9 Movie Scenes That Went Completely Over The Top
9 Movie Scenes That Went Completely Over The Top
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00:00 Hollywood is known as many things, but above all, it's a luscious parade of riches.
00:05 Excess to the extreme and embarrassingly flashy things moving 24 frames a second.
00:10 With this in mind, the following moments are where directors were clearly let loose to go
00:14 mad. Free to go as over the top as they wanted, almost certainly to the annoyance of the producers.
00:20 I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com and these are 9 Movie Scenes That Went Completely Over The Top.
00:25 Number 9 - Mickey Rock Explodes With A Tiger - Double Team
00:29 The 90s was a vastly different time, one in which audiences could see a trailer for a buddy action
00:35 film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman and not think they had fallen into an
00:40 alternate dimension. In 1997, it was just another in a long line of oddball pairings. Rodman at this
00:46 point was at the height of his success as a player and a paparazzi show-off, a controversial figure
00:51 even then. Then he got it in his head that he wanted to venture into the movie business,
00:56 seeing as how well that turned out for Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal.
01:00 So he took on the role of Yaz, an arms dealer who pairs with Van Damme's CIA agent to take
01:05 down a terrorist planning to sell plutonium to Iraq. Every line of the film feels as if it were
01:11 from an action script template made on some screenwriting software somewhere, complete with
01:16 personal vendettas, you know him better than anyone speeches, and the unlikely friendship
01:21 that forms between Van Damme and Mickey Rourke's character, it's all just played worse in this flick.
01:27 That is, except for the aforementioned Rourke's character and his death. See, the actor was miles
01:32 away from Sin City and credibility in general at this time, so he's settled for crap like this.
01:38 As a result, the end of the film finds him standing on an active landmine in a Greek stadium,
01:43 which explodes just as he's attacked by a marauding tiger. It's best not to question such a
01:50 slice of cinematic heaven, so I'll just leave it there.
01:53 Number 8 - Finn Dives Into A Shark's Mouth - Sharknado
01:57 Sharknado jokes started going around the water cooler before even the movie premiered,
02:01 but it did do something for the sci-fi network that no other show had done before. It actually
02:06 got an audience. Many tuned in to vibe on the first entry so bad it's good spirit,
02:11 and for the most part, weren't disappointed. Though it's diminished returns upon sequels
02:16 do make audiences forget just how much goodwill the original earned, and there is still plenty
02:21 to get a kick out of in Sharknado. But it's also a bit of a bore, with almost a half hour
02:27 of character development that goes nowhere and a lot of actors clearly there just to cash a paycheck.
02:33 What makes it exceptional though is how much payoff there is there in the final act when that
02:36 finally comes, from the insane junk science to the perfectly timed fall from helicopter to flying
02:43 shark's mouth, but nothing stands out as much as the epic chainsaw finale. See, after all the
02:48 Sharknados are extinguished, a falling shark heads towards our hero, who is literally called Finn by
02:54 the way. Like, do you get it? Finn? Finn like in a shark fin? No one said this movie was so. Well,
03:00 as the shark is falling, he's also running towards it, so he leaps towards it, trusted chainsaw in
03:06 tow, only to be swallowed whole by a poorly rendered CGI great white. Seconds later though,
03:12 he's cutting through its innards and rescuing himself. We've seen so bad is good done wrong
03:17 with snakes on a plane, and this was how it was meant to be.
03:21 Number 7 - Stop Motion Hamburgers - Better Off Dead
03:24 Four years before John Cujack forever became everyone's favourite awkward crush in Say Anything,
03:29 he was your average teen in standard 80s teen comedies, often as a second or third character.
03:35 The exceptions, One Crazy Summer and Better Off Dead, were both handled under the sage guidance
03:40 of director Savage Steve Holland, and you know he's reliable because he's willing to include his
03:45 nickname right there in the credits. The latter of these, Better Off Dead, finds Cujack in a
03:51 typical suburban teen environment, except for when he's challenged to take part in a drag race.
03:56 There's more lunacy, like the unfunny running joke of the newspaper boy who stalks Cujack relentlessly
04:02 just for a bill of two dollars, but the moment you know studios became afraid of Savage Steve
04:06 and just handed him the camera, is the fast food stop motion dance sequence. At this point,
04:12 Cujack's character begins to suffer from hallucinations after being dumped by his girlfriend,
04:17 and while working he imagines himself as a Dr. Frankenstein figure and the meat as a corpse.
04:23 The burger, reanimated, finds a family of hamburgers, some with instruments, and hilarity
04:29 ensues. I say hilarity because it's not really funny, it's just kind of, well it's absurd isn't
04:34 it? This was a long, long time before Sausage Party.
04:38 Number 6 - Lip Syncing to Roy Orbison - Blue Velvet
04:41 Audiences only vaguely knew what to expect out of Blue Velvet at the time, as it was
04:46 directed David Lynch's first trip into modern American suburbia after his work in art house
04:50 projects like Eraserhead and, due to Mel Brooks' insistence, big budget Hollywood films like The
04:56 Elephant Man. After his failure adapting Doom though, something he did after turning down
05:00 an opportunity to helm Return of the Jedi, Blue Velvet on paper looked like an interesting
05:06 thriller. A young all-American boy is walking through a field in Anytown, USA when he suddenly
05:11 finds an ear. Where did said ear come from? Well, the film turns out to be less interested in that
05:17 as the camera pans down under the perfectly cut grass lawns to the seedy insect-filled underbelly.
05:23 And welcome to where we're spending the rest of the movie with people replacing insects,
05:28 and leading our descent into sadosexual madness is Dennis Hopper, snorting nitrous oxide and
05:33 expounding on his love of Paps Blue Ribbon. And the rabbit hole just gets deeper, until we get
05:38 to the point where Al from Quantum Leap appears and lip syncs to Roy Orbison's in-dreams.
05:44 Oh, and all the while Dennis Hopper's character is just kinda going nuts in the background. This
05:49 is the scene where Blue Velvet truly goes bonkers and ratchets the insanity up to the next level.
05:55 Number 5 - The Sex Scene Shootout - Shoot 'Em Up
05:58 The opening scene of Shoot 'Em Up finds Clive Olin chewing on a carrot as he witnesses a woman
06:03 about to give birth fleeing from a hitman. Cartoonishly, he dispatches the thug by stabbing
06:08 him in the face with the vegetable, which is intentionally goofy and the carrot was an
06:13 intentional reference to Bugs Bunny. As you can probably tell from this scene, if nothing else,
06:18 Shoot 'Em Up is a bloody gory fast-paced video game/cartoon in live action, with every actor
06:24 chewing the scenery, particularly villain Paul Giamatti. But the kicker comes about halfway
06:29 through the never-ending shootout with Owen and Damsel in Distress Monica Bellucci having sex as
06:34 killers burst through the door. The thing is, Owen's character doesn't stop shooting, or screwing,
06:40 throughout this whole scene. It's so over-the-top goofy that it was actually just flat-out ripped
06:45 off in the trying-too-hard-Nick-Cage romp Drive Angry. Number 4 - Death is a Preteen Murderer
06:52 Final Destination 2 Final Destination was a perfectly decent little horror movie with a
06:57 small cast and a premise tailor-made for a standalone X-Files episode. In fact, screenwriter
07:02 Jeffrey Reddick first pitched it as such, but the studio adopted his idea and then franchised it.
07:08 The second film, from late former Stuntman and Sharknite director David R. Ellis,
07:12 oped the ante on gore and spectacle and even broke a rule or two along the way, most notably
07:18 offing a child in an explosion of blood early on in the film just to let audiences know it wasn't
07:23 screwing around. Now, future films in the series, apart from maybe three, felt like tired retreads
07:29 of this one, always trying to outdo the blood and viscera on screen, but this was the rare
07:34 moment where a mainstream horror felt properly shocking. Number 3 - Give Me The Elephant - Dark
07:40 Man Oddly, the most comic book-like director Sam Raimi ever got was with a film that had no comic
07:46 book source material. Frustrated with his inability to secure the rights to The Shadow,
07:50 in 1940's radio character voiced by Orson Welles, Raimi and his brothers set out to create their own
07:56 comic hero origin story. And everything that you'd later see in his Spider-Man movies is actually
08:02 kinda present in Dark Man. I mean, the scene in which Spidey beats the mugger who killed his
08:06 Uncle Ben is pretty much shot for shot the scene in which Liam Neeson's Peyton Westlake is beaten
08:11 by the Mafia here. After this scene, once Westlake is burned beyond recognition and impervious to
08:17 pain, he goes on a revenge spree, imitating his killers with artificial skin and turning them
08:22 against one another. As you might have guessed from this director, there are plenty of zany
08:26 moments along the way, most of them dealing with Westlake's homicidal glee, but the best is when
08:31 he actually tries to be normal. After perfecting his skin for up to 99 minutes in the sunlight
08:36 before it melts, he starts courting his former fiancée, eventually taking her to the amusement
08:41 park. Here he falls into the weirdest fight ever, but Raimi shoots the entire event with all the
08:47 flair and energy of a panel from Tales of the Crypt or something, much in the way that Creepshow
08:52 did a decade previous.
08:54 2. The Opening Scene - Femme Fatale
08:57 Femme Fatale is probably the most misunderstood film in Brian De Palma's filmography.
09:02 And while some see it as a sleazy Cinemax director slumming it, others praise it as one of his very
09:07 best. One thing is certain though, it's not what it appears on the tin. It plays to all the
09:13 director's greatest strengths and interests, you know, complex plotting, voyeurism and an
09:17 excellent climax, and constantly has the right audience second guessing everything. As you might
09:23 guess, to give away too much is to spoil the film, but just know that it begins with two women
09:27 making out during a heist at the Cannes Film Festival. In this scene, everything is in place
09:32 for the heist to go off. Every player has their role. There's the lead, who seduces the model
09:38 wearing the diamond crested clothing meant to be thieved, there's the scuba diver with the blow
09:42 torch, the guy in the van, etc. etc. But very quickly the film betrays convention when none of
09:48 the characters actually do their job, and instead are screwed over by the lead. Now it may not always
09:54 make literal sense which is why it ends up on this list, but it does always make cinematic sense,
10:00 even when it's subtly screwing with its audience.
10:02 1. Rambo, Conan and Gandhi - UHF
10:07 Nothing serves as convincing evidence that everyone was doing cocaine in the 1980s than
10:12 Wierd Al Yankovic's feature film UHF. At least Wierd Al here had the coherency to write a script
10:17 that did make sense while still including side clips that would work equally well in an era
10:22 appropriate Saturday Night Live skit. And it was the producers, presumably also out of their minds,
10:28 that gave him the green light for this movie. Now a cult classic, Yankovic's work has time to
10:33 indulge his every whim, from conning the librarian to an ultra-violent Gandhi who orders steak medium
10:39 rare before gunning down his opponents. And to its credit, pretty much every clip tops the one
10:44 preceding it, allowing a bit of flow to what could have been a disjointed crazy mess. Still, it's
10:50 hard to believe that this got made. So that's our list, I want to know what you guys think
10:54 down in the comments below. What do you think about these surprising scenes, and are there
10:59 any interesting ones I missed off here? While you're down there as well, could you please give
11:02 us a like, share, subscribe and head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this
11:06 every single day. Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thank you so much for watching,
11:10 and I'll see you soon.