… or, I suppose, the best of the rest. But I’m in a bit of a quandary here, 'cos I’d always imagined that
Sofia Coppola’s ludicrous death scene in Godfather III
was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. Then along comes Matrix Revolutions and WHAM!
Trinity dies in a much funnier way! Impaled on a hose! Who on earth can get impaled on a hose?
This may be a pointless use of spoiler boxes, but anyway. Which is the funnier? Care to suggest any others?
Owen Wilson’s death in The Haunting cracked up the entire theater. when he gets his head knocked off by a giant, swinging, iron lion head.
WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT??? It wasn’t scary, it was ridiculous!
I’ve always been greatly amused by the teacher’s death scene in Final Destination–
[spoiler]**First there’s the computer fire, then the monitor explodes and sends glass into her neck, then the stove explodes, the kitchen’s on fire, she’s on the floor, bleeding profusely from the throat, reaching up to the counter for a dish towel … and she pulls a whole mess o’ knives down onto her, impaling herself. And as if that weren’t bad enough … then the chair falls on her and drives the knife home.
It’s just hard to imagine anyone having a worse day.
**I may be wrong about the order of the catastrophes or the exact nature (except for the chair, I love the chair), but suffice to say it’s a great exercise in ridiculousness.[/spoiler]
The person that bounced off the propeller in Titantic. A well placed “Doh!” had my little group of friends rolling in the theater, which was extra amusing with the people crying around us. Evil, huh?
I just noticed that if you mouse over the thread title from the forum page, it will reveal text in Spoiler boxes. Huh.
Anyway, to the OP - I gotta go with Steven Seagal falling to his death in Executive Decision. I was so overjoyed that he was no longer going to be in the movie that I let out a little cheer.
Another one is from You Only Live Twice. James is talking with an agent that’s lived in Japan for many years (the same actor that was later the villain in Diamonds Are Forever) and is getting ready to tell James something about the vessel Ling-Po, when he just stops talking and has a weird look on his face. James runs over to find out that he’d just been stabbed in the back. I’ve never actually been stabbed in the back, but I imagine my response would be something more like “AAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHHHH!!!”
Mine is in Red Dragon
Where the Dragon glues the guy in to the wheelchair, bites off his tongue (lips?) and sends him flaming down the hill of a busy street.
I tell you, you laugh as loud and as hard as I did in the theatre at that, you get a reputation for being sick in the head.
In Meet Joe Black, when… …the car hits Brad Pitt. He flips through the air, goes splat, and gets run over by a bus (something like that). Sure it was shocking, but Brad Pitt spinning around mid-air and then getting flattened…funny stuff!
Vader’s.
He looked laughable–several people, in fact, did giggle when Luke unmasked him, plus that high-pitched British accent didn’t help. Still think Jones should have done the voice of the dying Vader.
But it don’t matter–Lucas will eventually super Christiansen over that actor anyway…
Sir Rhosis
Easily the funniest; I thought I’d be the first to mention it. He didn’t just fall to his death, he flipped end over end and flew off the right side of the screen. I also cheered. We all agreed that was the best part of the movie.
re: people getting stabbed quietly.
This was a favourite plot twist in British television / movies in the 1980s - cheap, sensational and effective. Bloke is talking. Bloke looks a bit glazed. Bloke falls forward revealing knife.
It became so common in bog-standard tv series and the like, that for years afterward whenever anyone stood relatively still and gazed into the distance, me and my brother and sister would immediately announce “he’s been stabbed!” Occasionally we were proven right and felt totally cool, but usually we’d misinterpreted some halfwit actor’s idea of depicting intense thought.
Vader’s death was stupid. They should’ve used Dave Prowse’s face, at least he looked vaguely like the eventual young Anakin, and it would have cheered him up, the poor dupe. I mean, let him have the last two minutes!
I don’t know which version it was, or who made it, but when I was in 9th grade, we watched an adaption of Dickens’s Great Expectations. The scene were Miss Havisham runs around the room in a giant fireball is comedy gold.
I was partial to “Ten points! No splash!” myself.
The climax of Kiss the Girls where Morgan Freeman is about to shoot the villain, then realizes that the flash from his gun will set off the natural gas filling the room. So he grabs a carton of milk and shoots through it to ‘dampen’ the flash while still killing the villain. I think everyone in the theater thought of the same joke at the same time. Got Milk? So the ‘thrilling’ ending just became a joke.
Re: Titanic
When the people are falling down the now-vertical part of the sinking ship:
PLINKO!
I know it’s already a really bad movie, but in Starship Troopers, the lead chick is dying and says to the lead guy “It’s ok, because I got to sleep with you first” or something very similar. Worse final words of any death scene I’ve ever witnessed.
Lee Remick’s clumsy demise in The Omen always cracks me up. Come on, casts on both arms and head stuck in a flimsy negligee?.. It reads more like a gag from Planes, Trains and Automobiles than a heart-stopping horror scene.
I third this scene. I saw an interesting interview with John Leguizamo (sp?) about this scene. He said that Segal threw a fit the day that the scene was to be shot. Segal was complaining that he never died in his films and his fans would go ape if he went through with it. The director made a comprimise with Segal in the scene. Segal’s character was supposed to explode (from the depressurization) but Segal wouldn’t have it. The director finally agreed to just let Segal float away so that the production could continue.
It would have been a sight more unintentionally amusing if they had, as anyone who’s ever heard him speak can attest.
“I have to save you!”
“You already aaave, moi son.”
Normally I would question this, as what sort of actor would sign onto a project without reading the script first and have no idea that his character dies until the day that scene is to be shot.
Normally.
I had mine all picked out as soon as I read the thread title, but Ross had to go and use it for his very first example.
“Daddy.” thump