Going Out With a Bang

Share on Facebook posted 04-08-09 by Angelo D'Argenio

While it certainly takes great skill to do a death scene well on film, it’s the poorly executed execution that more often rises to the level of true art. Under-budget and over-the-top death scenes tend to include truly bizarre causes for character extinction, from peculiar methods of impalement, to full body disintegration, to fatalities so freaky and incomprehensible we can’t even explain them (in those cases, it’s a fair bet the culprit is a wizard). Fact is, it’s way more fun to watch awful death scenes than good ones — and here are some of the worst.

Eat Your Heart Out, Flat Stanley

The reason this scene from Final Destination 3 sticks out to me is simple. After being missed by a perilous cavalcade of pyrotechnics, this cocky death dodger manages to get squashed by … a sign. A sign he sees coming. A sign he sees coming and makes no attempt to avoid. Now, quite apart from his whole “deer in the headlights” reaction, this particular sign, judging by its movement in the scene, is quite clearly made of cloth, cloth that is apparently so heavy you can’t even see his corpse underneath it! That’s some heavy cloth! Heck, if this magical cloth is heavy enough to totally flatten a body, I think we’ve got a new method of trash compacting — and corpse disposal — on our hands.

The Digesting Bed

Ah, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats People. This movie was so bad that multiple comedians have done bits about it. The premise: There is a bed, which is evil, and eats people. Genius!!! Now, this particular scene is a cheesy-fatality twofer: the death of both a curly-haired doofus and of the death bed itself. Maybe it’s just me, but once you feel your flesh dissolving and sliding right off the bone, isn’t it about time that you got your hands out of the bed’s stomach? Still, for my money, it’s his astonished gaze as he checks out his still-moving skeleton hands that makes this scene such a gem. Two thumbs up, death bed — you are truly horrible!

The Outhouse Death Scene

You heard me … Outhouse Death Scene. Before I go any further, let me just say that I love old-school movies like this. Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers was supposed to get your pulse racing by making you believe that anyone in this camp of innocent kids could be a vicious murderer. There are plenty of scenes where characters narrowly avoid death, and all of them are as bad as this one. Just look at it: First there were two clean stabs, both into the same wound, both of which would surely puncture a lung, or at least cause massive bleeding. But no, this is not what does in the blonde cutie in the short shorts. Rather, it is her subsequent stuffing into a toilet with a stick that signs her last check. Oh, and the simulated poo? That, well, that was just brown-hued genius.