mean sonofabitch, and his lackeys aren't much nicer. When D'Amico's boys nab a low-level hoodlum after all their drugs gets snatched, they only want to know the answer to one question: "Who sold you our coke?"
Shoving him into a giant industrial microwave ("They use her for treatin' the lumber," one of the mobsters tells D'Amico) they continue to fire questions at him, even as he starts clasping his head in pain. Then, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - pop! Imagine putting a ready-meal lasagne in the microwave without piercing the film. Times 100. Yuck.
That's not even mentioning the children's entertainer who Frank shoots in the head after he mistakes him for Kick-Ass.
8. Wash – Serenity
In the Firefly TV series and the Serenity film, Hoban 'Wash' Washburne was a firm fan favourite, the laconic, loyal pilot with a heart the size of a planet. A heart that was tragically punctured in the 2005 movie after he managed to pilot the ship onto the planet of the animalistic Reavers. After the chaos of the crash landing, everything is suddenly calm as Wash murmurs, "I'm a leaf on the wind," before he's speared by a harpoon. We're still not over this one.
9. Peter – Deadpool 2
Deadpool may be invincible and Cable may have a futuristic metal arm, but those powers, in the recent sequel, meant nothing next to the movie-stealing face fur of Peter (we don't even know his surname, he's that mysterious). The standout star of the second trailer, Rob Delaney's Man at C&A only joined X-Force because he caught an ad in the newspaper and thought it seemed like fun.
Being in a superteam seemed to be everything that poor Peter ever wanted, so it pained us the most to see this eager wannabe cruelly offed by having his arm burned off by Zeitgeist's acid puke. Some timey-wimey tricks in the credits bring him back to life, but we remember his scream as super-bile dissolved his flesh, even if he doesn't.
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