The Top 10 Villains of "Stranger Things"

It's been awhile since I posted an entry in this blog, and I wanted to do something relatively short and sweet. Somehow the idea of a villain ranking for the Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things popped into my mind, and here we are.

Stranger Things has done a great job of developing its characters, and quite a few of them are portrayed as having a mix of good and bad qualities. Dustin's a lovable goofball, but he's not above covering up for an otherworldly pet who turns out to be more hostile than he expects. And who doesn't love Season 2 Steve, now that he's matured from the complete douchebag he was at the start of the series?

So these are the characters that seem to have more bad than good in them. Let's see how they rank (spoilers ahead):

10. The Demogorgon

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Yes, the rampaging monster from the first season is barely on the list, even though it probably killed Nancy's best friend and sparked all those #JusticeForBarb posts. Because when it comes down to it, the Demogorgon is just some creature from an alternate dimension who wound up doing what it always does, just in our world. There was recently a giant uproar in my city because a coyote wandered out of the woods and snacked on a few small dogs; no one really blamed the coyote for doing this, everyone was just advised to not let their highly edible toy dogs run free. I kind of see the Demogorgon as having a similar nature.

9. Dart

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Dart is kind of a similar case. You could even argue that he's not as bad as the Demogorgon. After all, he's fairly harmless when he's a tadpole, and Dustin managed to tame him enough that he opts not to harm him and the others later in the film. You may even feel a little sorry for him when he dies.

On the other hand, I'm a cat person and Dart rather brutally kills Mews, Dustin's cat. Not cool, Dart.

8. Troy's weasel friend

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He has a name? Fine. James.

James is your typical middle school jerk who likes to pick on others, which in Stranger Things includes Mike, Dustin, Will, and Lucas. He basically serves as the backup and reinforcement for Troy's nastier brand of bullying, but shows at least some moral compass when he protests Troy's demand that Mike jump off a cliff. He's perfectly fine with Troy threatening to carve Dustin's teeth out of his head, though. Reign in those boundaries a little more, James.

7. Billy Hargrove

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I originally had Billy, Max's jerkwad stepbrother, set much higher on the list. His character acts like someone turned his persona to "Asshole" and then broke the dial off. He's cocky, domineering, and abusive. There are times when he's disturbingly violent, such as when he nearly runs down Mike and friends with his car and when he gleefully beats Steve unconscious.

I'm cutting him a bit of slack, though, since one scene suggests that some of his personality stems from his father's mistreatment. There's also the possibility that nearly getting castrated by a nail-studded baseball bat will humble him a bit in the third season.

6. Troy's mom

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We only see Troy's mother once, when she makes a ruckus at the Hawkins Police Department about how they need to find the girl who broke her son's arm. Troy probably changed the story from "This girl attacked me with her mind when I tried to murder a kid" to some blubbering lie that bullies like to tell when their victims fight back, but her demeanor suggests that she's been taken in by the misconception that her jerk son is a perfect angel for way too long. Stop your enabling, Mom.

5. Dr. Martin Brenner

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On the one hand, he's an evil mad scientist whose crimes have included abducting and experimenting on a child, unleashing hellish creatures from an alternate dimension on an unsuspecting small town, and generally being a pretty unscrupulous and shady guy.

On the other hand, he managed to give Eleven telekinetic powers and she seems perfectly happy with those. Wouldn't you want telekinetic powers?

4. Troy

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Why is Troy ranked higher than the mad doctor and a couple of literal monsters? Because screw bullies, that's why. He starts off as the kind of jerk who throws a few insults and taunts around, which is shitty but something bullies tend to grow out of once they get a little more mature.

But when you ruthlessly mock a classmate after he's been declared dead, threaten in all seriousness to remove someone's teeth with a knife, and demand that one of your bullying victims take a suicidal leap into a quarry, you're firmly in sociopath territory. Troy doesn't show up in Season 2, probably because his parents finally found his collection of tortured squirrels and sent him off to get electroshock therapy.

3. Connie Frazier

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Benny, the owner of a Hawkins diner, is an instantly likable character. He's angered when he sees Eleven sneaking some food out of his kitchen, but immediately grows kinder when he realizes that she's apparently escaped from a bad situation.

So it's pretty shocking and saddening when Benny's attempt to get Eleven help ends up getting him murdered by Connie Frazier, who poses as a social services worker and before abruptly shooting him.   She later manages to manipulate the boys' biology teacher in her hunt for Eleven, and you're left worrying that the teacher won't make it out alive, either. Frazier is cold, manipulative, and dangerous, so it's pretty satisfying when Eleven telekinetically takes her out.

2. The Mind Flayer

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I've given the other creatures from the Upside Down a bit of a pass, since they kind of come off as dumb animals. The Mind Flayer is something else entirely, acting as a sort of hive mind who can control the other creatures and infect people to use for its own purposes, which would seem to entail taking over our world. Yeah, the giant smoke spider is pretty bad. But it's still outdone by...

1. Stacey

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We see Stacey in one scene, at the very end of the second season, in which she rudely turns down Dustin's request to dance. Everyone loves Dustin, so I don't have much patience for someone whose actions (combined with some similarly hostile girls, admittedly) leave him fighting back tears on the bleachers. Especially when that person is so very full of herself.

Stacey, you're worse than the bullies, evil government agents, and monsters from another realm we meet in the show. Think about that while you're on the long, steady downward slope from your peak in middle school.

Top 10 Strangest Pre-Breaking Bad Roles of Breaking Bad Actors

Breaking Bad concluded in September, but some of the buzz around the show has continued. The popularity of the final season inspired plenty of people to watch it, and a spinoff around character Saul Goodman will be starting up this fall.

At this point, I'm probably going to limit my blog posts on Breaking Bad to two more posts: one more "defining moments" post on the last eight episodes and this idea, which grew out of the various jokes about the previous roles of the actors (one of the best suggestions linking Walter White with Bryan Cranston's other famous role has Breaking Bad as a prequel to Malcolm in the Middle).

So with no further ado, here are the top 10 strangest pre-Breaking Bad roles of Breaking Bad actors.

10. RJ Mitte: Jock on Hannah Montana

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Mitte's first on-screen role was a background, non-speaking part on the hit Disney Channel show that starred Miley Cyrus back before her tongue went all Venom-y. He's credited only as "School Jock," wearing a letter jacket in one scene. A few years later, Mitte started playing Walter White Jr.

9. Anna Gunn: Jerry's Girlfriend on Seinfeld

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This is probably one of the better known examples. In her pre-Skyler White days, Anna Gunn was one of the 57 girlfriends Jerry has in the course of Seinfeld. She plays this role in the episode "The Glasses," in which George thinks he sees Jerry's girlfriend Amy making out with Jerry's cousin.

Anna Gunn has been in the film and TV industry since 1992, when she appeared on an episode of Quantum Leap.

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You may have also spotted her in the 1998 thriller Enemy of the State, playing a character named Emily Reynolds.

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8. Aaron Paul: Johnny Knoxville Wannabe on The X-Files

A few years ago I watched all episodes of The X-Files and tallied up a body count of all the people, aliens, and creatures to die over the course of the popular show. I also checked the IMDB page on each episode and made a note of any before-they-were-famous types to make an appearance.

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One of them happened to be Aaron Paul, giving us a glimpse of what Jesse Pinkman may have been like in high school. He plays David "Sky Commander Winky" Winkle, a student who puts together videos on teenagers doing stupid things for a project he dubs The Dumb Ass Show. He also antagonizes a classmate with a variety of insect powers, earning him a retaliatory back rash.

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If you were home sick at the right time in the year 2000, you may have also seen him make it all the way to the Showcase Showdown on The Price is Right using his birth name of Aaron Sturtevant.



7. Matt Jones: Deep-Frying a Turkey on Gilmore Girls

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According to his IMDB page, Matt Jones didn't really come onto the scene until he began playing Brendan "Badger" Mayhew in Breaking Bad. But he does have a single role from 2002: a fellow named Morgan in an episode of Gilmore Girls. He apparently doesn't have any lines; Morgan doesn't appear in a transcript of the episode, though Jones is part of a family that deep-fries their turkey for Thanksgiving.

6. Steven Michael Quezada: "Mexican" in Beerfest

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Before Albuquerque's film industry became especially prominent with Breaking Bad, the city hosted the comedy troupe Broken Lizard (best known for Super Troopers) as they made the 2006 comedy Beerfest. Steven Michael Quezada won a small role, credited only as "Mexican," as one of his earlier roles prior to playing Hank's partner Steven Gomez.

It's also worth noting that Quezada, an Albuquerque native, was elected to a school board seat in the city in February of 2013, during the break between the first and last halves of the show's final season. I couldn't find a screenshot from his appearance in Beerfest, but that picture up top is from the ABQ's schools website.

5. Laura Fraser: "The Future" in Vanilla Sky

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I never saw Vanilla Sky, the bizarre sci-fi movie starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, and Penelope Cruz. It might be known mostly for a scene where Cruise's character runs through a deserted Times Square (and the movie's decision, unorthodox at the time, to not edit the World Trade Center out while many other films and TV shows in late 2001 were doing so after the buildings' destruction).



Laura Fraser, nearly a decade before playing Madrigal Electromotive's nervy and scheming executive Lydia Rodarte-Quayle, is the voice of the unseen entity that speaks to Cruise and delivers the last line in the movie. She's credited as "The Future."

4. Bryan Cranston: Villain in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

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Bryan Cranston's more recent alter ego of Hal on Malcolm in the Middle might lack the villainy that comes to characterize Walter White, and many of his other roles involve rather kind-hearted people. It's not like he never played the bad guy, though. He voiced a couple of villains who fought a group of teenage superheroes in the campy series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.



There was also that time he walked on the Moon. Cranston played Buzz Aldrin in From the Earth to the Moon, the terrific miniseries on the early days of the space program.

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And he was that one-armed officer who sends Tom Hanks et al out after Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan.

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3. Giancarlo Esposito: Big Bird's Camp Counselor on Sesame Street

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Even in his first appearance, it becomes clear that Gustavo Fring's genial kindness is only the crunchy candy shell over a core of cold ruthlessness. So it's a little disconcerting to see him palling around with Big Bird, especially after his role as a meth kingpin working behind a fried chicken franchise front.

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Giancarlo Esposito got the part of a camp counselor on the popular children's show after running out of options in the acting world, but admitted in an Onion AV Club interview that it was a pretty great experience. He was also one of the voices in the chorus that sang the theme for The Electric Company.

2. Dean Norris: Martian Mutant on Total Recall 

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Dean Norris must have a thing for science fiction. I'm not just saying this because the guy who played Hank Schrader once played a Martian mutant named Tony in the film Total Recall.

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He also played an officer in Starship Troopers.

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He apparently really likes the Terminator series. He was leading the SWAT team that found a dying Miles Dyson at Skynet HQ in Terminator 2...

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...and returned in the short-lived series The Sarah Connor Chronicles to play a nuclear power plant manager in a couple of episodes.

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1. Jonathan Banks: Helping Girls Understand Periods

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Yes, the actor behind the coldly efficient yet warmhearted fixer Mike Ehrmantraut had his first credited screen acting role as a doofy high school boyfriend  in Linda's Film on Menstruation, a 1974 public service announcement on...well, you know. Skip to 11:05 to see Banks ask if vaginas can control the weather.

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I'm going to wager that Jonathan Banks is able to look back on this and laugh. He's been in comedy roles, after all, like that time he played one of the air traffic controllers in the 1980 comedy classic Airplane!

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Top 10 Movies Made Better By Seeing Them In A Theater

Let's face it, sometimes it isn't quite worth it to go see a movie when it is first released in theaters. Aside from the sometimes expensive tickets and long train of pre-feature advertisements and trailers, the main issue is mostly those pesky other people who also want to see the same thing as you. Which would be fine if it weren't for the ones with the cell phones and delusions of MST3K caliber riffing talent. In the end I thought Looper was great and well worth seeing in the first run, but I could have done without the gaggle of teenagers a few rows up who considered every scene of someone getting shotgunned in the chest to be hilarity of a Chaplinesque quality.

But there's a reason movie theaters stay in business, after all. Sometimes seeing something on the big screen or with a group makes it much more of an experience than just popping a DVD in. Sometimes it's the enhanced picture or sound that makes it that much more memorable. And sometimes there's something about seeing a movie for the first time with dozens or hundreds of other people that just seems to heighten its quality. That was the case when I saw...

10. The Dark Knight (2008)

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This was probably the first movie I saw in the theater with a villain who genuinely made you uneasy. Part of The Dark Knight's success was no doubt due to Heath Ledger's untimely death shortly before the movie's release, but it's likely that he would have received rave reviews for his role as the Joker in any case. As I've mentioned, sometimes you go to a movie and people laugh at inappropriate times. In this case, you could measure the feelings of the crowd by the dead silence at most scenes and uneasy chuckles at the Joker's black humor. An entire group of people found the "pencil trick" funny, but you could tell they didn't want to sympathize with its perpetrator.

9. Forrest Gump (1994)

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I would have been about 10 years old when I saw this with my parents, so I couldn't quite appreciate the historical layering appearing throughout. I guess I knew a bit about JFK and Vietnam, but it wasn't until later that I could appreciate scenes such as Forrest inadvertently kicking off the Watergate scandal. Still, the strength of the movie is more in the story. This was probably one of the first (if not the first) movie I went to with my family that wasn't in the G or PG category, and I was completely fascinated.

8. Borat (2006)

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This is one of those odd things that was really popular and well-reviewed when it came out and then collapsed under its own success. After awhile, everyone got annoyed at the scads of people who thought their Borat impression was just tops or that going as Borat to the Halloween party was clever and original. But when you saw this in the theater, you didn't know about any of that and just knew this was supposed to be a funny movie. And seeing a comedy in the theater is generally a better experience since you're sharing a laugh with so many people.

7. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) / Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)

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Well these ones came out a little too early for me to see on their debut, but I still saw them on the big screen. I was at a writing program at a small college, and part of the entertainment included in the six weeks was the showing of a few movies. One evening was Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (the latter of which was unfortunately a bit of a letdown after the first; Life of Brian may have been the better choice). This was my first introduction to Monty Python, and the kind of humor was right up my alley. Even if the other people in the program who decided to take in this double feature were so well-acquainted with the film that they knew every line, they were still laughing uproariously. It was one hell of a way to first see the bizarre classic.

6. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

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I can't remember exactly where I saw this movie. I just remember that the opening scene of the D-Day invasion was already getting a lot of discussion when I saw the film with my family not too long after it opened. You knew it was going to be violent and brutal and difficult to watch, but it was still a shock when the first wave of soldiers prepared to storm the beach and was immediately cut down by gunfire. The whole sequence was so disheartening that when the first German was finally taken out someone gave a spontaneous cheer. Saving Private Ryan is often cited as the movie that reminded people that war isn't a pretty thing, and the sensory experience of watching it on the big screen drove the point home.

5. Contact (1997)


Although flawed in a few respects, the most memorable parts of Contact were also the scenes that were incredible when seen in the theater. First there was the unexpected silence of the title screen, followed by the zoom out from Earth that gave perspective to just how small a place in the universe we really occupy. The jarring flight of the transportation device to Vega through a series of wormholes was also a visual tour de force, frightening and exhilarating at the same time.

4. 50/50 (2011)

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This one sticks out for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was the first full-length movie I saw it in New London's Garde Arts Center, a historic theater with perks such as balcony seating and beer sales (both of which I took advantage of in seeing 50/50). And since the humor of comedies tends to be heightened when you see it with a group, the quick pace and wit of 50/50 got quite a few laughs. And considering the emotional power of the film later on, it's the first I'd been to with the opposite effect. Namely that one powerful scene made it clear that a lot of people were weeping.

3. The Simpsons Movie (2007) 

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Given that The Simpsons had already overstayed their television welcome by several years by the time this came out, I was a little skeptical about how this would turn out. The show was nowhere near the quality of the older episodes that won it a following, so there was plenty of concern that that the movie was going to be just as disappointing. But since work on the movie dated back to that golden age, the movie was something of a callback to that period. And watching it with a room full of Simpsons fans reminded me of old get-togethers with friends, helplessly laughing at the antics of America's favorite family.

2. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)


I started reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy after seeing the first Peter Jackson film adaptation and was impressed to find how much of the book he'd fit onto the screen. And a little worried that he covered so little of the second book in the follow-up. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the conclusion was arguably the best of the lot, with the final confrontation between good and evil about as flawless as it could be. And as always, such epic showdowns are that much better on the big screen.

1. The Avengers (2012)

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Well what can you say about this? Plenty of movies expect viewers to have seen a film or two as groundwork for the latest picture, but with five prior pictures this was a pretty audacious undertaking. This was the first movie I went to see at a midnight premiere, joining a couple of friends who are more steeped in comic book culture. The excitement at the premiere was palpable, all the more so because just about every review coming in said The Avengers wasn't going to disappoint. It's safe to say that if you saw this at the first opportunity, you weren't just taking in a good movie in a crowded theater; you were laughing, cheering, applauding, and having a hell of a lot of fun.

Summer Glau Holding Things

This idea popped into my head for some reason, perhaps because I haven't worked the Summer Glau theme into a post since January, and the one before that was the first reference in nearly a year. Also because it seemed like it could be a lot of fun, and I was right! You could probably start up a whole other blog based on this idea. And now I'm tempted, but may just settle for the occasional rundown of celebrities holding things. Thus the new category I've added.

All right, let's run down ten things the image search pulled up.

10. Broadsword

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There can be only one Summer Glau. Which makes her immortal, I guess. No one is complaining.

A screenshot from the movie Knights of Badassdom, currently in post-production. And yes, the trailer unabashedly takes advantage of the fact that Summer Glau in a short skirt with a broadsword is hot enough to contribute to global warming. But she's joining Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones), Danny Pudi (Community), and Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) for a movie about LARP nerds accidentally summoning a demon. It looks awesome.



9. Up A Bank

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Because Summer is sick of Fox canceling her shows and she needs to make some money somehow and everybody get on the ground RIGHT NOW.

A screenshot from the pilot of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicle in which Cameron and the Connors need to get to a time machine hidden in the bank vault or safe deposit boxes or something. Well maybe if you'd just asked nicely...

8. Serenity

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Here Summer holds (and kisses) a model of the Firefly class starship Serenity. The ship comes from the cult series Firefly, where Summer played the mysterious character River Tam.

Wait, what's that? You think it looks like what?! Oh, you've got a filthy mind. And crooked anatomy. Go see a doctor.

7. Gum

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Eh, gum. Never been a huge fan, just makes you hungry and loses its flavor and...er, I mean, I love it! Especially that 5 sugar-free gum from Wrigley! I'm going to by some right now and "stimulate my senses," ha ha!

This is purportedly Summer at a Comic Con appearance in New York. The picture she's standing in front of includes something on the "Human Preservation Project," no doubt a Terminator franchise thing. Why it involves all the 5 gum promotion, I don't know. Maybe Wrigley has the launch codes.

6. The Wee Baby Seamus

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Summer inspects a child for service in the robots' capacitor mines. Yes, good tiny hands on this one. They'll be able to have it crawling into tight spaces to unclog gears in no time.

No, of course this is just Summer holding a fan's baby during a FanExpo event.

5. Another Kid, In A Threatening Manner

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Would someone get Summer on a TV show that lasts longer than two seasons? Seriously, she's shaking down little kids for lunch money now.

Another still from TSCC, in which Summer calms down a bratty kid destined to be part of the future human resistance by neutralizing his gravity a little bit.

4. An Apple

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"Alas, poor apple! I knew it well, Horatio, a fruit of infinite zest, of most excellent juiciness..."

And I could probably try for more of the Hamlet speech, but as with most Shakespeare it goes on for awhile and it might take more time than I'm willing to spend to substitute apple words for skull words. Another TSCC image, this captures the moment in an episode when grocery shopping causes Cameron to go all Windows Vista on us.

3. A Tin Heart

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I'd like to think this is from some promotion where Summer Glau appears in different parts of the world with various clues, leading us on some grand mystery tour to a greater truth. Or maybe she's just waiting for a maelstrom to arrive so she can get that thing to Oz.

This is apparently a Warner Brothers photo shoot. Or something for Valentine's Day. Or a symbolic TSCC shot illustrating the question of whether robots can feel. Or maybe she was just at the coast and needed a breadbox.

2. Puppet Bono

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Summer contemplates all the terrible, horrible, no good very bad things she's going to make the lead singer of U2 go through now that she has a Bono voodoo doll.

Another shot from FanExpo, it looks like. The explanation given is that the Bono puppet was created by an Etsy designer who has it pose with celebrities and go on wacky adventures, which you can follow here.

1. Breast Cancer Bear

(summerglauwiki.com)

Summer is un-bear-ably cute. Urghh, ooh, I forgot about that ulcer that acts up whenever I make a bad pun. It's on my pun-creas. Owwww...

Here, Summer displays a bit of awesomeness by taking part in a fundraiser for breast cancer research. The bear she's holding was auctioned off for $2,007.64, with the winner getting the bear and this picture framed.

Top 10 Stupidest Final Destination Deaths

I had to double time on this article, as I realized that the fifth Final Destination movie it was supposed to preview or coordinate with came out today. The series can be described in two sentences. "Teens escape death in a [plane crash/highway pileup/roller coaster accident/race track disaster/bridge collapse]. Death stalks them one by one, and claims them in gruesome ways." It's the same damn movie five times over, and people keep going to see it. Apparently the first one was halfway decent, though now they're milking the series until, in the true Final Destination fashion, the auto-milking machine starts to suck out blood and innards (ie, film critics will personally murder anyone who continues to watch the new movies that come out and call it part of the experience, and the gross after all the lawsuits will be well in the red).

Now I know I'm complaining about something I haven't seen, what with...well, not watching any of these movies. But it seems like the only reason there's still a demand for this series is to see what ways the writers can come up with people to die. A lot of people have a certain morbid curiosity (it's why I know what a lot of the series' deaths are, after all), so they'll fork over the cash to see how the latest batch bites it. Most of the time it involves some sort of elaborate Rube Goldberg setup. Rube Goldberg, incidentally, died at the ripe old age of 87 after a long illness so apparently he and Death were on OK terms.

"It beats getting decapitated by an elevator."

So without further ado, here are my picks for the top 10 stupidest deaths in the Final Destination movies that have come out to date, minus the latest one which I will not watch. Keep in mind that there are the stupidest deaths...not the worst ways to die, of which there are plenty, but the ones that are absurd. Also, apologies for the clips I can't embed.

10. Movie theaters double as storage units for explosives (The Final Destination)

I'm really not sure how 3D movies came back. The glasses are less stupid-looking, and a bunch of theaters somehow became 3D capable, and quite a few movies now come in with this option. The better ones, like Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon, use it to make it something of an immersing experience without compromising the story. The worse movies use it as a gimmick to throw stuff at the audience. Case in point: this scene in The Final Destination.


Um...did we stumble into Inglourious Basterds or something? What mall theater leaves a depot of highly explosive materials in the megaplex where hundreds of people are concentrated? And not just highly explosive, but "spontaneously combustible" as the one barrel warns, so these things could just blow up for no reason at all. So we get the hot teens chewing the scenery over how they were supposed to be safe at this shitty movie within a shitty movie all along before the massive fireball blows out the screen and hurls a sharp piece of debris at the one girl for a last 3D thrill. Or perhaps your own theater just exploded and killed you? Those wags at The Final Destination sure know how to make you think, but they apparently don't know that most movie theaters have an emergency exit (aka, "the outside") behind the screen instead of a warehouse of nitroglycerin.

This technically doesn't qualify, since the whole sequence is just a vision and the blast is prevented. Still, enough explosives to level a block stored inside a movie theater...

9. The insanely unsafe race track (The Final Destination)

The Final Destination movies always start with some calamity killing dozens of people, and a handful escaping due to a character having a prescient filmstrip of the whole disaster. In the first two movies, it's a horrifying portrayal of a plane crash (thus the only real fitting use of "final destination") and a highway pileup. It gets into more obscure things from there, starting with a roller coaster mishap in the third movie and a race track catastrophe in the fourth movie.

To be fair, auto races aren't immune from tragedy; for some reason people still go to rally car races where the only thing separating spectators from injury or death is a line of tape making sure they don't go onto the track themselves. And a quick search of "race track disaster" brings up the the 24 Hours of Le Mans incident, in which a crashing vehicle did quite a few of the things portrayed here, albeit in the blink of an eye rather than an exaggerated period of half a dozen minutes. According to the Wikipedia article, the flying hood decapitated several people, the engine block flew into the crowd, and an estimated 84 people were killed.



That, however, was in 1955. This movie takes place some 55 years later, when modern race tracks have safety measures such as stronger fences and stop flags to ensure that every car doesn't obliterate itself and hurl debris into panicked grandstands. If the stadium at every racetrack had burning cars flying through flimsy fences and huge chunks of concrete collapsing into the stands, I think NASCAR would be a lot less popular, at least when it came to live attendance. On top of that, you have some downright ridiculous deaths such as the guy who slips and impales himself on a broken bench.

8. Unwanted face piercings (Final Destination 3)

If I'm interpreting this scene correctly, Ramona Flowers there is somehow interpreting a photo from the Carnival of Roller Coaster Death and translating it into "That little whirlwind is going to impale that guy with a bunch of stakes." At which point Death just decides that he'd much rather pile everyone under Ikea surplus and vault a bunch of stuff at a Goth girl so she falls into a possibly triggerless nail gun.



I don't do much in the way of home improvement projects, but I'm pretty sure nail guns need something to set them off. Was there a single frame of the nail gun trigger snagged on the table edge somewhere in this mess? Do some nail guns just operate by pressure alone? Let's watch that opening scene from the fourth season of The Wire, mainly to get a bit of a palette cleanser with some decent multimedia but also to learn some more about this particular power tool.



7. Window panes do not work that way! (Final Destination 2)

You've narrowly avoided a disaster which has killed dozens, and now the people who also cheated death are meeting their demise in ways which are gruesome and painful. In a sense, it's amazing these people aren't hiding out in a bomb shelter and waiting until Death is sated on the latest earthquake victims or something. But I guess you could stare Death in the eye and go about your daily business and run idiotically into a restricted zone to hassle some pigeons:



For shame, Final Destination 2 writers and producers. You couldn't think of some bloodier mishap, say a pane of glass guillotining him lengthwise from head to toe and leaving a couple of slices of human like you see in all the science museums these days? Instead, they decide that window panes versus humans must be done in a flat, head-on way that, for some reason, flattens this poor kid like he's made of mashed potatoes. Granted, this chart does suggest that giant panes of glass are heavy enough to do damage before they shatter, but judging from that clip I have to guess that Death was trying to trap him in the Phantom Zone and only got halfway through or something.

6. Muscles don't make you immortal, ass (Final Destination 3)

You've cheated death but discovered that Death is a nasty character and wants to, um, kill you. What's a guy to do? Why, punch Death in the face, I guess. That seems to be Jock Footballstar's attitude here:



So to recap: the team keeps a stuffed bear in the weight room, like any team with a bear mascot of course. A claw gets knocked into the face of some big guy (who, for a big guy, takes the unprecedented step of flinching away from a bear claw), and then there's some scimitars and head smashing and all.

I think the main thing to take away from this is the question of what school decided that a wise investment would be a coat of arms whose swords are sharp enough to slice through a fucking metal cable. I can only imagine the conversation that must have taken place for that:

Superintendent: I say we need razor sharp scimitars on the coat of arms in the weight room.
Board of Education Member: Are you sure? You know, we could use an upgrade to the computer lab. We're still on Windows 95 and-
Superintendent: NO. RAZOR SHARP SCIMITARS IN THE WEIGHT ROOM.

5. Yes, but can you make the pool drain dangerously powerful? (The Final Destination)

All right, I guess this is another one I might have to renege on. A simple search for "pool drain" uncovers this CNN story about how drains can exert 500 pounds of vacuum force and disembowel people. The stupidity factor lies more in the reason for Beef Jerkass heading to the bottom of the pool in the first place. OK, so his cell phone is dead and maybe this club has a pay phone he needs to use, but how is he going to check his voice mail? How is he even going to remember the number of the people he wants to dial in this, the age of mobile? Is he just really desperate to do his laundry and can't make do with only 30 minutes of drying?

"Curse you, socialist quarter! This is what happens when you put a Democrat in the White Houuuuu-[explodes]"

And we all know his reaction wouldn't be to go diving into the pool after a measly 25 cents, even in this economy. He'd go off onto the links to commit roid rage against whatever golfer looks like a reasonable enough culprit for a mis-aimed ball, or at least whatever golfer looks thrashable enough, which is to say, all of them. Death could have had a lot of fun figuring out a death out there, too, perhaps involving Rodney Dangerfield and a yacht.

4. Horse breaks the laws of physics (Final Destination 3)

I can at least appreciate that some of these setups are clever and even possible somewhere in the multiverse. There's a reason we have the phrase "freak accident," after all. But then there are scenes like this:



Putting aside the fact that the horse is only tied to a loosely planted flag, there's also the question of whether something with one, that's right, one horsepower has enough force to fling a javelin-like object in a nice arcing trajectory across the fairgrounds and right into some nice girl's back. If it did happen, odds are some people looked at this tragedy as some good inside information on the next Kentucky Derby results.

3. He should have just asked to be friends (The Final Destination)

I guess it's a requirement of the Final Destination universe that cars have to be leaking gas at all time. They must be perpetually at war in that universe to secure oil reserves for their fuel inefficient vehicles, the dumb motherfu-


Oh. Right. OK, let's just take a look at the clip.

So yeah, I'm not even sure why the tow truck's tank is spouting about a gallon of gas a minute, which seems to be the main cause of death here. Maybe there was something I missed earlier. Maybe he just decided to poke a hole in it to douse a cross for the burning, which seems to be his point in visiting this guy's house because the guy stopped him from going back into Le Mans Redux to save his wife or some such thing. Or maybe his company's motto is "Carter's Towing: We'll Pick You Up, But We Should Really Only Drive With A Half Tank Since There Are A Couple Of Punctures We Need To Patch Up At Some Point."

2. Death really hates educators (Final Destination)

Ah, teachers. Underpaid and overburdened with the responsibility of turning our youth into the leaders of tomorrow. Also, completely unaware of their surroundings.

I'm not sure about temperature differentials and all, aside from the time I spent working in a restaurant where the explicit instructions were to not leave an empty coffee pot heating on the burner because if you tried to fill it with water again it would explode in your face. Also the time my mother heated a Pyrex dish of something on the stove and it did just that, except for the my face part. Still, I think even the high school restaurant employees among us would recognize if a cup or container cracked open and started spilling liquid all over the place. Not so much the English teachers on Long Island, it seems. In all the ways Death succeeds in wounding this woman without delivering the fatal blow, I can only think of him as the incompetent hitman in Mulholland Drive. Hasn't he had hundreds of millions of years of practice in this sort of thing?



The idiot majority on YouTube believe the message of this clip is "teachers have flammable blood." No, it's more a result of this alcohol trail which is so very comprehensive that it can track its way back to the source bottle and detonate that. Perhaps vodka, like everything else in this universe, is just gasoline with another name. Credit is due for the teacher slipping on her own blood but recovering, but the fact that so much of her kitchen (and, after this clip, her entire house) winds up detonating is a bit odd. Was the teacher pulling a Breaking Bad sort of operation and running a meth lab in her kitchen cabinets?

1. The news media, now with more explosions! (Final Destination 2)

Given that I work in the media field, it's no secret that the TV news vans can show up awfully quick on the scene, sending either the rapid response SUV unit with a cameraman and good-looking reporter or the satellite truck which is apparently the exact same thing but allows you to broadcast live from the scene rather than just tape some footage for the next Live At Whatever. In this clip, it seems the former option has responded to a bad-enough car accident out in the middle of nowhere.



And once again you have to play the Breakfast Machine music as the ever-leaking vehicles over in Final Destinationland, the world's worst amusement park/alternate universe, as a cigarette ignites a gasoline trail that somehow leads from the accident to the news van (did they just decide that they needed to pull right up next to the wreck before the firefighters chased them off?), blows up the van, and throws some barbed wire at this Rory guy. Even assuming it would make it that far, with that much force, it's not razor wire or piano wire or anything that typically has the slicing capability in movies. It's probably just there to ensure the sheep don't wander off. Rory would likely get a couple of rusty puncture wounds, but I guess they didn't want to show a slow death by tetanus.