You heard me – I’m dumping practically everything I can think of at you, and no doubt I’ll still miss a few. In fact, there’s one I am intentionally leaving out just so I can watch the angry comments and laugh like a Disney villain. Honestly, though – after having my memory jarred by all the comments on my first installment of 14 of the Most Impressive Monologues in Movie History, I couldn’t not make another one of these. So here are, once more, some movie monologues out there that really stick out from the rest.

22. James Downey just heard the dumbest answer ever in Billy Madison

I really need to get around to memorizing this speech for future arguments. As far as monologues go it’s pretty short, but James Downey really sells it with his deadpan and awe-struck performance. It’s this great moment of a character being too mystified by someone’s stupidity to be offended by it in any way.

21. Brad Pitt wants his scalps in Inglorious Basterds

I remember my excitement when I heard that Brad Pitt was going to be in a Quentin Tarantino-directed film about fighting Nazis – but honestly I was hoping he’d play a more complex character when it came to dialogue…I was really hoping to hear Brad Pitt ramble off the fast and unnatural dialogue one comes to expect from this director, but instead we got something arguably better. Brad Pitt as a simple and hardened killing machine. His signature speech from the film chugs along at a moderate pace as he pretty much spells exactly what the audience can expect to see for the rest of the film. It’s a much better use of Brad Pitt and Tarantino writing then the couch-infesting stoner he played in True Romance – although that was also awesome.

20. Marisa Tomei makes you imagine you’re a deer in My Cousin Vinny

This is another short one – in fact I’m not even sure if you can count it as a monologue but I had to include it because of how wonderful the performance is. I know a lot of people were pissed that Tomei won Best Supporting Actress – and maybe it’s because I’m too lazy to educate myself on who else was nominated – but her role in this film did seem award winning to me. It’s a silly character, but she pulled it off flawlessly.

19. Rutget Hauer reflects on his memories in Blade Runner

It’s a very bizarre monologue, at least in the way that Hauer performs it. He’s spent the entire film trying to live, and then at this last moment when he can at least watch this puny human die he instead carries out a new, and much more effective plan. Even though he dies, he doesn’t lose and he knows it – which is what I love about that smirk. He’s saddened by his own mortality but his semblance of humanity is also vindicated by it – at least combined with his final and only act of heroics toward a non-replicant.

18. Warren Beatty talks obscenity in Bulworth

I would like to say that this is the best thing that Warren Beatty has ever done, but I’m not sure that’s exactly the case – it might just be my favorite thing he’s ever done. The film, which was also written and directed by the actor, seems like a combination of an aging man’s desire to get out some political frustrations and also get to hang out with young actresses – although considering his hot wife the latter may not be a huge priority. Anyway, I love this monologue because his core point that any verbal obscenity can’t compare to the type of shit that goes down in Washington can be shared by any American out there despite their political affiliation – it’s a message that is, unfortunately, timeless.

17. Jeff Cohen spills his guts in The Goonies

What’s not to love? Chunk’s confession has to be one of the most honest confessions in film history as he takes us step by step through his life’s sins. I love the cathartic shame that seems to come with each story – as if he felt bad about these deeds before he even did them. Then of course there is Robert Davi’s growing smile throughout, finally ending with “I’m beginning to like this kid!” Poor Chunk.

16. Al Pacino is a fan of man in The Devil’s Advocate

This is one of those performances that an actor like Al Pacino can never take back. If I ever met the actual Devil I would find him only as convincing as he is similar looking to Al Pacino, thanks to this role. It was only a matter of time for someone in Hollywood to have figured this one out, you know? And of course, his satanic presence in this film pretty much comes to its glorious peak at this demonic pro-mankind rant. And you know what? He kind of has a point. I can’t possibly deny that the 20th century was entirely Al Pacino’s.

If you’re anything like me you probably would take a good psychological scarring over some dick in a mask jumping out at you any day of the week – at least when it comes to horror films. Nowadays it seems like the best is behind us when it comes to the genre, and what’s left is less a collection of disturbing concepts and more so the movie equivalent of a carnival spook house. That being said – I do like carnival spook houses – a fleeting scare is good when it’s done right. Sure, in the end these scares don’t hold a candle to say, the end of Rosemary’s Baby, but we can’t deny them either. So that’s what this list is: me sucking it up and admitting that the dick in the mask totally got me.

I should tell you that I don’t wish to demerit these films for having jump scares in them; most of them have plenty of psychological scarring as well… take number ten, for example.

10. The Thing – Chest Attack

Yikes. That’s like… the last thing you want someone’s chest to do.

First off, let me just say that Rob Bottin is amazing. He’s the special effects artist you have to thank for having the image of a mans severed head crawling around like a spider burned forever in your nightmares.

What I love about this scare is that the characters are already in a bad situation trying to save the guy’s life – and then in the blink of an eye it’s a total 360 and suddenly they are making sure he never moves ever again. It’s horrifying the first time you watch it too because you’re not really expecting a scare, let alone expecting the scare to be so… unusual. And before you can recover you are treated to a barrage of carnage so bizarre and disturbing that you’ve completely forgotten about the jump that introduced it all. The Thing is truly a spectacle of amazing practical effects, disturbing grotesque, and glorious man beards.

9. Se7en – Sloth

I can’t tell if it’s the jump that gets me here or what the jump reveals – that the tattered corpse tied to a bed isn’t a corpse but rather what remains of a guy who is currently having a very bad year. The whole scene leading up to it is bad enough when it is explained just what happened to this guy, and we realize that it is probably the worst murder of the film… But then finding out that the job isn’t even finished is down right bananas – a word I don’t easily throw around, mind you.

There’s no way to see this coming because well… why the hell would we? This isn’t a movie where corpses just come to life willy-nilly, as far as we know the rules in their world are the same as the rules to ours. Even with the cop getting way too close to the guy (who must smell awful mind you) making the situation perfect for a scare, it just doesn’t seem like that kind of film. Never would we suspect the idea that someone who looks like that guy does could possibly be alive in any capacity – which is exactly what this scare is betting on.

8. The Decent – Night Vision Creature

You know, I loved this scare but I wasn’t actually surprised by it… the reason why is because some ass decided to stick it in every preview for this film when it was coming out, making everyone who saw it thoroughly ready for the best scare moment of the entire film. I hate that – it’s like when they stuck the ending shot to Quarantine on all the movie previews and posters… did no one stop and say “Hey guys… maybe it’s not a good idea to reveal the end of our movie in all our ads…” That kind of seems like advertising 101.

Anyway – it was only years later when I watched this with a friend who hadn’t seen the previews did I witness just how good the scare is. Firstly – if they didn’t set it up so quickly you’d see it coming, but you don’t have time to realize that. Secondly they actually give you a second to see the creature without indicating it with any scare chords or anything. It’s this nice silent moment that lasts barely a second where your heart drops into your stomach, then a boom of sound and action. It’s not the most original thing in the world, but it’s very solid and perfectly timed.

7. Signs – The Pantry

I’ll probably get some shit for this one – and I wouldn’t blame anyone for it either. I’m not a huge fan of this film but I do think it has its moments – I just wish it didn’t try to be more than what it was… which goes for all of M. Night Shyamalan films, actually.

There are several moments in this film that got me – another that comes to mind is the alien arm in the basement, and also the TV reflection part… but this one really did it for me because it relied on no external sounds or music. It was that lack of scare chords that oddly enough made me jump. It felt, well… alien – off in pacing. There’s this tension buildup of trying to see what’s on the other side of this door, and then when he walks away and comes back you expect at the least a second buildup, if only for a moment. But instead we instantly get the scare without any warning and any indication in the sounds – just the natural clicking of the claws of the hand and it’s over.

6. Psycho – Meeting Mother

Psycho is a really hard film to put into perspective. Most people know the ending of the film before they’ve even seen it – that alone puts the movie at a complete disadvantage to modern audiences. So far I’ve only met one person who didn’t know the end – and when finding that out I promptly sat them down to watch it, only to have someone walk into the room and spoil the ending half way through. You can imagine my anger.

Now – obviously there is another scene I could mention here, a scene that did have audiences jumping their seats because not only was it unexpected in a fleeting sense but also because no movie had really ever just killed off their star that suddenly before. However I really think this scene is scarier as a jump, firstly because we see the killer coming in the shower scene, and secondly because this one has two reveals right after another. The initial reveal of mother’s corpse is slow but also a huge blow to the audience, and then before they can put it all together we are hit with the classic Psycho chords and our first and only sight of Norman in all his drag glory – his face deranged and desperate as he is held back from stabbing this woman to death.

It’s just so much in so little time.

A good beginning credit sequence is really all it takes for me to like a movie. That seems like a really stupid thing to say – but when you think about it, while not all good movies have creative credits, almost all creative credits belong to good movies. It shows that the filmmakers actually cared enough to do something meaningful with their title sequence as opposed to just throwing out some stock effect… After all, the beginning credits are the opening number to a film – the handshake – and if it doesn’t make you excited about what you’re about to watch then there really isn’t a point is there?

Here are a collection that got be friggin’ pumped right from the start.

14. Inside Man (2006)

There’s nothing particularly flashy or exciting about this credit sequence – it’s just really, really solid. Clive Owen’s beginning monologue instantly hooks you into the film, as does Spike Lee’s choice in music – Chaiyya Chaiyya by A. R. Rahman. But I think what really got my attention more than anything was Matthew Libatique’s amazing cinematography throughout the sequence. You would know LIbatique’s work from such films as Pi and Requiem For A Dream – pretty much every Darren Aronofsky film – also he did Cowboys and Aliens for some reason. Anyway, if there was every a perfect example of his talent, these credits are certainly it.

13. Watchmen (2009)

Well anything to Bob Dylan’s “Times They Are A-Changin’” is going to be rather effective from the start – especially when the sequence’s timeline expands two generations. There’s something fascinating about the alternate reality portrayed in these credits – the idea of taking US history and sticking in superheroes is great, but it’s the result of that addition that really sticks. They start with the expected glory days of crime fighting and bring it all the way to the inevitable downfall that such a system would meet – something that most superhero films fail to recognize. After all, the thought of Superman is neat until you realize that his presence would limit your freedom.

12. Halloween (1978)

So simple, so effective.

You really get a clear idea of the kind of menace you’ll be facing throughout the film just from this one shot – slowly pushing in on a delightfully generic-looking jack-o-lantern with the same repetitive piano tune we’ve all grown to fear over the years. The Halloween theme has that same quality that the Jaws theme has; it’s simple and it escalates. Much like the shark from Jaws, Michael Myers is inevitable – he plows toward you at a slow but steady rate, much like his theme music does as well. It’s only a matter of time before you have to stop running.

11. The Shining (1980)

Speaking of simplicity – while the cinematography and music is quite impressive, this sequence really takes the prize for most basic titles ever. Why is it all scrolling up? What is that, sky blue? Kubrick, you are weird. I could have banged these titles out in less than a minute at my local public access station – and yet, why are they so damn awesome? I think the answer is that because of how awkward and basic they are, it almost gives off the impression that he is getting them out of the way, that the real star here are the visuals of the car driving through the mountains along with Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind’s incredibly sinister opening title music. It should be noted that Carlos is also responsible for the theme to A Clockwork Orange – which makes all sorts of sense when you compare the two styles.

As movie-goers, we are all familiar with that excruciating moment when you are watching a movie and the action is so horribly uncomfortable that you actually feel the need to cover your own face. It’s this nonsensically powerful moment when you actually feel embarrassed for a fictional character because of some terribly awkward scenario that you’d rather watch a murder than bare witness to. It’s like a horror movie almost – it’s that same turtle reaction where you just want to shrink away. And like horror, it’s either done really well or it’s abused, which is why I want to share with you the films I think did it the very best.

Oh, and if you are wondering why I only picked 9 – it’s the most awkward number I could think of.

9. Wedding Crashers

It’s naturally going to be awkward when you are following two characters whose hobby is to attend weddings of complete strangers under false identities in order to pick up women. As brilliant this idea may be, watching our main characters mingle with the guests and family, we can’t help but know that – much watching like a drunk lion tamer – it’s only going to be a matter of time before things go horribly wrong. The film does an amazing job at making this happen in the least expected way, as the main characters get sucked into a post-wedding get together with the bride’s upper class family lead by an all powerful U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and highly suspicious father of the bride played by Christopher Walken.

This is our catalyst for the awkwardness, as all actions must be made carefully to prevent this one frightening man from knowing the truth. Things couldn’t be worse, as one of or heroes played by Vince Vaughn spends this outing subjected to the Secretary’s ultra-insane, danger-slut daughter who goes great lengths of making every waking second a horror story of awkwardness – especially during a certain dinner scene. Combine this with a racist grandmother, a sexually confused gothic artist son, and of course the Secretary’s wife – who is looking to jump the first young man unfortunate enough to be alone in a room with her.

8. There’s Something About Mary

I want everyone to know right now that this is going to be the only Ben Stiller movie I include. The reason why is that I think that, besides this film, awkward Ben Stiller films are to comedy what the Paranormal Activity series are to horror: cheap. Mind you – I love those Paranormal Activity films – and they work, just like most of those Ben Stiller movies work at being awkward, but it’s an easy awkwardness – a cheap get.

There’s Something About Mary could very easily been lost in that pile of movies had it not been done so early in Stiller’s film career. And perhaps it wouldn’t be on this list if I didn’t have such an untainted fondness of the very pure discomfort and awkwardness that surrounds Stiller’s character. He literally goes from one horrible situation to the next – all starting with one of the most painful scenes involving genitals and a zipper. Weirdly enough, I think the best moment of awkwardness in the whole film is when his friend, played by Chris Elliot, jokingly tells him that he is dying. It’s brief and yet really speaks to the character’s inability to even respond correctly in such a basic situation.

7. Being There

This is the second to last time Peter Sellers (think Dr. Strangelove) acted in a motion picture before his death, and it’s personally the film I recall him most fondly in. The story follows a gardener named Chance – or has he puts it, Chance the gardener – who has spent his whole life working under the supervision of one wealthy man. Being rather simple-minded, Chance knows only what he has learned from watching television and from his work as a gardener. Once his employer dies, Chance is forced to go out in the world for the first time – the world, in this case, being the city of Washington D.C.

Here’s the fun part – basically the entire film is based around one simple fact: if you’re old, white, and wearing a suit then people will assume you are important. This is what happens as Chance the gardener gets entangled in the life of a high-ranking political advisor and becomes, though a miscommunication, known as “Chauncey Gardiner.” What follows is a wonderful story of a very simple human being having every minimal thought that comes out of his mouth be misinterpreted for symbolic brilliance as the character moves higher and higher up the ranks of importance, eventually working as an advisor to the President of the United States.

What makes it all so awkward is that, as the audience, you know that when this guy is talking about gardening he isn’t using it as a metaphor but actually, you know, talking about gardening. Watching every conversation is like getting teeth pulled as you wait for everyone else to finally catch on to what’s going on. The humor, of course, is that they never really do. All of this comes to its peak when you watch what is probably the most awkward sex scene you’ll ever see in a film.

6. The 40 Year Old Virgin

Yeah, no surprise here. The painfulness starts the moment Steve Carell’s virgin character Andy is forced into an over-poker conversation with the guys he works with about sex, and only gets worse from there as he fumbles through a clearly misinformed description of the female (as opposed to male) boob. Once outed, his whole place of work knows the truth, and instead of doing what anyone else would do in that situation, Andy actually sticks around and allows himself to be helped in getting laid – which naturally leads to more and more awkwardness.

It’s hard to pick the most terrible moment, the first that comes to mind would be his inebriated foreplay scene with Elizabeth Banks’s super sexual Beth character, or probably worse would be his near fatal ride home with director Judd Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann who drunkenly drives Andy back to her place, only to give him a taste of the contents of her stomach. Probably the best moment has to be the speed dating, when Andy is attacked by his own awkwardness when confronted with a very talkative lady who probably should have considered wearing a bra.

Monologues are to actors what analogies are to bullshit writers who have no idea how to start their list article about monologues. What I mean is that every actor should have a really good understanding on how to perform a monologue – at least I assume so considering that they are the most common tools for auditioning for a part. To someone like myself, who couldn’t act even if Hitler’s death depended on it, I really have no idea what goes into a monologue – however I do know what comes out of a good one. So when I judge the talent of these I’m really just judging how effective they seemed to be, not necessarily the amount of artistic effort that was put into it. Simply put, these are some terrific monologues.

14. Hugo Weaving on the human virus in The Matrix

It’s actually three different monologues that are intercut with other scenes – but each one tells a single progressing story: Agent Smith is freaking crazy. It’s terrific how he goes from this calm and collected piece of programming to actually showing an emotional repulsion to the human race. It’s kind of a moment where all bets are suddenly off, and we realize that there is much, much more to this villain, and much more to the properties of the Matrix, than we originally thought. Hugo Weaving pulls the whole thing off absolutely perfectly, making the seamless transition over from bot to lunatic.

13. Zach Galifianakis’s wolf pack speech in The Hangover

This is really the defining moment of Zach’s one-man wolf pack character in this film – awkward, emotional, antisocial, and horribly inappropriate. The prepared speech aspect of it is damn funny, as well as his stumbling over-clarification of his upgrade from one to two men in his wolf pack. Then there is the obvious denial of being a ‘lone wolf’ and instead calling yourself a single member of a pack of wolves. All that is great, but my favorite thing about this speech is the other men’s tolerance and acceptance of how weird it all is – actually enjoying the funniness the same way the audience is. Then of course, like any gathering, it all derails the moment someone starts cutting their hand.

12. Christopher Walken tells the story of the gold watch in Pulp Fiction

There are a lot of awesome speeches in this film I could have also gone with, but I really think this one takes the cake. First of all, this entire sequence is the pivotal piece of motivation for Butch to risk his life retrieving the watch, so it absolutely has to work. You have to believe that you would, in his situation, have to get that watch too. No better way to do that than this truly epic story involving generations upon generations passing this hunk of gold from father to son, only for it to end with a seven-year up-the-butt sacrifice. If someone hid something up their butt for that long just to give it to me, I too would rather die than lose it. What I love about this monologue is that Walken tells the story in such a detailed and passionate way, such a stoic description on these brave men, right until he gets to the part of the story that he personally witnessed. All of a sudden his character instantly loosens up as he very casually talks about sticking a watch up his ass.

11. Bill Murray rallies the troupes in Stripes

Oh, sweet Bill. Truly an American hero is this man that his rallying cries could even make Jello Biafra join the army. If you ever need to convince someone of the merits of being an American citizen you need not look further than this speech. We are truly the biggest mutts of the world, and by big I do mean overweight. What gets me is the mix of Kindergarten-level compassion given to these supposed army men combined with the honesty that no one in the room was smart enough to stay out of the army. The childish way he makes people raise their hands if they cried during Old Yeller is almost as good as the childish way they hesitantly go along with him. It’s adorable.

10. Viggo Mortensen talks about the fall of man in The Return Of The King

What I dearly love about pre-battle warm up speeches in movies is that at some point they had to have prepared something ahead of time… like, they know they will have to give a big dramatic speech before battle so they certainly must have practiced it in the mirror a few times first. This speech is particularly terrific because, unless I am mistaken, it marks the first time that Aragorn gets to do this as a leader – man, he must have had this speech prepared for years! It’s a good one too, quick and to the point, one to rival Mel Gibson’s Braveheart speech (a speech I omitted from this list because it felt too expected).

9. Tommy Lee Jones recalls a dream in No Country For Old Men

Every aspect of this film, from the characters to the (lack of) music and sound, is incredibly simple in this weird way. What I mean is that even the most chaotic element of the story, Javier Bardem’s sociopathic Chigurh, runs on very basic and set principles that are pretty damn straightforward in nature. The complexities come from watching these rather stubborn characters’ basic motivations and personalities chug along to the inevitable moment in which they collide with one another, because we all know that not everyone is going to get what they want, and everyone wants something drastically different. This ending speech with Tommy Lee Jones retelling an extremely symbolic dream perfectly represents this as such a profound vision of his father is both recognized as such and nonchalantly told the way one would tell any dream. It’s just so simple in every way, but says something so complex about his character and about the film.

8. Brad Pitt explains the in and outs of the nuthouse in Twelve Monkeys

It’s a little scattered in that Brad Pitt’s character Jeffery is pretty much in a constant state of monologue throughout this movie. It was this role when I first realized that Brad Pitt could act, and since then I have had a warm fondness for the man, but lately I’ve been hoping to see him do something as out there as this character was; I don’t think he’s really ever topped this. The dialogue itself is great, as is the way he delivers it, but the thing I love most is the body language and facial expressions; he truly looks bat shit crazy with his hand flicking and face twitching. Along with that, whenever the nurse scolds him he seems to have this great moment of remorse each time, as he knows full well that he is acting out, only to almost instantly forget it. The cherry is Bruce Willis’s drugged up droopy face as he slowly puts together just how nuts this guy is. There should be more films like this film.

Yes that’s right – New Years just happened like, a week ago… counting down, people count down on New Years… that’s the point, and it’s as close as I can get to writing about something that relates to the holidays, and it’s way late. And while I first thought to do this because of the end of 2011, it actually turned out to be a fun list to think about. How do you judge the intensity of a ticking clock? It’s not always how close the characters came to zero – sometimes it’s about the process itself, getting to inevitability, fighting time.

It’s rather like life, and the knowledge that being on this world is a sort of countdown. Every year is another tick of the clock, leading every one of us to the same inescapable conclusion. So uh… Happy New Year! …Here’s a list counting down countdowns.

10. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind – An Entire Relationship

Because of the delightfully surreal execution of this story, it’s very easy to think of this film as not containing any kind of countdown. There’s no ticking clock to be nervously watched and there’s no concrete zero hour – this is the only example on this list where an amount of time isn’t being counted down, but rather an entire relationship’s worth of memories as they are systematically degraded from a man’s brain during one night of sleep.

The tension from this comes from the man’s refusal to allow the memories to slip away as he desperately attempts to somehow stop the process from happening. As the memories roll back farther and farther to the day he first met the women he loves, the noose begins to tighten. The intensity does grow considerably as we watch the very last memory he has of the relationship literally fall apart around him.

9. Ringu/The Ring – Seven Days

I have a special place in my heart for both Ringu and the American remake The Ring, so instead of choosing one or the other I went ahead and combined the two. The countdown of seven days may not be the most intense countdown in a film, but it’s probably the most horrific in its outcome and mysteriousness surrounding it. It’s a wonderful example of modernized folklore – you watch what looks like it could be any student film in any college anywhere ever on an unlabeled videocassette and then you get a call that, when answered, whispers two words: seven days.

Personally, in most cases when I watch experimental black and white films I tend to want to die right away. The only way to stop your demise is to make a copy and show the tape to someone else, which seems like a challenge even for when these movies were made – I wonder if seeding a torrent of it would count.

8. Nick Of Time – One Hour, Fourteen Minutes

Thank the lord for 90s political action/suspense films! Why is it that we’ve suddenly become a society of people that think it’s too silly to have a murder mystery that takes place in the White House or an action film where the President is the hero? What happened in 2000 that we shamed ourselves out of that? This film is centered on a character played by Johnny Depp whose daughter is kidnapped by Christopher Walken and will be killed unless he assassinates a governor in the next 74 minutes.

Of course our assassin-to-be knows that he essentially has to choose between his life, as he will surely not survive such an ordeal, or the life of his daughter, who is being held in a van. As he stalls for time and attempts to alert the governor’s bodyguards he finds out, to his despair, that the bodyguards are the very same people who have kidnapped his daughter under the orders of the governor’s very own husband! Seriously – 90s political action/suspense, you can’t beat that shit.

7. The Dark Knight – Roughly Twenty Minutes

So the Joker has pretty much sent Gotham into an full-blown frenzy – while all the bridges and evacuation routes have been blocked off due to his threats of repercussion, two ferries have managed to make their way across the river and out of town. One of these boats houses Gotham’s biggest and baddest criminals, and the other contains your average bunch of civilians. Sure enough, this situation takes a rather bad turn as the Joker remotely hijacks both ferries with instructions that he has rigged them with explosives as well as given each boat the means to detonate the other, and if neither boat is ablaze by midnight than he will blow them both.

It’s a rather foul plot that takes the kill or be killed scenario to a whole new level of mass-murder. For the next 20 or so minutes we have the pleasure of watching both boats try to figure out a fair way to make the decision between dying innocent or living guilty, and knowing that at any moment their neighboring vessel just might make the decision for them. It’s a hell of a sequence.

6. Aliens – Four Hours

Alright – you’re on a remote planet and you’ve effectively sealed yourself off from the giant acidic two-mouthed space demons that happen to also be inhabiting the planet with you – time to take it easy for a while and find a way to be rescued right? Well – too bad because everything is going to blow up in four hours – that means that you now have to actually find a way to escape this grotesque planet before you are either vaporized or brutally torn up by a bunch of walking nightmares. Good thing you have Bishop, that’s for damn sure, because I’m not sure you would be able to convince anyone else to Shawshank their way through pipes in order to retrieve the ship that will get you the hell out of there.

To make matters worse Ripley loses the only character in the film that really isn’t allowed to die, Newt. More hits the fan as Ripley searches for Newt and gets way more than she bargained for in the form of an alien queen, and suddenly this becomes both a race against time and a more literal race against a giant egg-laying monster. Nothing makes my muscles tighten more than listening to that bitch computer voice counting down the minutes left to reach “minimum safe distance.”

5. The Andromeda Strain – Five Minutes

This is going back a bit – in this Michael Crichton novel turned film our government discovers a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism that essentially turns blood into freaking powder. They bring the organism, as well as the few surviving specimens, to a secret underground lab in the middle of Nevada (where else?) where it is studied five levels down in what has to be the most overly sanitary environment imaginable. The fail safe to the whole lab is naturally a big hunk of nuke buried under the entire thing and set to detonate five minutes after there is any kind of containment problem – after all, they really don’t want to destroy the entire human race. There is only one way to stop the countdown once it starts, a single key that has been given to a single individual – in this case one of our main characters, Dr. Hall.

Before the five minutes are over he must insert the key one of several locations around the lab, which is exactly what he has to do when such a breach occurs not long after the scientists have discovered that a nuclear explosion will only make the organism, which feeds off energy, stronger. This scene cuts it way close as the doctor has to climb through a secure area guarded by freaking lasers in order to get to an insertion point. Got to love the days when lasers were a thing you could put in movies with a straight face.

4. The Fifth Element – One Hour, Fifty-Seven Minutes

The moment when Corbin Dallas learns from the president that he has one hour and fifty-seven minutes to save the planet Earth is also the moment we get to hear one of the best Bruce Willis action quotes out there: “I’ll call you back in two hours.” Alright, perhaps it’s not the best of the best but it’s a decent one – it’s in the top twenty. The worst part about this countdown to oblivion is that there is nothing that they can do to stop it until the last five minutes, when the heroes of the film arrive at the temple in which they must insert four element stones into specific spots and then figure out how to “open” them.

When they learn that each stone is opened with its own specific element we are then treated to what is probably the most gut wrenching cinematic moments out there when the fate of Earth comes down to a single matchstick. As if that isn’t awful enough, in the last minute, after they have set up this machine, Corbin must convince a despondent and damaged Lilu that the world is, in fact, worth saving. Holy hell – the entire human race dependent on a Bruce Willis action movie character talking about his feelings – we’re doomed!

3. Run Lola Run – Twenty Minutes

It’s hard to think of a way to ever pull off a film like this ever again. The entire film is one big countdown as Lola attempts to acquire 100,000 marks that her boyfriend needs in order to pay off a crime boss. Not only is this entire film structured around time in the sense that it is a race against it, but it also uses time as a method of showing us just how big of a difference the little things make by going through three different versions of the same series of events surrounding Lola’s mad dash to save her man. Each version starts with just one variation: Lola’s reaction to an initial obstacle, a vicious dog. Depending on her reaction she finds herself either going faster or slower, reaching locations and events at different points in time and drastically changing the ultimate outcome. What makes this work so well is that the manner in which this dog affects her also mirrors the way she handles future situations emotionally – and it’s only when she masters that one situation is she able to master everything else.

2. Back To The Future – Eight Minutes

Dear god, did Marty really have to change his clothes before going back to 1985? I ask that every time I see the final clock tower scene that, without fail, still makes me nervous to watch. I mean, it’s a bolt of lightening – there is no wiggle room. And not only does Marty have to hit 88 at the right moment, but also at the right freaking place on the road – seriously what are the damn odds that they could pull that off first try? Also… why didn’t Doc just attach a really long cable from the tower to the DeLorean that uncoiled or something while it drove away? Why did they have to do that hook thingy? Whatever – it’s awesome. Then of course, as if there isn’t enough going on, Doc has to nearly kill himself trying to plug those cables in on the top of the tower while hanging from a giant clock – way to use symbolism, guys.

1. The Hurt Locker – Two Minutes

Sorry. Look, I was trying to judge this purely on countdown movies or scenes that made me tense to watch, not on how un-depressing the scene was. It’s hard to end this with such a terrible scene – but I mean, did you see it? If you didn’t than go watch the movie, if you did and want to see it again, here it is:

Those two minutes last forever, and every time I hope that they are going to get the guy out of that thing. It’s such a dark situation because you know just by looking at the device that two minutes is nowhere near enough time – but the fact that James doesn’t even see that as a possibility is both inspiring to watch and incredibly sad when he is finally forced to give up and apologizes to the man who is about to explode in front of everybody. It ranks as the most intense countdowns because it is truly inescapable from the moment the clock starts. Wow, dark. If it helps – The director of this film, Kathryn Bigelow, also directed Point Break with Keanu Reeves… so that’s… that’s kind of silly right? This year is already starting awkward.

It’s already the second day of 2012, which means we’ll all be sober within the next day or two. It also means that we can officially start looking (through blurry eyes) ahead to the future. A future of promise and potential. A future of hope. A future of tingling anticipation that the road stretched out in front of us that leads to the cinema will be paved with gold.

Will there be piles of excrement along the way? Of course, but we don’t know how many or how badly they’ll tarnish our yellow-bricked roller coaster ride. All we can see from this far out is the shimmering wonder of movies to come – the vast unknown that looks wonderful (and might just live up to the hype).

In past years (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011), we’ve gone with a fairly arbitrary count of 20-30 movies. This year, we decided to prove that there were 52 movies worth prematurely celebrating (even though what we found were many more). That’s one for every week (even if there are some weeks with a few and some weeks with none at all).

Regardless of the number, Rob Hunter, Neil Miller, Kate Erbland, Allison Loring, Landon Palmer, Brian Salisbury and Cole Abaius have joined forces to remind us all that there are a lot of great movies to hope for this year. Go grab a calendar and pencil in everything that gets your blood pressure up toward unsafe levels.

It’s going to be a busy, flick-filled 2012. Here are the 52 most anticipated movies.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films (TBA)

If you are a cult movie geek, then you already known that documentary director Mark Hartley is one of our most important and celebrated archivists. His first two docs, Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed, about Aussie and Filipino genre films respectively, are as hilarious as they are informative; featuring larger than life personalities and edited with music video sensibility. The prospect of Hartley lending his reverent, rock-n-roll treatment to the Cannon Films legacy is enough to make me run slowly away from enormous explosions with my fist raised in triumphant salute. -BS

Cosmopolis (TBA)

I am admittedly excited to see what Robert Pattinson can do outside of the Twilight juggernaut as I suspect there might be more to him than just a pretty face (although I am also prepared to be proven wrong as I was after my similar predictions of Channing Tatum). But really, this film had me at “David Cronenberg.” -AL

The Master (TBA)

A P.T. Anderson movie is always an event, and in his latest he seems to be working more in a There Will Be Blood mode than his mosaic narratives of Boogie Nights and Magnolia by focusing on another eccentric, power-hungry individual. Reportedly based loosely on the life of L. Ron Hubbard and his founding of the Church of Scientology, The Master stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the leader of a growing religious organization who recruits a drifter (Joaquin Phoenix) as his assistant.

The film will certainly be a showcase for the talents of the always-amazing Hoffman, marks the return of an ostensibly un-bearded Phoenix to the silver screen (for what that’s worth), and the alleged basis for its narrative will likely prove controversial for a church that isn’t known for taking criticism lightly, especially in Hollywood. The film is currently in its post-production stages and has yet to receive a release date, but here’s hoping we’ll get an opportunity to know The Master sometime this year. -LP

Only God Forgives (TBA)

People seem to like that Nicholas Winding Refn character, and they seem to like it when he teams up with Ryan Gosling. At a basic level, it’s beyond fantastic to see an unconventional director receive so much notice. At an even simpler level, it’ll be great to see him make a movie about a policeman and gangster busting leg bones together in a Thai boxing ring. It’s another exploration of violence to look forward to from a man obsessed with it. No word yet on whether hammers are allowed in Muay Thai. -CA

Cogan’s Trade (TBA)

If I have to spend the rest of my life extolling the copious virtues of Andrew Dominik’s stunning The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, that’s fine by me, but I have a feeling that the director’s next, crime drama Cogan’s Trade, will do the job for me. The film reunites him with Assassination stars Brad Pitt and Garret Dillahunt, along with Scoot McNariry, James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta, and Sam Shepard. I’ll stop there – that’s all you need. -KE

Stoker (TBA)

A teenage girl (Mia Wasikowska) dealing with her father’s death finds a mystery in the arrival of her eccentric uncle (Matthew Goode). Perhaps the family name has some bearing as to where the tale is going… The cast and story seem fairly solid here, but the real draw for me is that it’s Park Chan-wook‘s English language debut. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Oldboy, Thirst and others have shown him to be a director more than capable of exciting the eyes and mind, and it’s doubly exciting to see him take on this new challenge. -RH

Inside Llewyn Davis (TBA)

Not much has been revealed about the Coen Brothers’ latest except that it depicts the life of a fictional folk musician during the heyday of the Greenwich Village scene. That the Coens might do here for Bob Dylan-era folk music what O Brother Where Art Thou? did for Woody Guthrie-era folk is promising. The film also marks the first major leading role for Drive’s talented Oscar Isaac, and could be another showcase for Mulligan’s musical talent that we first got a glimpse of in Shame last year. The last four films from the Coens have all been markedly different, so there’s no telling what they have in store for us this year. -LP

If I had to pick two things that I just can’t get enough of in films, it would have to be a good underdog story and gratuitous physical violence. It is only natural then that I would build a humble list of some of my favorite moments in cinema where the two are combined.

When I think about what makes a fight particularly one-sided, it actually has less to do with the amount of people that the hero is up against and more about the hero’s strengths, or rather lack thereof. But then there’s always going to be an ‘awesome’ factor to think about, because when it is all said and done the hero usually triumphs against the odds – so the means in which they do such a thing is very important to me; being badass certainly has its merits, but in most cases, being creative is far more impressive.

12. Sherlock Holmes vs. Dredger

As a fan of the original Sherlock Holmes books I find it funny when people give this movie shit for its ‘out of character’ fight scenes. While we all know the character of Holmes to be some delicate funny hat-wearing man who solves puzzles while puffing on a pipe, this popularized image is actually far from the man in the original books. In fact, the Guy Ritchie version – while not perfect – is far closer to the anti-social, rollie-smoking cocaine-addict pack rat who had no qualms about throwing a fist or two that exists in the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle version.

This particular fight against a rather imposing Frenchman is especially fun due to the trial and error it takes both Holmes and Watson to eventually take him out – a cattle prod doesn’t stop him, a gun fails as well. In the end it takes the sheer strength of both heroes engaging in a two-man strangulation that eventually does Dredger in for good – and that’s only after the second time around. The first time around goes less well.

Best moment: When Dredger barrels Holmes like he’s freaking Donkey Kong.

11. Westley vs. Fezzik in The Princess Bride

Again with the little guy versus the big guy – and like before, this ends in a less-fatal strangulation. Look, we all know why this scene is awesome – we’ve seen our hero Westley take on the Cliffs of Insanity and show bad ass mercy toward Inigo Montoya, on top of this we’ve no doubt fallen in love with Andre the Giant’s brutally statured yet good natured Fezzik by this point – so neither of these people can die and surely they would normally get along, but they still must fight. When they do, it’s as silly, brutal, and as polite as we hoped it to be.

Anybody want a peanut?

10. Neo vs. Agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded

We all knew this fight was coming the moment we discover that Agent Smith has the power to replicate himself – and of course we knew that Neo could handle it. I think what we didn’t expect to see was how silly the whole ordeal ends up being – but when you think about it, why wouldn’t it be? There is really no way to have one character fight scores upon scores of doppelgangers of Hugo Weaving and have it not look stupid-hilarious.

I think the mistake is seeing this scene as anything intended to be a dramatic moment – but rather a joyous moment in cinema where we are allowed to watch Keanu Reeves literally walk on people before getting pig-piled.

9. Mani vs. Thieves in The Brotherhood Of The Wolf

Oh Mani. This blank faced Native American badass is too awesome for words – no, literally he is too awesome to speak in most of the scenes in this film. He just stares at you and processes your every move before slamming you without ever breaking a sweat. His introductory fight against roughly a half-dozen men with sticks doesn’t make any effort to hide the kind of kick-assery we’re about to be subjected to for the remainder of the film. Not to mention that he’s wearing a goddamned tricorne and ninja-style face covering trench coat the whole damn time he’s schooling these ruffians.

Seriously how can one guy be more awesome? Not only does he lay hands like a pro but also looks Matrix-cool the entire time!

8. V vs. Creedy’s Men in V For Vendetta

Oh it’s such a satisfying scene! Watching V not only have his revenge, but actually getting to carry it out through such a vicious choking out is a perfect finale to the sharp carnage he has just inflicted to the futilely-armed room of men now bleeding out in the gutters around him. The best part is that on most days and with most people, Creedy would have been absolutely right in his assessment of the situation beforehand; more often than not firing a good ten rounds into a person will pretty much take care of things – but in this case, V had rage on his side. By far the greatest moment is when it’s all over, and V finally realizes that he’s not in the best shape.

7. The Bride vs. The Crazy 88s in Kill Bill Vol. 1

Violence. You know it’s going to be bad when the movie actually has to switch to black and white just to compensate for the copious gallons of human-juice that’s about to be spilled. Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to stick an all-yellow Uma Thurman in a Japanese dance hall and have her sword fight hoards of gang members dressed like The Lone Ranger. I’m honestly not even sure why they had to censor the red out of the scene; the whole thing looks like a Monty Python sketch to me. Fountains of blood aside, the scene really has more of a comedic feel to it than anything else – especially at the end when The Bride stands over a room wriggling with crying amputees and orders everyone to leave their limbs behind, as they now belong to her.

6. King Kong vs. Three Tyrannosaurus Rexes

What I love about this fight is that every moment when you think things can’t get worse, they inevitably do – first it’s one Rex, then two, and before you know it poor Kong is being snapped at by three hungry Tyrannosaurus Rexes as they snarl for his lady morsel of food. If that isn’t bad enough, the group all end up plummeting into a hanging battle as our damsel in distress dangles over inescapable ingestion. The final blow comes about in a moment of utter brutality when Kong literally crushes his final opponent’s skull. When all is said and done, retrospectively this whole ordeal seemed rather childish considering that they are all fighting over a meal that’s proportionately the size of a soft taco.

5. Dutch vs. The Predator

The Predator is just about the most badass villain you can have in a film – partly because he’s a giant claw-faced alien, but mainly because he has an almost Klingon sense of honor when it comes to fighting. What I mean by this is that if he respects his opponent he will take them on face to scary, scary face. This is what happens in the first film, but only after Dutch literally uses all of the Predator’s techniques against him – such as invisibility, projectiles, and tree dwelling. It’s his fighting spirit that finally makes the gloves come off, so to speak, as The Predator removes his weapons and mask and takes on Arnie alien-to-man. To this day, this character is the only one that I hold in my mind as a serious threat to any Schwarzenegger character out there, and I’m including The Terminator.

I bet there is some kind of clever transition to be made here, but I’m going to take the lazy route.

4. T-800 vs. T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day

The thing about the T-1000 is that it runs on a whole different level than our hero character. When you watch the first Terminator film you get to see how a trained solder handles the T-800 robot – by running his ass off. That’s really all you can do: shoot and run and hope that you find some convenient way to crush or blow the thing up. Then we have this film – Terminator 2 – and the same applies for the T-1000 villain: run and shoot and hope. But the catch is that the one doing all the running and shooting this time around is that very same model from the first one, this model which seemed indestructible before is running for it’s goddamn life in the second film. And when they are finally cornered and forced to fight – you see exactly why the T-800 has avoided this very situation; the T-1000 is a steamroller.

3. Indiana Jones vs. The Big Bald Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark

The world is already pretty tough on Indiana Jones to begin with – but then you have a scene like this. He just escaped from a room full of what is literally his biggest fear and now all he really wants to do is bounce this Nazi camp and out of nowhere this giant bald dude just strolls out of a hut and immediately starts pounding on him like there’s candy inside. Who the hell is this guy anyway? Why is he half dressed and why does he enjoy punching so much? Luckily he enjoys it so much that he completely forgets his surroundings, and if it weren’t for that it seems like there wasn’t much hope for our hero otherwise. It’s hard to even classify it as a fight, up until the end it’s more of an ass kicking.

Speaking of ass kicking…

2. ‘Jack’ vs. Tyler Durden in Fight Club

This is pretty much as one-sided as a fight can get, considering that our nameless narrator of the film is actually fighting himself. The scene is both cruel and hilarious as we watch the beating not just from the character’s perspective but also from the perspective of the security cameras, which show the sad truth of the matter. There is also one of the funniest moments of ass-handing-to when Tyler grabs at Jack only to get a single shoe, which he examines momentarily before wielding it like a club. The cherry, naturally, is the fact that the receiver of the beating is not wearing any pants. This whole ordeal seems hopeless in the end, as Tyler throws his opponent/himself down a flight of stairs. How do you even defend yourself from yourself? Luckily, in the end the narrator does find a way – a really, really desperate way.

1. Dae-su Oh vs. A Hallway Filled With Dudes in Oldboy

Okay. Best fight scene – you know what? Best action scene, ever. I know that it’s hard to find one scene and actually label it as the ‘best’ of anything – but for me, this really is it. First off, it’s one single three minute long shot, secondly the entire buildup actually comes to a freaking punch line at the end when Dae-su Oh finds himself grinning madly at an elevator full of thugs, who are clearly going to end up like the wailing bunch behind him. But mostly what makes this scene the best ever for me is that it is the only instant in a movie where one person takes on many and I actually believe it. When you see The Bride or Neo take on hoards of enemies it’s sure entertaining, but nothing about it actually reflects reality in the least, and deep down you just don’t really care about what you are seeing. The real reason for this is that most action scenes escalate in order to keep the audience interested – however this scene does the opposite, which is actually how you’d expect it to go in real life. As the hero takes on more and more people he becomes more and more fatigued, as does those he fights. In the end it’s almost awkward in that there is no resolving final blow, no witty lines – he just slowly limps away, hammer in hand. Oh yeah – the hammer… actually I think the hammer is probably what makes this scene the best… I mean… it’s a hammer. He’s hitting people with a freaking hammer.

So I’m almost certain that for every one I listed here there are ten I did not – after all, action and fight scenes are pretty much built on the idea that to every fight there is an underdog. I’d like to hear what ones I missed. Honestly I would.

People rarely have the nibs to stick a good musical sequence or two in their non-musical genre films, so let’s take a moment to pay our respects to those who did it so well by arbitrarily judging them in list form.

12. Johnny B. Goode In Back To The Future

I have so much personal nostalgia surrounding this film that I often forget that it’s a comedy. Marty McFly performing Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and accidentally inventing Rock N’ Roll in the process has to be the trademark of the entire trilogy. What strikes me as particularly funny about the whole thing is how quickly everyone, the band and the students, just run with it. Like suddenly these musicians just ‘follow along’ and play a perfect rendition of “Johnny B. Goode” in every way. Then of course you have the obvious Michael J. Fox lip-syncing to top it off. All this makes for a delightfully goofy scene, which of course sets up the punch line at the end of Marty completely ruining the moment with his more modern showboating.

11. Day-O In Beetlejuice

Hard to imagine just how awesome the rehearsals for this were – and in the end they really pulled this off. It comes out of freaking nowhere, which is awesome, but what really sells the scene is the look on everyone’s face as their possessed bodies dance against their wills. The mix of odd curiosity and horror, along with forced pleasure gets me every single time. The star performance is clearly Catherine O’Hara’s, as she embodies every element of what makes this bit work so nicely. My only nagging question is: why would anyone think this would be a good way to scare someone out of your house? Sure, the shrimp were a little freaky at the end, but phantom Harry Belafonte dance numbers are well worth a little haunting – as seen in the closing scene of this film.

10. Build Me Up Buttercup In There’s Something About Mary

I absolutely love it when you sit through a comedy and, right as you think it’s all over, you get hit with something like this. A surefire way to make your audience come out smiling is to have a little song and dance as your closing sequence. What makes this particular music video work is that it, right at the end, immediately takes you back through everything you just saw – only with everyone singing and dancing to The Foundations for no good reason besides it being awesome as shit.

The extra layer that hits me with this is that because movies are shot location to location, they must have had to take a little time out in every location to shoot just a little bit of the song – if not the entire thing. That must have been so fun for the first few weeks, and then pain inducing for every following week after.

And while we’re talking about ending credits songs…

9. Aquarius In The 40 Year Old Virgin

You watch this film hoping, waiting for that moment when Steve Carell’s character Andy finally gets a piece. In the end, the reward for your patience is well, WELL worth it. Much like There’s Something About Mary – the sequence brings back all the characters, big and minor, to dance hilltop in celebration of Andy’s new love to the tune of Aquarius from the musical Hair. It’s ridiculous as hell, but also such a blissful moment that you can’t help but to feel a little fuzzy about it while you laugh your ass off. I think for me, it’s the colorful fabric banners that really did it – that, and of course, the folksy dancing and overall shirtlessness. Probably my favorite detail of all has to be Jonah Hill dancing in a poncho – that image is rather unbeatable.

8. Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) In The Big Lebowski

It must be tough to be Jeff Bridges and know that the role you were born to play was a character called ‘The Dude.’ But… well… god what a role – what a movie! And everything that makes this Coen Brothers masterpiece so damn entertaining comes together in one beautiful drug induced porno movie inspired sequence lovingly entitled ‘Gutterballs’ and set to Kenny Rogers’s “Just Dropped In.”

What makes this whole ordeal so adorable has to be Lebowski’s slick dance moves as he seduces Julianne Moore’s Viking clad dream-world facsimile. Also Peter Stormare running with giant scissors is just a wonderful thing to have happened in the history of cinema. To top it off, pretty much everything you see in this sequence is something related to the rest of the film. For example, those scissors that Stormare is running around with can be see painted in the background of an earlier scene.

7. Still In Office Space

Watch it here!

If you’ve never beaten up a piece of electronic equipment you’ve never really lived. What makes this scene great is that, like the movie itself, everyone who has ever worked in an office environment – or even just worked with technology of any kind – can relate to this scene 100%. I don’t go a day without screaming at some blank-faced piece of electronics stalling on me like some robot asshole, and the fantasy of just smashing it through with a bat is a common one for many different reasons.

The idea alone of the quest for simplicity in life is enough to make three guys in suits bashing a copier/printer in the middle of a field to the Geto Boys the most satisfying imagery in a film – not to mention one of the funniest. But the cherry on top is of course the hatred this thing has invoked in these men and the catharsis of the kill. Michael Bolton’s refusal to let up is amazing, but the winner of the scene is Peter – look at him standing there, the man who set this whole thing up simply watches the brutality and savors it without a single blow.

6. You’re The Voice In Hot Rod

I feel like not enough people saw this film. It’s probably one of my favorites casts, which includes the SNL-famous trio from The Lonely Island as well as some of the funniest people around like Bill Hader, Danny McBride, Chris Parnell, and Will Arnett. This particular moment in the film, which actually serves as the turning point of the plot that I believe brings us into the third act, is portrayed simply in song as our main character is joined with the rest of his friends while walking down the street to John Farnham’s “You’re The Voice.” Then something… weird happens. Okay weirder. It’s an amazing progression from kind of silly spoof on a movie cliché to an amazing moment of ridiculousness followed by one of the funniest reaction conversations ever. That’s really what makes it all work, when they get out of the situation and react the way any normal person would in that situation, asking “What the hell? Was that because of us?”

5. Puttin’ On The Ritz In Young Frankenstein

Mel Brooks films are kind of something you have to grow up with to find funny – at least that’s what I’ve come to realize from discussing them with friends. Either you love them or you don’t. So with the clip above I expect a very polarized reaction in terms of funniness. However I think the reason why it never fails to make me personally laugh is really the simplicity of the song and dance, we know what’s coming every time Gene Wilder cues Peter Boyle’s monster portrayal, but it’s funny nonetheless. Combine that with the monster’s vacant but excited gaze and stiff cane work and this becomes easier one of the funniest dance sequences in a film.

4. Hip To Be Square In American Psycho

Watch it here!

Okay, maybe this isn’t exactly “HA HA” funny…well, it kind of is. I know I laughed the first time I saw Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman shuffling around in a raincoat frantically explaining the intricacies of Huey Lewis & The News to a drunk Jared Leto while preparing to hack into his face with an ax. The comedy to be found comes from the horror of what is inevitably about to go down combined with Bale’s happy-go-lucky performance and amazing dialogue, followed by Leto’s all too slow progression as his inebriated mind pieces together that something is terribly wrong with the situation and Bateman’s brief and honest responses to his inquiries.

Then, all of it comes into a perfect climax as we realize that what we are actually seeing is a man chop up another man in the middle of a beautiful apartment to the tune of “Hip To Be Square” by Huey Lewis. How can you not lose it at such a beautifully absurd moment? For the record, this scene was neck and neck for this list with the Phil Collins’ “Sussudio” sex scene – the deciding factor being the fact that I’m not really sure I’m allowed to link to such a scene.

3. Knights Of The Round Table In Monty Python And The Holy Grail

Monty Python And The Holy Grail is a film that they would never make today, and that makes me sad. You just can’t end a film with everyone getting randomly arrested anymore, and you certainly can’t blow off Camelot, ground zero of King Arthur lore, in a single song and dance routine. But there we have it – the beauty of this film, the beauty of Monty Python in general. These guys never failed to mix absurdity and talent together to create comedy art – and it was art.

My biggest fear is that this film will be missed by newer generations; it’s truly timeless in its humor. What makes this particular moment really work for me is two things: the stupidly joyful looks on the knights’ faces as they dance about, and then of course the punchline reveal that the whole song appears to be some kind of shared delusion of the group, concluding that Camelot is not worth the time – that’s literally as much sense as you can make of it. Of course there’s the cutaway to the prisoner clapping along in the dungeon – gets me every time that does.

2. Don’t Stop Me Now In Shaun Of The Dead

Of course. This scene literally makes my heart race in excitement every time I see it. Something about fighting zombies to Queen just gets me so pumped. The progression is amazing as it goes from simply having “Don’t Stop Me Now” playing innocently in the background to it becoming the metronome for a zombie assassination. What I love most is the characters’ frustration with the situation’s seriousness as they truly struggle with gravity of things, but at the same time they inadvertently go along with the silliness by strobing the lights and instinctively striking to the beat. Then as matters get exacerbated further, as the zombies break in and Shaun takes a dart to the dome, the scene begins to just spew madness. All a while we are watching this poor zombie who is being taken out in what should hold the record for least effective zombie killing method.

Oh hey – speaking of Queen…

1. Bohemian Rhapsody In Wayne’s World

I mean, obviously. There’s not much I can even say here – it’s the freaking “Bohemian Rhapsody” scene. Here’s a story for you, many years ago I took a trip to London where I spent most of my time randomly walking the streets with a friend. We met up with a group of young punk rockers who wanted us to join them on a fairly long subway trip to go see this movie being publicly played in the middle of a field in some random park. We took the trip and found ourselves in a field of what must have been thousands, all picnicking with their kids or drinking with friends – young, old, middle class, poor, rich – there was no divide amongst us. And then came this scene, and everyone knew the words. EVERYONE. A whole field of people headbanging together as one – perfect harmony. It was truly beautiful.

Happy Holidays, everybody!

Queen rules.

Despite being the least efficient mode of transportation available today, people can’t get enough to these damned amusement park rides. I myself enjoy being flung around by steel monsters quite a bit, but truth be told I much prefer rides as they are depicted in films.

The reason for this is simple: since they aren’t going to build a whole amusement park ride just for the film they go find one that already exists, then they proceed to make it look 10 times more awesome than it really is by adding cool elements or characters to it. The result is a ride that is just too fun to exist. The following are those rides that set the bar up high, as well as their less-awesome real world equivalents.

6. Wally World’s “Whipper Snapper” in National Lampoon’s Vacation

I don’t know if it’s the movie-long anticipation, the slow motion victory run in the parking lot, or that big moose thing – Wally World just seems like the most awesome theme park ever. The best ride in the bunch has to be the Whipper Snapper, the steel coaster that flips the Griswolds around during their day of bonding/hostage taking at the park. It’s the combination of both horror and satisfaction on the entire group’s faces that really does it for me; after going through days and days of road trip hell for a few hours getting scared shitless on some rollercoasters, it’s nice to see them actually enjoy it.

See for yourself right here!

In reality, anyone can visit Wally World by taking a trip to Six Flag’s Magic Mountain right outside of LA and take a ride on either the Colossus – which was the wooden coaster in the film – or of course Revolution – which is the real name of the Whipper Snapper. Personally, I have only driven past this place (undoubtedly the worst ride of an amusement park is driving by it), but I hope to spend a day there at some point. No doubt it won’t be as fun as I imagine; unless you are visiting the park with Chevy Chase during its closed season, it’s just not going to be the same.

5. Waterloo’s Waterslides in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Much like the Griswolds at Wally World, this is more about whom you’re with than what the ride is like. Ever go to a water park with someone who has never been to a water park before? It’s fun; it’s a lot of fun actually. The reason why is that you get to relive your own amazement by watching theirs. This is exactly why we have kids, so life doesn’t get boring.

Now, imagine going to a water park with someone who doesn’t even know that they exist, someone from the 1800s, perhaps. Also, imagine that this person is Napoleon.

I don’t know if I was incepted by this scene or not, but I just feel in my heart that the real Napoleon would have been a big water park guy. Obviously we’ll never know because damned if I can even find a phone booth, let alone turn one into a time machine – but if you’re up to it you can always don the uniform and head over to the Golfland-Sunsplash Waterpark in Mesa Arizona, which is the location of this Waterloo park. It looks like the same deal you see in the movie – minus the whole French emperor aspect.

4. Price Amusement’s “Terror Incognita” in The House On Haunted Hill

Okay, this would kind of depend on your definition of “awesome.” Ask yourself: do you enjoy thinking you are about to die? If the answer is “no,” then here’s another question: do you enjoy the relief of not dying enough to undergo the sensation of thinking you are about to die? I guess what I’m really asking is if you’re the kind of person who might describe the movie Flatliners as “inspirational” – and if the answer is “yes” to any of this, then you’d probably enjoy the Terror Incognita. Why, you ask?

For those of your at work, what the rollercoaster does is simulate not one, but two different accidents, giving the rider that lovely feeling that you get right before you die – only without the dying. Say what you want about this movie, which I personally thought was so-so, but that’s a freaking awesome ride idea. Maybe I’m sick, but I would totally ride that thing again and again, which – in a way – I actually have. What Lisa Loeb is screaming on is actually The Hulk at Universal Studios Florida, and it’s absolutely awesome. No, there is no elevator or faked crash – but the rollercoaster itself is just as fun.

Not really surprising that a Universal film would think to shoot their amusement park scene at Universal Studios – but it takes some balls to show your star rollercoaster crashing. What does bother me, however, is that there must have been a lot of disappointed people showing up to the real coaster expecting that awesome elevator – it’s like if a ride was shown having knarly laser robots only to have no such thing in real life…

3. Wonderworld’s “Alien Attack” in Beverly Hills Cop 3

Seriously, picture walking around Universal Studios with your little shit kid tugging at you asking where the robot ride is – I have to imagine that this happened a lot to parents visiting the park after this movie came out.

Well – I guess you could just tell the kid that Eddie Murphy killed all the robots before puppeteering a corpse.

Murder spree aside – that looks awesome; you just can’t beat robots shooting at you. Wicked laser effects too, right? If only those things actually existed where this was shot at the Universal Studios Hollywood Earthquake ride. The rest of Wonderworld, however, was shot at California’s Great America in Santa Clara. I find it funny that Universal Studios in Hollywood had so little rides that they had to outsource their amusement park scene – in fact, having actually worked at this park, I can tell you that they still have only one coaster.

That being said, the Studio Tour ride in which I worked, which includes Earthquake along with King Kong and Jaws, is well worth the visit. The movie sets alone are amazing – you can actually be in the presence of (and if you’re lucky, actually touch) the sets from classics like Psycho, Jurassic Park, Harvey, Spartacus, and of course, Beverly Hills Cop 3.

2. Pacific Playland’s Zombie Coaster in Zombieland

This is, like before, not really about where you are and more about whom you’re with. The people you’re with being zombies, of course.

You know – there’s a Men In Black ride in the aforementioned Universal Studios in Florida where you get to shoot at aliens as you ride around, and I recall going on it and thinking to myself, “wow, did they really manage to screw this up?” They had, they really had. It was only after seeing this film did I finally see what that ride should have been like. Imagine a first person shooter where you get to fling around on a metal track with a shotgun wailing on zombies – it’s the American dream.

This bloodbath of a ride, in real life, is actually called “Go Bananas!” which is strangely fitting; I would personally qualify what happens in that scene as ‘bananas’, amongst several other adjectives as well. The park itself is the Wild Adventures Theme Park in Valdosta Georgia.

In fact, both Zombieland and The Walking Dead were shot almost entirely in Georgia, which really doesn’t say very good things for that place.

1. The Bazooko Circus Merry-Go-Round in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

Of all the ways you can stack up these behemoth steel towers and push people at high velocities, all the ways you simulate explosions and floods, all the money you can toss at putting together a mind bending thrill – none of it compares to the simple combination of a merry-go-round and alcohol.

It’s simply diabolical if you ask me – put a bar at the center of a spinning room and stick the whole thing in the most psychotically colorful and noisy environment imaginable. It also doesn’t help if you happen to be on mescaline.

Click here to see it in action.

I really can’t count the ways I love this film, but if I had to, this scene would be far up that list. The Bazooko Circus seems just too insane, too cruel to be a real place – and throwing in Dr. Thompson and Gonzo into the mix is like pouring gasoline on a fire. The kicker is that – not only is The Bazooko Circus and the merry-go-round real, but it’s just as crazy as you think it is.

Get your ass to Vegas and check out the Circus Circus hotel and casino that borders the south strip, there you will find the Horse-A-Round bar, which is exactly what you see in the film. The actual book doesn’t even hide this, calling the casino by its actual name.

Having personally visited this place, I can absolutely confirm that it is, as the late doctor put it, “What the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.” It’s that insane.

Also, for all you Tupac fans, it should be noted that it was this casino where, after exiting, he successfully faked his death to protect himself from the Illuminati.

It’s one thing when we’re talking about Alfred Hitchcock having a walk-through in every single one of his films, including one that exclusively takes place on a lifeboat (he appears in a newspaper ad for that one). Sure it’s eccentric but it’s not surprising because, well, they’re his films and he can appear in them as he pleases.

What does strike me as weird is when a director shows up totally unexpected in someone else’s film. Usually there is a good reason – either they are producing the film or friends with the cast. However despite the later explanation, it’s still a bit jarring to see, say… the director of Kill Bill in an Adam Sandler comedy…

7. Quentin Tarantino in Little Nicky

This is one of those cameos that you actually have to stare directly at a few times before you realize what you are seeing. Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino shows up like four freaking times as the comically blind preacher Deacon in this demonic Adam Sandler flick. On first glance it’s a little hard to understand why he might show up in such a film until you think about its cast, which includes Patricia Arquette from True Romance, Tommy Lister from Jackie Brown, and of course scary Harvey Keitel from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. This ensemble, along with a movie already littered with insane cameos to begin with suddenly makes his stumbling, crazed cameo make some sense.

6. Steven Spielberg in Vanilla Sky

I like this cameo – it’s one of those where after you see it you are not even sure if it actually happened. Steven pops in and out in this scene as a guest of Tom Cruise’s character David’s birthday party. Not only is his appearance a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it type of moment, but it get’s even nuttier when you take a look at the cap that Steven is wearing in the shot. It’s a Pre-Crime cap, as in the fictional police force in Minority Report, which was of course the film that he and Cruise were currently undergoing pre-production for. Suddenly it all kind of comes together, especially since later, during the shooting of Minority Report, Vanilla Sky director Cameron Crowe managed to make a similar cameo to return the favor.

Check out Spielberg’s brief appearance:

5. Tim Burton in Singles

Well, while we’re on the subject of Cameron Crowe, anyone remember this grunge opus? The film follows several 20 something Seattle residents as they struggle to maintain their relationships during the height of the grunge era in the early 90s. While the film features several cameos from members of the more iconic grunge bands at the time – such as Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, and Soundgarden – why Tim Burton felt the need to appear in this film is rather beyond me. I’m not complaining though; it’s a terrific cameo where he basically plays a brooding filmmaker – which is, of course, fitting.

It should also be noted that during this very same year Tim made an appearance in Danny DeVito’s film Hoffa as well. Can you guess what the role was?

Of course.

4. Sam Raimi in The Hudsucker Proxy

Evil Dead and Spider-Man director Sam Raimi has probably the best cameos in his own films; whenever you see an off screen hand or object hitting an actor – it’s him doing it. Seriously, every opportunity he gets to personally slam an actor with something he takes it, and you have to respect that. However out of the movies he isn’t the director of, his appearance as one of the silhouetted brainstormers coming up with the Hula Hoop name in The Coen Brothers’ Hudsucker Proxy has to be the best. He’s the shorter one:

Now – I have a feeling that a lot of you might be yelling at me right now. The reason why is that I’m cheating a little. There’s a perfectly good reason why Raimi would appear in this film and it’s because he actually co-wrote it and was a second unit director on the thing. So yeah… I guess I’m cheating a lot. But I sure love that cameo.

Also if you are wondering what the hell Sam Raimi would be doing with the Coen Brothers in the first place well, go check the credits for The Evil Dead and see who served as the assistant editor. Actually don’t, I’ll just tell you that its Joel Coen, who actually got his start working with Raimi.

3. George Lucas in Beverly Hills Cop 3

Beverly Hills Cop 3 is one of those glorious films you spend an entire Sunday sparatically watching in a series of disjointed 20 minute segments as it plays over and over again on Comedy Central. It was during such a day that I found myself simultaneously dropping my vacuum and burrito and staring at the TV, wondering aloud just why the hell George Lucas decided to appear in the film.

That’s him with actress Christina Venuti – he’s credited as playing Disappointed Man at the end of the film, a role I must say he really embodied. Out of the very few cameos this man has made, this has to be my favorite. It’s just such a comically pathetic role, and it kind of makes me think that he has some kind of sense of humor hidden away.

The reason for this cameo was that director John Landis is rather known for featuring other directors, in fact along with Lucas, directors Joe Dante, Martha Coolidge, George Schaefer, John Singleton, Barbet Schroeder, Arthur Hiller, and Peter Medak also make cameos in this film.

2. Bryan Singer in Star Trek Nemesis

Everything I said about Spielberg’s cameo being quick, I take it back.

Did you catch it? That’s Usual Suspects and X-Men director Bryan Singer taking over Warf’s console as he leaves with Riker.

It’s another one of those really odd cameos that makes perfect sense the moment you think about it a little more – after all, Bryan directed both the first and second X-Men films, the first having already been made before this film – which of course also stars Patrick Stewart – and the second in pre-production. The director was also a bit of a Star Trek fan himself, so when he first met Stewart he made sure to find the time to also meet many of the producers for the Star Trek series. Through his friendships he was offered this run-on role, which despite being so brief, has actually earned his ‘character’ his very own Star Trek trading card.

1. Peter Jackson in Hot Fuzz

It’s really easy to forget that Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson has a really, really weird sense of humor. In fact, go and check out like, everything he did before the LOTR series and see for yourself. In fact, just go watch the film Meet The Feebles. I dare you.

While Jackson has made many cameos in his own films – including my personal favorite in Bad Taste, where his character vomits green in a bowl and then watches as a room full of people eat said vomit – he hasn’t appeared in any full length film besides his own. Well, except for Hot Fuzz.

You can probably guess which person he is there – but in case you are dense, that’s him, Father Christmas, stabbing Simon Pegg in the hand. Beautiful! Even weirder is that this isn’t the only cameo in this film that you can link to The Lord Of The Rings, as Cate Blanchett makes an even more memorable walk-on as Simon Pegg’s girlfriend, whose face we never see save for the eyes.

Engorge yourself with even more entertaining and educational lists here!

I’ve found that this list comes up fairly often on the Internet – however every time I read one I’m surprised by how many redundancies they all share. While a few of said redundancies will also appear in the following (because sometimes you just can’t deny a good performance) I’m going to try and mix this up and give a you a few of my personal favorite and slightly less talked about non-funny roles some real funny people took on. Let’s get started with a picture of a pen jabbed into Jon Stewart’s eye.

10. Jon Stewart in The Faculty

I love Jon Stewart, but I also think there should be more movies out there where he turns into an alien and gets stabbed in the eye. I don’t know why, I just love watching it happen in this film. This happens right after he also gets his finders lopped off by Josh Hartnett, one of the many random actors stuck in this early Robert Rodriguez film. Seriously – the cast features Robert Patrick, Elijah Wood, Famke Janssen, and Christopher McDonald just to name a few. Oh and Usher, Usher’s in this film as well.

Here, check out Jon’s alien death for yourself:

9. Adam Sandler in Spanglish

Spanglish probably isn’t the most serious role you could say Sandler has been in. I’d even argue that his role in Funny People was probably more dramatic – however with films like Punch Drunk Love and Reign Over Me, while his roles have been more serious they’ve also been a lot more outstanding in nature. What I like about this particular role is that it is not only fairly serious, but extremely subdued as well. It’s a simple character, a man struggling to keep faithful in a marriage, and Sandler plays it beautifully by downplaying his own sense of humor – often appearing as not the funniest person in the room, such as with the following scene:

8. Steve Carell in Little Miss Sunshine

This is, of course, one of those you see in all the lists about serious roles by comedians. I actually don’t think the reason why has much to do with the level of drama involved in the part, to me it’s the same Steve Carell personality we see in some of his other work, only heavily downplayed – muted. But that’s why it works too, the character comes across as a skeleton of a man that was once jubilant, humorous, and charismatic. Any humor that comes from this beaten down suicide case is from his exhaustion with those around him and the reactions of his family. This clip really says it all:

7. Steve Martin in Shopgirl

I hate it when a movie like Shopgirl comes along, adapted by Steve Martin from a novel he himself wrote, and shows me this wonderful window – Steve Martin taking on a serious role that was clearly something person to him – and then the window shuts and never seems to open again. Since The Jerk, this man has made me laugh consistently, but it was so cool to see him try something as subdued as this role. My guess is that it’s because of the subdued nature of the role, and the film in general that it didn’t see the success it deserved. Also you can’t beat co-star like Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman.

Of course when I mean subdued, I really mean subdued – as you will see by the first time Steve Martin’s character meets his future lover at her place of work:

6. Rodney Dangerfield in Natural Born Killers

This role had both absolutely nothing to do Dangerfield’s actual performance and at the same time had everything to do with it. The reason why is because his character in this film is not really unlike any of his comedic performances – which is what makes it so scary when you hear the words coming out of his mouth. This is probably one of the smartest scenes in a film I’ve ever seen – as director Oliver Stone disturbingly juxtaposes Rodney Dangerfield’s reputation and performance as well as a sitcom like environment with the extremely dark portrayal of a dysfunctional suburban family. Watch if you dare.

Click to the next page below to see the final five… 

Hey there pilgrims! Got a delicious new list guaranteed to knock the stuffing right out of you! Feast your eyes and gobble down six fictional dinner parties that you should give thanks you didn’t attend! Turkey!

Okay enough pandering. It’s Thanksgiving – let’s move on.

I do have to admit that it is in the spirit of the holiday that I chose to talk about these films themselves and not how they were made or anything like that – sometimes when you spend all your time thinking about what goes into a film it’s easy to forget what you love about them in the first place. So for this reason here is a straight up list of the best, most delightfully intense and entertaining movies surrounding dinner parties. After all, what’s a good group meal without a little sex, mystery, and of course, fowl play.

I couldn’t resist that last pun.

6. Clue

It could be the nostalgia talking – but in my opinion Clue seems to be the only film based off a board game that is actually a viable idea. The filmmakers took the murder mystery genre and hammed it up to the extreme, giving us everything we would want from trap doors to suspicious maids… and of course our diabolical butler played by Tim Curry.

Curry alone could make this film, however you can’t forget the wonderful performances of Michael McKean’s Mr. Green, Lesley Ann Warren’s Miss Scarlet, Madeline Kahn’s Mrs. White, Christopher Lloyd’s Plum, and Martin Mull’s Mustard. However my personal favorite has to be Lee Ving’s baffling performance as Mr. Boddy.

If you’re wondering why this particular actor stands out to me, it’s because the only other thing Lee Ving is known for besides this film is having his 80s punk band FEAR booted from Saturday Night Live.

That’s right, this suited villain was the lead singer of one the rudest punk bands of it’s time – and so why was he cast in this film? According to the filmmakers it was because his name sounded like the word ‘leaving’, which is probably not the best way to cast a role. But hey, it worked out – and now we have one of the most fun dinner party films you’ll ever see.

5. Gosford Park

If you love Brits than you’re going to love this film. It’s delightfully British – rainy, slow moving, dryly comical, and has Michael Gambon in it. If you have no idea who he is, that’s him up top… and if that still doesn’t ring a bell – this will.

In fact Gosford Park is so British is has not just one, but five actors from the Harry Potter movies in it – not to mention Stephen Fry, Clive Owen and Helen Mirren. So British.

Like Clue, this film also happens to be a murder mystery, as it follows a group of 1930’s upper-class socialites as they mingle together for a dinner party and hunting trip. Meanwhile their armies of servants have their own get together in the lower decks of the house. The festivities are unfortunately interrupted when a brutal poisoning/stabbing takes place, leaving the partygoers and servants alike wondering just who is responsible. Oh and Ryan Phillippe is in it too!

It has a wonderful cast, wonderful story, and so much food that you can’t help but to be hungry the entire film. Also murder.

4. The Last Supper

Speaking of murder, if you are in the mood for some fun politically slanted slaughter this is definitely a movie for you. It also happens to be Cameron Diaz’s second film ever made, right after The Mask.

The film follows a group of young ambitious liberal roommates who, after accidently inviting a neo-Nazi to their house supper ends up in a physical altercation over the dinner table ending with the stabbing of said Nazi. While a moment made even more satisfying due to the Nazi being played by Bill Paxton (I love Bill Paxton but it’s really fun to watch him be stabbed for some reason), they still have a dead body on their hands, which they decides to bury in the garden behind the house.

It doesn’t stop there of course, for this group of friends now have a bit of a taste for Nazi murder, and decide to make a habit of killing people who they happen to disagree with. Sunday after Sunday, they begin to invite ultra-conservatists to their dinner parties, only to end the night with one more lump in their garden. This pattern comes to its apex when one of them gets hold of a famous right wing television talking head, played by Ron Perlman, who graciously accepts their invitation to dinner. The meal results in one of the more unforgettable meals of a film.

3. The House Of Yes

Originally a play, this is the only film on the list that actually takes place on Thanksgiving and is also the absolute craziest of the batch. First off, you’d never expect to see top-notch performances from both Freddie Prinze Jr. and Tori Spelling, but you certainly get it. Unfortunately for them, both performances are completely blown away by Parker Posey’s awe inspiring insanity as she plays ‘Jackie-O’ Pascal, a girl who is not only obsessed with the Kennedy assassination but also with her twin brother Marty that goes way, way beyond the love between siblings. Yeah, it’s a messed up family.

Really, really messed up family.

It all begins with Marty bringing home his new fiancée for the family to meet, which proves to be much more than a minute mistake as it sends his incestuous sis into a crazy rage lasting the entire film. As the plot unfolds it becomes clearer and clearer that Jackie-O’s and Marty’s weird sexual past revolving around JFK’s death isn’t even the darkest nook of this family’s past – but it is certainly the weirdest.

See the crazy for yourself:

2. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?

Of course. This film follows Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn playing an older and opening minded couple who now has to come to terms with their free-spirited daughter’s (Hepburn’s real life niece Katharine Houghton) decision to marry a black doctor, played by Sidney Freaking Poitier. This clearly wouldn’t be such a big deal now, however this film happened to be made in the late 60s when the subject of interracial marriage was still considered fairly taboo. Despite this, the film received two Academy Awards for best original screenplay, and a best actress award for Hepburn’s more than deserving performance.

I personally find this to be my favorite dinner party film because we never actually get to the dinner – the entire premise is the anticipation of the event, which promises to be especially eventful as both fiancés’ parents are planned to attend and discuss the repercussions of this potentially divisive coupling. It’s almost as if the resolution is only the promise of a resolution, which reflects the frustrations of life, family, and relationships better than any film I’ve ever seen.

1. Rope

Rope is the only film on this list that literally makes my stomach hurt because of the suspense. It begins with two friends who have decided to pull off a murder for the pure sake of the act – strangling a classmate who they deem to be intellectually inferior to them and hiding him in a chest.

But that’s not the fun part – the fun part is when they use the chest at the serving table for a dinner party that very night in which they have invited their victim’s friends and family. As the movie progresses one of the killers is able to completely brush off the event – going so far as to use the very rope used for the murder to tie up books given as a gift to the victim’s father. The other killer, however, begins to break down as grief, paranoia, and alcohol kicks in. This dynamic, as well as James Stewart’s portrayal of the two killers’ overly suspicious friend, makes this party one of most gut wrenching displays of suspense you’ll ever see from a Hitchcock film.

The most painful scene is near the end, when their maid begins to clean up after the party – slowly clearing the chest as our two homicidal hosts entertain the guests. With each setting cleared she begins to retrieve piles of books, which she intends to return to the chest once it’s fully cleared.

Watching this moment slowly play out knowing what she will find if she does open the chest is absolutely stressful to watch. All more stressful when you find yourself trying to figure out exactly who you are even rooting for the entire film.

To top everything off – Alfred Hitchcock shot the entire film to maintain the illusion of a single continuous shot throughout – making the entire film run in real time, which only increases the discomfort of the situation.

This is the film to watch on Thanksgiving – a little reminder that even if Grandma is hitting the bottle a little too hard or that your nephew just vomited on the carpet, at least you haven’t killed anybody… yet.

Happy Thanksgiving!

It seems appropriate that Jim Henson’s legendary creation, the Muppets, got their start on children’s programming and public television because they have a lot to teach the world. Not only did they spearhead the low-rent show Sam and Friends on WRC-TV in Washington DC, they were also instrumental in making Sesame Street a primary education powerhouse.

But even when the Muppets branched out from their roots to land in their variety show and later major motion pictures, they still had a lot to teach us. Like many folks out there, I grew up with the Muppets, and these are some of the most important lessons I have taken away over the years.

10. The show must go on.

The run-down Muppet theater was a fledgling enterprise run by Kermit the Frog and his merry band of performers. Unfortunately for Kermit and the gang, he was constantly fighting against budgetary constraints, building disrepair and miserly ownership (which did have the fortune of bringing the owner’s nephew Scooter into the fold). But no matter what fate threw at the Muppets, they managed to put together a bang-up show each week… even if Crazy Harry took advantage of the situation…

9. Love is blind.

Forget falling in love, Romeo and Juliet style, with someone from the other side of the tracks. Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy fall in love with each other from opposite sides of biology. They’re not just from different species; they’re from completely different scientific classes (Kermit from class Amphibia and Piggy from class Mammalia). We humans have more genetically in common with a platypus than Kermit does with Piggy. But they don’t care. They’re in love, and that’s all that matters…

8. No one should be above making fun of themselves.

As much as The Muppet Show featured some fantastic guest stars and brilliant performers, everyone was game to have a little fun with their image and reputation. The beauty of the Muppets is they mixed tender and sweet with self-deprecating humor. For every “Turn the World Around” musical number with Harry Belefonte, there’s big name stars making complete fools of themselves. Case in point, check out Mark Hammil guesting on The Muppet Show in 1980 while at the top of his game during the release of The Empire Strikes Back. Yeah, he’s probably as high as a kite in this scene, but it still showed off his sense of humor…

7. Real artists aren’t always appreciated.

Before Gonzo became the George Clooney of chickens, he began his career as an out-of-the-box performance artist. Even against the ridiculous backdrop of The Muppet Show, he was never seen for the artistic genius that he is today. Back in 1976, this sad-eyed performer was often booed off the stage by those he dismissed as “yokels” and “philistines”…

6. Great songs don’t have to make any sense.

Have you ever caught yourself humming a catchy tune, or even singing it, and suddenly realize you have no idea what it’s about. Whether it’s misunderstood lyrics like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” or Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” music is often more about the feeling it brings up than the actual message of the lyrics. And sometimes nonsensical lyrics are all you need to get across a certain feeling. With the revival of the Muppets and the new film, this song has come back into the mainstream. I dare you to not be humming this for days after listening to it…

Check out the final five on the next page…

Hollywood is good at recycling things. After all, you build a giant house or an elaborate prop and you wouldn’t just use it once and toss it, right? This is why they have backlots at studios; they can hoard all their favorite stuff for later use (like the iconic building in the image above) or, failing that, at least use it for the studio tours. Same kind of goes for on-location sets – some places are just too dynamic to use only once, especially when the owner is more than willing to pimp out their place for cash.

This circle of life is great when you are working with a generic looking high school or cookie-cutter set but there are the occasional moments when they use a location just a little too iconic for its own good – and like a type-cast actor, you can’t help but to see the location as anything besides what made it famous in the first place.

6. Batman Takes On The Joker In The Same Place Ripley Took On Aliens

When the crew of Aliens found the Action Lane Power Station in London they thought it was the perfect place to portray the dark corridors of LV-426, that is once they cleaned all the damned asbestos out of the place. The clean up was well worth it, because not only did it serve as a wonderful place for the suspense of the first hive scene of the film, but also later went on to be the site of Batman and The Joker’s first confrontation at Axis Chemicals in Tim Burton’s Batman, which of course results in the villain’s disfigurement. Watching the movies back-to-back, it’s uncanny.

The two biggest giveaways have to be the giant tank redressed in Batman to be ‘Toxic Gas’ (just what the hell is that factory producing anyway?) and of course those bright orange railings that stand out so much.

Kind of makes you want to watch Batman fight an Alien doesn’t it?

Totally unrelated but really, really awesome.

5. Professor X’s School For Gifted Youngsters Is Also Billy Madison’s House

Throughout the X-Men films, multiple mansions around the world have stood in for Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters – even in the first film they used two different places for the exterior shots alone, picking and choosing places that they saw fit. Because of this it’s hard for anyone to nail down one place and say, “That’s the school from X-Men!” Instead I went ahead and chose the first location shown in the first film when establishing the school, and that location is Parkwood Estate in Ontario Canada.

What makes this establishing shot of these gifted students so fun to look at is because this same location was used years earlier during the establishing shots of another film… coincidentally also about a very gifted student.

What respectable drunken man-child doesn’t want to be Billy Madison? This is of course during the beginning credits of the film where Billy chases his ‘friend’ around the mansion on a golf cart. It’s kind of weird to watch X-Men knowing that years before it, at that very same spot, this was happening:

To make matters worse, Parkwood has also appeared in gems like Undercover Brother and Bulletproof Monk. However I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I own both of those films.

4. Tyler Durden Blows Up Die Hard’s Nakatomi Plaza In Fight Club

The Fox Plaza in Century City, Los Angeles just can’t get a break; everyone seems to want to destroy it – It was the lobby of the building in the elevator scene in Speed, its surrounding areas were rioted upon in Airheads – and of course it was Nakatomi Plaza in the action classic Die Hard where it exploded not once, but TWICE.

It’s a little lazy when you think about it – after all Fox Plaza is the headquarters for 20th Century Fox, which of course released Die Hard. So it almost feels like the executives wanted to make a film, but didn’t want to get out of their chairs to do it.

But through all of these fictional attacks the building still remained standing… that is until Mr. Durden got his hands on it.

Did you catch it? It’s rather quick. That’s the Fox Plaza on the far left, one of the first buildings to go down in the ending sequence to Fight Club. It’s amongst several other notable Century City and Los Angeles buildings, such as the St. Regis Hotel and Century Plaza Twin Towers, that were composited into the false skyline for this now iconic… and rather romantic demolition.

Every bit of movie news has to be taken with a fistful of salt. With so many moving parts, even the biggest players in the game sometimes see their work fall into the tall grass of development hell. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that all of those times you shake your fist at a new project (be it remake or reboot) are warranted, but they don’t always get made. Sometimes, the stuff we’re dreading goes down in flames too.

So it’s with that bittersweet spirit that we look back on a few announced projects that still haven’t been made.

And might never be.

8. Gore Verbinski’s BioShock

There was a rumbling that we’d see an adaptation of the video game masterwork “BioShock” as early as 2008 but it stalled out seriously. Gore Verbinski was quick to jump on board, claiming that the same green screen technology that brought 300 to life would deliver an underwater utopia, but delays pushed him into the producer’s chair with Juan Carlos Fresnadillo taking over as director. The budget was an issue, but ultimately the film project died on the R-rated vine because Verbinski smartly refused to tone it down to PG-13. Without a studio interested in a higher budget, R-rated action film with Randian overtones, the movie adaptation won’t be seeing Rapture any time soon.

7. Jason Reitman’s Pierre Pierre

The idea behind Pierre Pierre (which ranked high on the 2007 Black List) was that Jim Carrey would play a French arse bringing a stolen “Mona Lisa” to the States. Jason Reitman was attached to the project after his success with Juno and in the middle of his involvement with Jennifer’s Body. It would have been amazing to see, but he dropped out. Then, Fox Atomic went kaput, and everyone involved with the project spread to the winds. As late as 2010, the script that Reitman said was one of the funniest he’d read was in turnaround, and then Borat director Larry Charles attached his name. As we all know, the bearded one is busy with Sacha Baron Cohen and The Dictator, so it remains unclear as to if or when Pierre Pierre will ever get made.

6. Sarah Michelle Gellar in American McGee’s Alice

Another abandoned game adaptation, Wes Craven was originally meant to direct the dark take on Alice and her Wonderland. That was back in 2000, and after being bounced around between studios, it went into turnaround before game fan Sarah Michelle Gellar got on board in 2008. The actress claimed, “It’s a passion project of mine. It’s a story that I’d love to see. I’m fearful at this rate that I’m going to be the Queen of Hearts because I’m going to be too old to be Alice …” She’s currently starring in the television show Ringer, but she’s no longer involved with Alice. Neither is director Marcus Nispel, who was attached briefly. In fact, it’s unclear if anyone notable is attached to head down the rabbit hole and into the insane asylum.

5. Kate Hudson Becoming Margaret Keane for Big Eyes

Artist Margaret Keane had a compelling life story that was headed to the big screen with a script from 1408 writing team Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski and Kate Hudson attached to play the woman famous for painting giant-eyed children. Thomas Hayden Church was on board to play her husband – who she had a troubled divorce with – but even though Keane’s work has infiltrated pop culture, it doesn’t look like a film about her life will.

4. Dane Cook’s Buddy Cop Comedy Dead Already

In 2008, Dane Cook was coming off a year which saw him in Mr. Brooks, Good Luck Chuck, and Dan in Real Life. It was a wide variety of projects that was built to launch his career even further into the stratosphere. In 2008, he said he was gearing up for an action comedy in the “vein of Lethal Weapon,” called Dead Already. It might have been too far outside of his wheelhouse, because it never got made, and after My Best Friend’s Girl, his career looked dead already as well, but it seems to be battling its way back with several indie projects this year.

3. The Coen Brothers’ Yiddish Policeman’s Union

Producer par excellence Scott Rudin bought the rights to Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” back in 2002, and he announced that he’d worked out a deal with The Coen Brothers to write and direct an adaptation of the bizarre, Jewish, snow-set mystery (and could he have gotten a better directing team?) in 2008. It was supposed to be their next after A Serious Man, but it never came to fruition, which is tragic because the levels of genius pairing up here are astounding.

2. Charlize Theron in the Sympathy for Lady Vengeance Remake

Alongside the Oldboy remake that never got made, Charlize Theron announced in 2008 that she’d be producing and starring in a remake of Chan-wook Park‘s capstone film of his trilogy – Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. The original focuses on a woman recently released from prison after serving time for kidnapping and murder who sets a revenge plot in motion for the man she blames. There was no word on whether the US remake would adhere closely, but it doesn’t seem to matter because we never got to see it made. Oddly enough, Theron will be seen next in list-partner Jason Reitman’s next movie Young Adult. And speaking of Mister F…

 1. The Arrested Development Movie

While Ghostbusters 3 also deserves this spot, and while we’ll be writing more of these lists where it can earn it, there’s no doubt what the king of promised-yet-undelivered films is. Arrested Development went off the air in 2006, and two years later, the unthinkable was announced.

At this point, after the insulting amount of false starts and empty promises, the prospect of a second life for the beloved show seems like wishful thinking being taken too seriously. At a reunion earlier this year, the entire cast swore that a movie was going to happen, but as of this list being made, I don’t see any cameras rolling. It’s still just a pipe dream. One that hopefully will escape development hell and end up in a theater near you (in the near future).

What movie projects do you wish had actually come to fruition? Which are you glad never got made?

It’s hard to get excited about something as technical as that thing that makes cameras not fall down on film sets, especially these days, when you can make a successful film without even going through the effort of picking up a camera at all. Even if you are shooting a live action film, thanks to the realism of CGI, computers are now able to put a lens wherever you need it to be – this is why I think we need to take a second to celebrate some of the hard working pieces of lightweight metal that were behind a few of the more bitchin’ shots out there. These rigs got the shot done, computers be damned!

6. Motion Control Split Screen in The Rules Of Attraction

Motion control has been around a while now – but what made this shot so impressive wasn’t the rig, but how rig was used, observe:

Pretty damn slick, right? Of course, they had to shoot the scene twice, once with each actor on either side of the shot. They set the camera up on a motion control rig, which is basically a crane or dolly designed to make the exact same movements over and over, and programmed it to pull out into the same ending position each time, so when it did, the split screen was no more! It’s so simple and yet so effective, especially in this scene, where two potential lovers are meeting for the first time.

It did prove to be a little difficult on the actors, whose actions, dialogue, and even line of sight had to be coordinated exactly with not only each other, but the rig as well.

5. SnorriCam in Requiem For A Dream

The SnorriCam rig, essentially a rig that attaches the camera on to the chest of the actor, has been around since as early as 60s. In case you are wondering it got its name from, thank two Icelandic directors, Einar and Eiour Snorri, (no relation, seriously) who worked to improve the rig in the 1990s. What makes this rig so awesome is that it literally is only as good as the actor wearing it – meaning that it showcases a performance so intimately, while at the same time is so intrusive to the performance that it takes a really dedicated actor or actress. For example, Jennifer Connelly.

Watch a clip on YouTube

Director Darren Aronofsky has this wonderful talent of knowing just when to use this rig in his films, which works best when creating some kind of emotional out of body experience. My personal favorite would be Marlon Wayans running from the cops, something that no doubt sucked to do with a giant rig strapped to your chest.

Watch a clip on YouTube

4. Vas-O-Cam and Shaky Cam in The Evil Dead

In case anyone is wondering, I have a copy of “The Evil Dead Companion” right next to my desk, which is probably why I keep bringing this series up.

The Vas-O-Cam and the Shaky Cam take us less in the direction of advanced filmmaking rigs and more in the direction of pieces of wood. You see, director Sam Raimi had a limited budget, but he also knew that he couldn’t let that show in the film – and the quickest way to spot a low budget film is if all you are seeing is tripod and handheld shots. No – he couldn’t just run around the set with a camera on his shoulder like a jackass, he needed rigs! So he got creative – the first kind of rig he needed was something to stabilize the camera when shooting the POV shots of the villain. The answer was simple.

Yeah. That’s a board. What made it work was that the board served as a way to distribute the cameras weight amongst several people gripping on to it, which made for the closest thing he could get to a steady shot. It looked like this:

Oh, right, also spoiler alert. Anyway, that’s the first rig, the second rig he needed was something to simulate a smooth dolly shot. The solution was elegant.

Vaseline.

3. Car Rig in Children Of Men

Director Alfonso Cuaron is very much into tracking shots in his films – and you can’t really blame him for it; after all tracking shots are really, really fun to watch. So when he was faced with an action scene in Children Of Men that took place exclusively in a car (a very unfriendly place to put cameras) he had to make a few choices: he could cut between many different angles, shoot on a green screen, or build the most awesome car rig ever. He went with the third option.

Wicked boss. Basically it had a fake car interior mounted on a real vehicle manned by a hidden driver, then on top of it all, there was a second compartment where the remote camera operator and director sat. Between the upper and lower halves was the camera.

It hung down and moved the same way those claws at arcades moved: two tracks running the length and width of the car that it could move on, giving it free range to cover everything that was happening. So as the scene progressed, they would simply move this thing as they wished, provided that the actors also moved their seats in coordination with it. In the end we got one of the coolest shots ever.

Er…spoiler alert. Sorry. Also before you ask, no, it’s not all one shot, and yes, it was touched up with digital effects, too…but does it matter? So awesome.

2. Bullet Time in The Matrix

Speaking of awesome, holy God, is this an amazing rig. No doubt everyone is familiar with it – the best way to explain the effect is this: instead of a single lens that sequentially exposes film frame by frame as an action is carried out, bullet time is an array of lenses all devoted to a single frame of film capturing a different angle of an action at either the same moment in time or at a slower rate than usual. Okay, that may not have been the best way to explain it. It’s a bunch of cameras.

See? You can wrap them around your subject any way you please, kind of like a rollercoaster track, and then take a series of pictures that when put together sequentially appear to cover a small moment in time from many angles.

When the Wachowski Brothers began pre-production of the first Matrix film, they considered all sorts of insane ways to try to stop time, such as attaching the camera to some kind of rocket propelled rig to go faster than the action – in the end, the solution was clear with bullet time, and thanks to them we will surely never forget that famous shot from the first film.

Of course, in the later films they opted out of amazingly capturing a still moment in time and went with Muppet-grade CGI realism instead. We can only hope some film comes along to once again take advantage of this awesome, awesome rig.

1. Smart Gun aka Steadicam Gun in Aliens

Yes. Technically there wasn’t a camera at the end of this rig; instead, there was something way cooler.

Since its conception in the late 70s by Garrett Brown and wonderful first uses in The Shining, Rocky, and Marathon Man, the Steadicam has become an essential to any major motion picture production. It’s quite hard to explain the technical details of it, but imagine having a third arm sticking out of your stomach that is holding a camera – and anywhere you move, the arm counterbalances, keeping the camera held steady. Hence, Steadicam. It looks like this:

That’s Brown himself manning the rig there. So okay – now picture a German MG-42 machine gun at the end of it, because that’s what the pre-production team of Aliens did.

No doubt many reading this have a warm place in their hearts for this particular weapon, and the arm was one of the key details to making this alien drone killer one of the more outstanding guns in sci-fi lore. It’s like the cherry on top.

Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t really a walk in the park to handle either – anyone who has tried on a Steadicam can tell you that the part of the steadying process is redistributing the weight of the camera from the arms to the torso, so you best have a strong back. The case was no different for the smart gun, as Jenette Goldstein (Vasquez) has expressed in interviews, you couldn’t really have the thing on very long.

Small price to pay for going down in badass history, I guess.

Week in and week out, there’s always something interesting happening in the Cinematic Listology Archives.

Most films tend to be technological and logistical nightmares right from the start; clusters of egos working together with complicated equipment in an attempt to capture what is essentially a really elaborate lie tends to be a rather surreal process, so it’s not really surprising to hear that a whole lot of craziness can go down during the making of a movie – however as unsurprising as it may be, it’s still damn entertaining.

That’s why DVD documentaries, in my opinion, are like the ultimate kind of reality TV: stick a bunch of millionaire actors, union laborers, and eccentric artists in a room with expensive and possibly life-threatening electrical equipment and you’re surely going to get something worth watching. These are the sets that were no doubt the worst to be party to, and the best to be a fly on the wall for – that is if you happen to be a really sadistic fly.

6. Eyes Wide Shut

The torment that comes from Stanley Kubrick’s final film was not from the conditions of the set, nor was it even from any complications that arose during shooting. It certainly wasn’t Nicole Kidman’s nude scenes. What made working on this film a living hell was much more elegant than any disaster or ego clash – it was the pure tedium. 15 months of it.

Kubrick is known for being a rather meticulous director, and for this film he went above and beyond, setting an actual Guinness World Record for “longest constant movie shoot” at 400 straight days. That means that for those 400 days production never took a break. The reason for such a long shoot is of course Kubrick’s extreme attention to detail and perfectionism. At one point he shot a take of Tom Cruise walking though a door 90 times before he thought it was right. Ten whole days were spent deciding whether or not a character should make a certain hand signal. A 13-minute scene with Sydney Pollack took three full weeks of filming to get.

Of course it’s not like they didn’t know what they were getting into – as Vincent D’Onofrio, who had previously worked with Kubrick, told the actors “Rent a house or an apartment, because you’re going to be in England for a while.” And later in an interview Cruise himself expressed both his excitement and awareness of the possible length of the shoot saying “Nicole and I talk about it so much at night. When we’re 70 years old, sitting on the front porch, we’ll be able to look back and say, ‘Wow! We made this movie with Stanley Kubrick!’ We know it may take a long time to finish, but we don’t care.” When asked how long was a long time, he predicted six months. Oh so close!

Not long after the film was finally completed Kidman and Cruse famously separated, no doubt because they were sick of looking at each other.

5. What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?

Whoever the sick bastard was that decided to cast both Bette Davis and John Crawford together in this film must have known the kind of perfect storm they were creating by doing so. After all – up until this point Crawford had once deliberately seduced one of Davis’s costars just to piss her off, and Davis had publically called Crawford an African caterpillar-eyebrowed mannequin who had “slept with every male star at MGM, except Lassie.” They were not pals – in fact their professional rivalry only got worse when both actresses signed to Warner Bros and were faced with actually competing for the same roles. It was in their older years that they were both cast as clashing siblings in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?.

It got pretty bad. Stitches bad, when at one point during a fight scene Davis ‘accidentally’ kicked Crawford right in the head – causing a trip to the medic. Joan then retaliated by filling her costume with rocks for a scene where Davis had to drag her body, causing the actress serious back injury in the process. This was all after Davis made sure to have a Coca Cola machine installed in her dressing room – the significance being that Crawford’s late husband had been the CEO of Pepsi. Nothing could even be interpreted as playful jabbing between rivals, as Bette was later quoted saying “The best time I ever had with Joan was when I pushed her down some stairs in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?.”

It didn’t even stop there – after the movie was finished Davis ended up getting nominated for the role, which caused Crawford to actually lobby against her co-star getting the Oscar. She went so far as to offer to accept the award for any of the other nominees who couldn’t accept the award in the event that they won, which was exactly what happened when Anne Bancroft won over Davis. Up stepped Joan Crawford, happily accepting the award that Davis didn’t get.

However it should be noted that in the end, Davis got the last word when Joan Crawford died some time later, saying “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”

Freaking ice cold.

4. The Shining

This list could be all Kubrick films if it wanted to be. The Shining stands out with an equally elegant type of on set tedium as the previously mentioned Eyes Wide Shut – however this time it was mixed with much more focused abuse, specifically at the two biggest victims of the film played by Scatman Crothers and Shelley Duvall.

While Kubrick did long shoots for every actor (including spending 3 days shooting the infamous door-chopping scene with Jack Nicholson) he focused his longest and most grueling shoots on these two, and actually took yet another Guinness World Record in the process for the most takes for one shot, at a whopping 127 takes for the scene where Wendy swings the baseball bat at Jack:

Watching that clip with this knowledge, it becomes clear why Duvall comes across as desperate as she does. However some of the production crew says that this record is in fact wrong, as the most takes they shot during production was actually when Scatman’s character Hallorann explains to Danny about what Shining is, which is said to have taken 148 different takes. No matter who is right in this matter, what’s clear is that Kubrick was a crazy, crazy man.

On top of all of this Kubrick also appeared to treat Duvall in a much harsher manner than the rest of the cast, presumably to create a feeling of hopelessness in her character. The process nearly drove the actress sick with stress, as she explains during a making of documentary:

If you keep watching, you will see in the very next sequence an instance of Kubrick completely blowing off Duvall’s complaints of getting her hair caught in a window while shooting, telling the crew “Don’t sympathize with Shelley” and demanding that she does another take.

3. Apocalypse Now

You can’t really have a list like this without putting Apocalypse Now on it. As far as hellish sets go, the 16 months of sporadic shooting for this film was everything you would expect the perfect production hell to be. Starting with a recast of the main character from Harvey Keitel to Martin Sheen along with a set-destroying typhoon that shut down production 2 months into the film, the shit hit the fan nice and early for the cast and crew.

Oh, it got worse. It’s hard to even know where to start – there was Laurence Fishburne, who had lied about his age to get the part of the 17-year-old Tyrone ‘Clean’ Miller. Laurence was actually 14 at the time of shooting, making the fact that most of his co-stars were either drunk or on some kind of drug a bit disturbing especially when you take into account that this whole ordeal was happening in some remote Philippine jungle. Sam Bottoms, who played Lance Johnson, at one point shot a scene on a triad of amphetamines, weed, and LSD.

Then of course there was the one-million-dollar man, Marlon Brando. One million being the money he got in advance for playing the role of Kurtz, which he did so drunk and overweight without ever reading the script or the original source material “Heart Of Darkness.” In fact the entire ending of the film had to be changed in order to accommodate and conceal Brando’s misshapen physique.

The winner has to be Martin Sheen, our ‘hero’ of the film, who suffered both a drunken breakdown and a goddamn heart attack on the set. Surely one of the finest moments of insanity has to be his inebriated kung fu demonstration that resulted in a broken mirror and fit of tears – All while celebrating his 36th birthday:

To be fair, having an alcohol-induced nervous breakdown on the set of a Francis Ford Coppola film isn’t a half bad way to spend a birthday. It’s certainly more memorable than cake and music.

2. The Abyss

So with most of the previous on this list it’s been focused more on specific people who went through terrible ordeals on set either because of other actors or the director or copious amounts of drugs and alcohol – in this instance the villain was the set itself:

That there is the containment building of the unfinished Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant in Shelby, North Carolina. In order to effectively shoot the underwater scenes they needed, the giant concrete structure was filled with 7 million gallons of water at a depth of 40 feet, making it the largest underwater set ever constructed. That’s the cool part – the rest is horrendous.

To start things off, on the first day of shooting the tank sprang a leak that spit roughly 150,000 gallons of water a minute and had to be repaired by specially brought in experts. That was probably the least terrible thing that happened during the following six month, 70 hour a week shoot that featured Ed Harris nearly drowning and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio storming off the set screaming “We are not animals!” But those two incidents aside, what made this particular set so incredibly unbearable was that even when things were going exactly right, everything still sucked.

The water, for example, was treated with so much chlorine that the crew developed skin rashes and loss of body hair – not to mention that they were all slowly turning into blondes. There was a giant tarp being used to make the set dark that ripped early on during a thunderstorm, so all shooting afterward had to be done exclusively at night. Oh, also it was cold. Really cold – outside of the water all production meetings had to be done in hot tubs because the outside air was downright frigid.

To top this off, the average time people were spending submerged was five hours – so much time that they actually had to undergo decompression before getting out. And of course, in the water for 5 hours there really isn’t a place to take a leak, so they just… you know… went. Some cast and crew members were even seen nodding off while underwater, for the process of shooting was so slow that they never even completed a single scene in a day.

Most of the actors said that the waiting, combined with being submerged underwater in the dead of night, was the absolute worst part of the experience. Michael Biehn claims that out of the five months he was there he only acted for about four weeks, Ed Harris claims to had randomly broken into tears from the frustration – and many of the cast actually trashed their dressing rooms in anger, going so far as throwing couches from the windows.

A lot of the actors still express some grievances with director James Cameron to this day for his demanding nature, however in his defense, according to the cast and the crew he spent an average of 12 hours a day without ever getting out of the tank, often seen in full dive gear watching the dailies for the previous day on his giant underwater monitor. The man was dedicated.

1. The Evil Dead

The more you hear the cast and crew talk about it, the more you can believe that the filming of The Evil Dead could have just as likely ended in a crime scene.

“I never worked so hard or so long in my life… It got so cold there. After Tim Philo left and I had to operate the camera, be my own first assistant and load the cameras, etc, I also had to help blood up Bruce… My hands would be covered in syrup, and I’d realize, I gotta change the film magazine, I gotta change the lenses, so I would have to wash this blood off my hands. It was like fifteen degrees in this place, and there was no heat. The only thing we had was the coffee maker, full of coffee, not water. So I had to pour hot coffee over my hands to get the blood off them, and to warm them up enough to be able to load the 16mm cameras. It was a very hard, physically difficult experience. We should have taken days off, we should have rested, but it got to the point where we’d work eighteen hour days non-stop for, it seemed like, months.” –Director Sam Raimi, from “The Evil Dead Companion”

Even in the first six autumn weeks of shooting The Evil Dead, things were pretty terrible. The Tennessee-located cabin that they used had to be purged of wall-to-wall cow manure as well as heavily repaired to look livable. They had to dig a trench in the floor to fake a basement. The actors wore old and uncomfortable contact lenses that had to be taken out every fifteen minutes to prevent eye damage. At one point actress Ellen Sandweiss spent an entire freezing cold night shooting in a nightgown while barefoot, resulting in her feet getting torn to shreds by roots and twigs. This film would turn out to be the very last of her acting career.

Then things got worse, as their $300,000 budget ran out and, due to Sam Raimi’s extremely thorough shooting style, the six weeks had turned into the entire winter season, the cast and crew began to leave. The rest of the film was shot with only five people alone in the middle of a Karo syrup-covered cabin in Tennessee for the month of January. The only remaining actor being Bruce Campbell, who was known for doing anything producer Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi wished of him. For all the other actors, they would simply stand in themselves. Thanks to the magic of wigs, this included the female leads as well.

Bruce Campbell became so exhausted by the 12-18 hour shoots that they often kept him in character (awake, being the character) by jabbing him with sticks – At one point Raimi and Tapert decided to take total advantage of his condition for their own amusement, insisting that Bruce chop wood on camera over and over for what they called the big “wood chopping scene.” It took Campbell 45 minutes before realizing that there was, in fact, no such scene planned. Dicks!

After shooting was completed Bruce and Rob had the pleasure of taking a shotgun to every prop leftover before heading back for post-production. Campbell has since described the experience as being ‘Vietnam-like’ and claims to have grown a beard and slept on his floor for the following two months after shooting.

What are some of your favorite production horror stories?

Last month the Oscar season officially kicked off, and this month we’ll be getting plenty more Oscar baiters and real contenders to add to the mix. We’ll get another Brett Ratner film, the 25th film of the decade from Clint Eastwood, another upbeat audience friendly film from Lars von Trier, and the most expected and clichéd, a Martin Scorsese ”kids” film.

A fairly promising month, right? I’ve already seen a few films coming out this month, and there’s plenty of good-to-great films to see, even one or two that didn’t make it on this list.

Honorable Mentions: My Week with Marilyn (an extremely enjoyable film with a great performance by Kenneth Branagh), Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, and London Boulevard (a solid anti-cliché gangster film). But here are the names who made it all the way to the top ten:

10. J. Edgar (November 9th)

God, I hope this is Clint Eastwood’s comeback. The last memorable film he made was Letters From Iwo Jima, and since then it’s been mediocre disappointment after mediocre disappointment. Changeling, Grand Torino, Invictus, and the noble effort Hereafter are all Eastwood at his most schmaltzy and condescending. Getting an idea in an Eastwood film isn’t enough now, he wants to hammer you in the face with it. Hopefully with a good script from Dustin Lance Black (Milk), this will mark Eastwood’s return with a grand biopic.

9. The Muppets (Nov 23rd)

8. Into the Abyss (Nov 11th)

Another year, another Werner Herzog film. The word of mouth on the festival circuit has been fantastic, so this is undoubtedly going to be another home run for the filmmaker. Although, despite being in the minority on this, I was slightly underwhelmed by Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. To sound more snobby, it wasn’t one of his greater films. From what I and everyone else who pays attention has heard, his documentary on death row is a moving and humanistic exploration on life and death.

7. Immortals (Nov 11th)

The trailers for Tarsem‘s Immortals haven’t been anything to write home about. There’s an odd stiltedness to how the footage is being showed, and they make the film look shockingly small in scope. One point the trailers do get across: This is a Tarsem picture. The Fall is one of the best films of its decade and The Cell is a disturbing and visually engaging thriller; the visionary has his own style. Whether his action sequences and the picture itself will go beyond, “That looks beautiful,” remains unseen, but a Tarsem film is still a Tarsem film.

6. Tyrannosaur (Nov 18th)

I have not seen Paddy Considine‘s feature debut and festival favorite Tyrannosaur yet. However, our own Kate Erbland has, and she described it, to paraphrase, as: too bleak, everyone in it is either broken or are their way to becoming broken, uncomfortable, and that it “made her sick to her stomach.” Sign me up!

Editor’s Note: We’ve spent a while searching for a fitting replacement for Ashe (who we still miss), but we’re elated to welcome David Christopher Bell to our team. He’ll be writing insightful lists for us every Thursday from now until we stop blackmailing him for that thing he did in Florida in 1986. Please give him a warm welcome!

It’s funny. After Anthony Perkins first appeared as Norman Bates there was absolutely no going back from it. No matter what role he was put in after Norman, when audiences looked at him all they could see was the shower-interrupting taxidermologist that they feared so deeply. This proved to be a major hindrance in his career, causing him never to land any major role in the industry afterward. Now if only he had worn a mask.

After all, if horror films have taught us anything it’s that no matter how effective a performance is, if you have a bunch of rubber on your face, mainstream audiences aren’t going to end up learning your name or recognizing your face. So in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, the following are some of those very names and faces that are responsible for some of the greatest movie nightmares of modern horror. People who you could walk right by on the streets and never know that they are to thank for all those times your childhood-spawned neuroses forced you to double-check under your bed.

8 & 7. Dane Farwell & Roger Jackson – Ghostface

Anyone nearing thirty no doubt recalls the first Scream film with only the finest high-school nostalgia, a feeling unfortunately followed by disdain at the lofty amount of tired sequels and formulaic slasher flicks that the film made way for. Nevertheless, one iconic constant of the series has been the frantic but calculated pursuits of the Ghostface character throughout the films.

While a handful of actors have revealed themselves to be the killer in these films, there are two people who we have to thank for the Ghostface performances. The first is Dane Farwell, the stuntman who was physically behind the cloak and mask for the majority of Ghostface’s screen time.

It was Farwell’s imposing stature and frenzied movements that really defined the corporeal aspects of the villain, which he did make sure to change depending on which masked character he was currently standing in for. If you watch the first film, for example, with a keen eye you can actually speculate whether the killer is Stu or Billy in any given scene by judging the level of aggressiveness or awkwardness during the attacks. Take a look at this scene that, despite the later reveal of Billy’s cell phone, seems most likely to be Stu’s dirty work:

But of course, chances are that it’s primarily, if not exclusively, Farwell under there the whole time, mimicking his interpretation of which character is the current killer. His work was continued in the second film, and was unique, so that when he opted out of the third film fans actually noticed a change. Luckily he did return for the fourth and is said to be involved in the upcoming fifth installment as well.

It should also be noted that Ghostface’s signature move of wiping the blood off his knife with his forefinger and thumb was in fact a move created by Farwell himself.

So that’s the body, but what about the voice?

The sinister voice behind the entire series, what is explained to be a voice-changing device in the films, was in fact voice actor Roger Jackson. A man with over 150 credits to his name, including the Martian translator in Mars Attacks, as well as Mojo Jojo in The Powerpuff Girls, he worked directly with the actors on set via telephone as opposed to pre- or post-recording his lines. However, despite being physically on the set, in order to make the performances more authentic director Wes Craven made sure that none of the actors actually interacted with Roger face-to-face to preserve the mysteriousness of the conversations. The same goes for him in real life, as most interviews with him about Scream are done with a shroud of darkness to conceal his face.

What is no doubt both Jackson and Farwell’s best moment in this entire series of films is of course the unforgettable first scene of the first film. It’s this moment when we are first introduced to Jackson’s creepy charm and gradually increasing menace as well as Farwell’s threatening stance and surprise attacks that, much like Billy and Stu, we can instantly see just how deadly of a team these two really are.

6. Roberto Campanella – Red Pyramid

The somewhat underrated movie adaptation of Silent Hill was one of the most visually striking horror films in a good long time, and this is partly due to Roberto Campanella, who not only plays both Red Pyramid and the mangled bathroom janitor Colin, but also served as the film’s choreographer. Take a moment to consider that – think about the movement of those terrifying faceless nurses or the even more horrible armless walking condom dude at the beginning of the film. This was all thanks to Campanella, who worked with all the costume actors of the film.

That aside, his own costume for Red Pyramid was a task in itself. It required a five-piece prosthetic that took three hours to put on, 15-inch-soled boots to make him 7 feet tall, a 12 lb. pyramid mask that completely blinded him, and to top it all off he had to be completely bare-assed the entire time.

Try to imagine what it’s like to hit a mark and pretend that a foam sword is actually made of heavy steel while clopping around a set with your naked ass at chest height with everyone else. In the below behind-the-scenes video, Campanella compares the sensation to being a little kid, which says all sorts of things about his parents.

5. Nick Castle – Michael Myers

To be fair, at least five different people actually portrayed Michael Myers in the original Halloween film – most notably Tony Moran, who was the actual face of Myers when he is unmasked near the end of the movie. However, the person we see the most, the one that walked the walk and talked the uh-…the heavy breathing…is Nick Castle.

Castle, who was John Carpenter‘s long-time friend from the University of Southern California and an aspiring filmmaker himself, took on the role for a mere 25 bucks a day and then proceeded to completely define the multimillion-dollar franchise psychopath with his patient and precise body language. Michael Myers is indeed a man who takes his time, almost aware that he is in a horror movie and therefore has no need to rush things, his movements are slow and somewhat dull up until the final moments when he decides to pin you to a wall with a knife and then go see what your girlfriend is up to.

After owning the role, Castle made the jump from aspiring filmmaker to actual filmmaker, directing several films, including the CGI pioneer The Last Starfighter, as well as co-writing Escape From New York with his buddy John.

4. Gunnar Hansen – Leatherface

What makes Leatherface so incredibly terrifying is the childlike naiveté he has towards the gruesome acts that he commits. He kills in a dog-like manner, either out of obedience or protection. This was no mistake in the performance, as Hansen himself has described him as being “afraid of his own family.”

It’s hard to tell from all that beard, but that is the face of the man who brought the squealing out-of-control behemoth Leatherface to life. After playing football in high school and then later working as a bouncer while making it through graduate school, Hansen decided to try out for the role of Leatherface. After receiving the part, he celebrated by spending four straight weeks running around on camera wielding a chainsaw over his head for 12-hour-a-day shoots. He was then handed $800 and then pretty much stopped acting for a decade. Hard to imagine why he found acting so unfavorable, right?

At one point during the shoot, he was supposed to use a rigged knife to pretend to cut actress Marilyn Burns’s finger – after several unsuccessful takes using the rig, Hansen decided the more efficient technique of removing said rig and actually cutting the actress would prove to get better results – he was correct.

3. Bolaji Badejo – Alien

The story of the 7-foot-tall, Somalia-born, North London graphic designer who was picked up at a bar to play the star villain in Ridley Scott’s Alien before completely vanishing off the face of the earth is a weird story indeed.

In fact it’s so weird that you no doubt had to read that last sentence more than once.

One day, one of the films casting directors noticed the extremely lean 6’ 10” Bolaji at a local pub – aware that the film has yet to find anyone tall and slender enough to correctly portray the alien of the film, he was brought to director Scott, who asked the young man if he wanted to be in the film. According to Scott himself, Bolaji’s answer was “Sure.” And, just like that, he spent the next ten months of his life becoming a monster movie legend.

He trained with movement coordinators and used various rigs to get the unnatural look that they wanted for the creature, and was kept away from the other cast in order to create a feeling of unfamiliarity in the performances.

And then after the film was complete and on it’s way to becoming the hit that it now is, Bolaji just sort of…vanished. There have been various hoax pictures of him in his older years, but the producers and fans were never able to officially track him down for later interviews. Sadly the most popular rumor, which has yet to be confirmed, is that Bolaji committed suicide not long after the film was shot – but if that were the case then surely there would have been some kind of evidence of it. Perhaps, for the sake of irony, he was simply abducted by aliens.

2. Billy Bryan – Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

Anyone who is surprised to see Stay Puft on a list of costumed terrors is either a sociopath or a professional clown or most likely both. In what could be called the most loved film of its generation, Ghostbusters also featured one of the most dread-inducing monsters since Godzilla (who, by the way, is only absent from this list because he fell more into the sci-fi/monster genre than the horror genre). With his blank eyes and plastic smile, the marshmallow man killed hundreds upon hundreds as he made his delicious yet deadly-looking rampage down the streets of New York City. While the character was portrayed at times through stop-motion and model work, most of the work was done by special effects master Billy Bryan – who not only performed as Stay Puft, but created the costume as well!

Because Bryan was creating something that he himself intended to wear, the process naturally resulted in a rather comfortable and well-ventilated suit. Bryan had no troubles portraying the iconic mallow, and has since felt only pride about having the credit. After all, wouldn’t you?

Also – it should be noted that this isn’t the only iconic horror character Bill Bryan has played:

That’s right – he was also the pit monster in Army Of Darkness. Even if those were the only two things he did, he would still have the best resume ever.

1. Kevin Peter Hall – Predator

Kevin Peter Hall is without a doubt the best person who ever lived. Better than Gandhi. He was able to take a totally silent, mostly faceless, and often completely invisible character and make it the most physically intimidating presence of a film that starred Jesse Ventura, Carl Weathers, and freaking Arnold Schwarzenegger.

At 7’ 2” he towered over his co-stars, but his size wasn’t what did it – it was the way he moved, his hunter stance and walk that just made you want to run for your life. Mannerisms that, after his unfortunate death, were mimicked in every Predator film to follow the sequel.

The kicker is that he also happened to be as sweet as a newborn bunny rabbit – according to producer John Davis he was “big and tall and soft and sweet inside.” Which absolutely has to be the weirdest performance review by a boss ever, that is until you actually watch him on the set:

Who knew the Predator was so damn huggable? And for anyone who happened to notice from his face, he does make a cameo in the film as the helicopter pilot who rescues Dutch.

And finally, if after all of that you still need a reason to love Kevin Peter Hall, here it is: