The most gruesome Bond deaths

Cafe Society
1

What are some of the most brutal ways to die by a character in Bond?

It can be a good or bad guy / girl, just as long as the death itself was gruesome. Ex: Martin Solo getting crushed in the car in Goldfinger wouldn’t count, since he was already dead by then, having been <yawn> shot in the chest by Oddjob.

Deaths that probably have no basis in reality also count. Ex: the guy that was somehow killed by that face-attaching octopus in Octopussy.

I’m not looking for an absolute winner in this thread, just a handy list of a bunch of creatively awful ones, most of which I have probably forgotten, all in one place for future reference.

Spoilers within, of course.

I’ll start:

• The henchman that stole Billy Bob’s boat in Live and Let Die: Bond throws gasoline in his face, then opens the throttle so that the boat careens wildly in circles for a while, then steers it into a barge, where it explodes.

• Helga Brandt getting eaten by piranhas in You Only Live Twice. Ugh.

• Dario (Benicio Del Toro) getting chewed up by the cocaine sifting machine in License to Kill.

• Kananga exploding with that shark pellet in his mouth in Live and Let Die.

2

Doctor No getting boiled in his own nuclear reactor.

Elliot Carver and the sea-drill. (But shouldn’t there have been blood all over Bond and everything else?)

3

[ul]
[li]Max Kalba and Aziz Fekkesh from The Spy Who Loved Me - Both bitten to death by Jaws’ metal jaws.[/li][li]Elliot Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies - Shredded by that torpedo drill thing.[/li][li]One of the American astronauts in You Only Live Twice - Air hose severed by the SPECTRE capsule while on an EVA outside his own space craft.[/li][li]The henchman who falls into a snowblower in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service - Again, shredded.[/li][/ul]

4

Maybe it was because I first saw it when I was an impressionable youngster, but in View to a Kill, the scuba diving CIA guy (I think it was a CIA guy) who Zorin captures and sends down the pipe with the fan at the end still creeps me out when I catch it on TV.

5

Xenia Onatopp - getting pulled up by a helicopter and then squeezed, trapped by a tree, high over the ground.

6

Here’s another vote for Elliott Carver.

And wasn’t there a guy who exploded in some kind of pressure chamber (memory is fuzzy, sorry, I saw that one when I was nine)?

7

That was in License to Kill.

“What should we do with the money?”
“Launder it.”

(The actor that played the guy getting blown up was Anthony Zerbe, the bad guy in The Omega Man and more recently the head councilman dude in Matrix Reloaded).

8

Thank you, Dooku. You are now my King. (we used to have the same “location” in our profiles, did you know?)

9

The hacker kid in Goldeneye (Boris?), getting doused in liquid nitrogen and then shattering.

“Yes! I am invincible!” splash crack

10

Falling into the printing press.

“I’ve always wanted to be in the papers.”

11

This doesn’t technically count because he didn’t die, but Felix Leiter’s “he disagreed with something that ate him” bit was pretty gruesome to me. I have a deep and abiding fear of being eaten alive, especially by sharks.

12

License to Kill was the first Bond movie to be rated R for its violence, no doubt for:

[ul][li]Talia Soto’s lover being killed off-camera by Robert Davi, who then gave her the lover’s cut-out heart along with a Valentine’s card.[/li][li]Felix Leiter (David Hedison) being shark-munched off camera.[/li][li]Milton Krest being exploded in the compression chamber.[/li][li]Nameless goon being impaled on forklift forks.[/li][li]Del Toro being shredded.[/li][li]Davi being doused in gasoline and burned alive.[/li][/ul]
Geez, did Sam Peckinpah direct this one?

13

If you are talking about “Tomorrow Never Dies”, I thought the line was, “Huh, they’ll print anything these days.”

14

Actually, an almost-R. It had to be toned down to a PG-13.

15

Mahaloth, I was referring to License to Kill. The phrase was on a note from Sanchez on Leiter’s body. The incident itself was taken from the book Live and Let Die.

16

Getting your wheelchair dropped down an active smokestack to be roasted alive can’t be any fun either.

:frowning:

17

The one where that one guy gets killed by those sharks with laser guns attached to their heads.

… no, wait…

18

Well, you have any number of people free falling from planes sans parachute. The only reason it’s not more gruesome is that we never see them land.

19

Good ones! I had forgotten about Kevin McClory’s - er, I mean, Blofeld’s death down that smokestack.

Some more good ones:

• Strangways getting sucked into space in Moonraker.

• Vijay Armitraj getting sliced to death by that sawblade yo-yo thingy in Octopussy.

• Quarrel getting burned alive by the “dragon” in Dr. No.

• Onatop squeezing the life out of you while you were busy thinking you were going to have sex with Famke Janssen was probably pretty rough.

20

Right–but my friend Jack had an even better one: “As my journalism prof told us, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’.”