9 Movie Scenes That Went Completely Over The Top
Femme Fatale started with quite the bang...
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00:00Hollywood is known as many things, but above all, it's a luscious parade of riches.
00:05Excess to the extreme and embarrassingly flashy things moving 24 frames a second.
00:10With this in mind, the following moments are where directors were clearly
00:13let loose to go mad, free to go as over the top as they wanted,
00:17almost certainly to the annoyance of the producers.
00:20I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com and these are 9 movie scenes that went completely over the top.
00:259. Mickey Rock Explodes With A Tiger – Double Team
00:29The 90s was a vastly different time, one in which audiences could see a trailer for a
00:34buddy action film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman and not think they had fallen
00:39into an alternate dimension. In 1997, it was just another in a long line of oddball pairings.
00:45Rodman at this point was at the height of his success as a player and a paparazzi show-off,
00:50a controversial figure even then. Then he got it in his head that he wanted to venture into
00:55the movie business, seeing as how well that turned out for Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal.
01:00So he took on the role of Yats, an arms dealer who pairs with Van Damme's CIA agent to take
01:05down a terrorist planning to sell plutonium to Iraq. Every line of the film feels as if
01:10it were from an action script template made on some screenwriting software somewhere.
01:16Complete with personal vendettas, you-know-him-better-than-anyone speeches,
01:20and the unlikely friendship that forms between Van Damme and Mickey Rock's character,
01:24it's all just played worse in this flick. That is, except for the aforementioned Rock's character
01:30and his death. See, the actor was miles away from Sin City and credibility in general at this time,
01:36so he settled for crap like this. As a result, the end of the film finds him standing on an active
01:41landmine in a Greek stadium, which explodes just as he's attacked by a marauding tiger.
01:48It's best not to question such a slice of cinematic heaven, so I'll just leave it there.
01:538. Finn Dives Into A Shark's Mouth – Sharknado
01:57Sharknado jokes started going around the water cooler before even the movie premiered,
02:01but it did do something for the sci-fi network that no other show had done before. It actually
02:06got an audience. Many tuned in to vibe on the first entry so bad it's good spirit,
02:11and for the most part, weren't disappointed. Though it's diminished returns upon sequels
02:16do make audiences forget just how much goodwill the original earned, and there is still plenty
02:21to get a kick out of in Sharknado. But it's also a bit of a bore, with almost a half hour
02:27of character development that goes nowhere and a lot of actors clearly there just to cash a paycheck.
02:33What makes it exceptional though is how much payoff there is there in the final act when that
02:36finally comes, from the insane junk science to the perfectly timed fall from helicopter to flying
02:43shark's mouth, but nothing stands out as much as the epic chainsaw finale. See, after all the
02:48Sharknados are extinguished, a falling shark heads towards our hero, who is literally called
02:53Finn by the way. Like, do you get it? Finn. Finn liking a shark, Finn. No one said this movie was
02:59soul. Well, as the shark is falling, he's also running towards it, so he leaps towards it,
03:05trusted chainsaw in tow, only to be swallowed whole by a poorly rendered CGI great white.
03:11Seconds later though, he's cutting through it's innards and rescuing himself. We've seen as soul
03:16baddies go done wrong with snakes on a plane, and this was how it was meant to be.
03:21Number 7, Stop Motion Hamburgers, Better Off Dead. Four years before John Kujak forever became
03:26everyone's favourite awkward crush in Say Anything, he was your average teen in standard 80s teen
03:32comedies, often as a second or third character. The exceptions, One Crazy Summer and Better Off Dead
03:38were both handled under the sage guidance of director Savage, Steve Holland. And you know
03:43he's reliable because he's willing to include his nickname right there in the credits. The latter
03:48of these, Better Off Dead, finds Kujak in a typical suburban teen environment, except for when he's
03:54challenged to take part in a drag race. There's more lunacy, like the unfunny running joke of the
03:59newspaper boy who stalks Kujak relentlessly just for a bill of two dollars, but the moment you know
04:04studios became afraid of Savage Steve and just handed him the camera, is the fast food stop
04:10motion dance sequence. At this point Kujak's character begins to suffer from hallucinations
04:15after being dumped by his girlfriend, and while working he imagines himself as a Dr. Frankenstein
04:20figure and the meat as a corpse. The burger, reanimated, finds a family of hamburgers, some
04:26with instruments, and hilarity ensues. I say hilarity because it's not really funny, it's just
04:33kind of, well it's absurd isn't it? This was a long, long time before Sausage Pie.
04:386. Lip Syncing to Roy Orbison – Blue Velvet
04:42Audiences only vaguely knew what to expect out of Blue Velvet at the time. As it was directed,
04:46David Lynch's first trip into modern American suburbia after his work in art house projects
04:51like Eraserhead and, due to Mel Brooks' insistence, big budget Hollywood films like The Elephant Man.
04:57After his failure adapting Doom though, something he did after turning down an opportunity to helm
05:02Return of the Jedi, Blue Velvet on paper looked like an interesting thriller. A young all-American
05:07boy is walking through a field in Anytown, USA when he suddenly finds an ear. Where did said ear
05:13come from? Well, the film turns out to be less interested in that as the camera pans down under
05:18the perfectly cut grass lawns to the seedy insect-filled underbelly. And welcome to where
05:24we're spending the rest of the movie with people replacing insects. And leading our descent into
05:29sadosexual madness is Dennis Hopper, snorting nitrous oxide and expounding on his love of
05:35Blue Ribbon. And the rabbit hole just gets deeper, until we get to the point where Al from Quantum
05:40Leap appears and lip-syncs to Roy Orbison's In Dreams. Oh, and all the while, Dennis Hopper's
05:46character is just kinda going nuts in the background. This is the scene where Blue Velvet
05:51truly goes bonkers and ratchets the insanity up to the next level.
05:555. The Sex Scene Shootout – Shoot Em Up
05:58The opening scene of Shoot Em Up finds Clive Owen chewing on a carrot as he witnesses a woman about
06:03to give birth fleeing from a hitman. Cartoonishly, he dispatches the thug by stabbing him in the face
06:08with the vegetable, which is intentionally goofy and the carrot was an intentional reference to
06:14Bugs Bunny. As you can probably tell from this scene, if nothing else, Shoot Em Up is a bloody,
06:19gory, fast-paced video game slash cartoon in live action, with every actor chewing the scenery,
06:25particularly villain Paul Giamatti. But the kicker comes about halfway through the never-ending
06:30shootout with Owen and damsel-in-distress Monica Bellucci having sex as killers burst through the
06:35door. The thing is, Owen's character doesn't stop shooting, or screwing, throughout this whole scene.
06:41It's so over-the-top goofy that it was actually just flat-out ripped off in the trying-too-hard
06:47Nick Cage romp Drive Angry. 4. Death Is A Preteen Murderer – Final Destination 2
06:54Final Destination was a perfectly decent little horror movie with a small cast and a premise
06:58tailor-made for a standalone X-Files episode. In fact, screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick first pitched
07:04it as such, but the studio adopted his idea and then franchised it. The second film, from late
07:09former Stuntman and Sharknight director David R. Ellis, upped the ante on gore and spectacle and
07:14even broke a rule or two along the way, most notably offering a child in an explosion of blood
07:20early on in the film just to let audiences know that it wasn't screwing around. Now, future films
07:25in the series, apart from maybe three, felt like tired retreads of this one, always trying to outdo
07:31the blood and viscera on screen, but this was the rare moment where a mainstream horror felt properly
07:37shocking. 3. Give Me The Elephant – Darkman Oddly, the most comic book-like director Sam Raimi
07:43ever got was with a film that had no comic book source material. Frustrated with his inability to
07:49secure the rights to The Shadow, a 1940s radio character voiced by Orson Welles, Raimi and his
07:54brothers set out to create their own comic hero origin story. And everything you'd later see in
08:00his Spider-Man movies is actually kinda present in Darkman. I mean, the scene in which Spidey beats
08:05the mugger who killed his uncle Ben is pretty much shot for shot the scene in which Liam Neeson's
08:10Peyton Westlake is beaten by the mafia here. After this scene, once Westlake is burned beyond
08:15recognition and impervious to pain, he goes on a revenge spree, imitating his killers with
08:20artificial skin and turning them against one another. As you might have guessed from this
08:24director, there are plenty of zany moments along the way, most of them dealing with Westlake's
08:29homicidal glee, but the best is when he actually tries to be normal. After perfecting his skin for
08:34up to 99 minutes in the sunlight before it melts, he starts courting his former fiancée, eventually
08:40taking her to the amusement park. Here he falls into the weirdest fight ever, but Raimi shoots
08:46the entire event with all the flair and energy of a panel from Tales of the Crypt or something,
08:51much in the way that Creepshow did a decade previous.
08:552. The Opening Scene – Femme Fatale
08:58Femme Fatale is probably the most misunderstood film in Brian De Palma's filmography.
09:02And while some see it as a sleazy Cinemax director slumming it, others praise it as one of his very
09:07best. One thing is certain though, it's not what it appears on the tin. It plays to all the
09:13director's greatest strengths and interests, you know, complex plotting, voyeurism and an excellent
09:18climax, and constantly has the right audience second-guessing everything. As you might guess,
09:23to give away too much is to spoil the film, but just know that it begins with two women making
09:28out during a heist at the Cannes Film Festival. In this scene, everything is in place for the heist
09:33to go off. Every player has their role. There's the lead, who seduces the model wearing the
09:38diamond-crested clothing meant to be thieved, there's the scuba diver with the blowtorch,
09:42the guy in the van, etc. But very quickly, the film betrays convention when none of the characters
09:49actually do their job, and instead are screwed over by the lead. Now it may not always make
09:54literal sense, which is why it ends up on this list, but it does always make cinematic sense,
10:00even when it's certainly screwing with its audience.
10:031. Rambo, Conan and Gandhi – UHF
10:07Nothing serves as convincing evidence that everyone was doing cocaine in the 1980s than
10:12Wierd Al Yankovic's feature film UHF. At least Wierd Al here had the coherency to write a script
10:17that did make sense while still including side clips that would work equally well in an era
10:22appropriate Saturday Night Live skit. And it was the producers, presumably also out of their minds,
10:28that gave him the green light for this movie. Now a cult classic, Yankovic's work has time
10:32to indulge his every whim, from conning the librarian to an ultraviolet Gandhi who orders
10:38steak medium rare before gunning down his opponents. And to its credit, pretty much
10:43every clip tops the one preceding it, allowing a bit of flow to what could have been a disjointed
10:49crazy mess. Still, it's hard to believe that this got made.
10:53So that's our list, I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below,
10:56what do you think about these surprising scenes, and are there any interesting ones I missed off
11:00here? While you're down there as well could you please give us a like, share, subscribe,
11:03and head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
11:08Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.