Fantastic Fest: The Alamo's favorite "Best Kills"
John Cassavetes blow'd up real good: "The Fury"
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Fantastic Fest’s “100 Best Kills” party invites you—the cynical, desensitized viewer—to play show-and-tell by bringing in your most cherished clips of cinematic death and dismemberment. To get the ball of viscera rolling, The A.V. Club asked Alamo Drafthouse programmers Zack Carlson and Lars Nilsen to share with us their own all-time favorite moments in movie murder. Grab a bucket. (It goes without saying, but every clip below is beyond NSFW.)
Nightmare In A Damaged Brain (1981)
Zack Carlson: That film is blindly, unrepentantly trashy—a fact made clear when an 8-year-old boy graphically divides a copulating couple with an axe. No shadows on the wall or quick cutaways. We see every slice of naked gristle as the wee little lumberjack is bathed in splash after splash of the red stuff.
Black Sunday (1960)
Lars Nilsen: Mario Bava’s classic starts off with a gorgeous woman having this really cool iron-spiked “mask of Satan” nailed to her face by an executioner wielding a wooden mallet the size of a pony keg. It’s okay; she’s a witch. The whole thing is spectacularly beautiful, yet it still makes me ill.
Night Warning (1983)
ZC: The entire movie is a backbreaking exercise in severity, but the first six minutes contain the most harrowing onscreen double demise you’re ever likely to see—lensed by cinematography genius Jan de Bont—in which a happy young couple is demolished, brutally beheaded, rolled down a mountain, and blown up. To the max.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
LN: Out of nowhere, the metal door slides open, Leatherface pops out, brains the guy with a metal hammer, and his storyline is ended just like that. What happened? Brilliant.
Superstition (1982)
ZC: If you move into a furious dead witch’s house, you’re pretty much begging for a hard time—or a whirling dislodged buzzsaw blade through the chest. In this case, the mangled sternum belongs to a well-meaning old priest who’s just stopped by to say hello. And that mutilated minister is played by Stacy Keach’s dad. All I can say is, “Thank you, Jesus.”
The Fury (1978)
LN: As audacious as Brian De Palma’s approach to film was during his platinum age in the ’70s, I can’t believe he did something so, um, hypertextual and meta-critical as blowing up John Cassavetes! There’s his filmmaking manifesto right there. And it’s a super high-quality explosion, captured from 17 different camera angles, repeated endlessly. Real solid bedrock kill.
Black Cobra (1976)
LN: At the end, the beautiful snake dancer Laura Gemser gets revenge on scummy bad guy Gabriele Tinti for the serpent-inflicted death of her lesbian lover by having a couple of dudes hold him down and cram a really hungry snake where the sun doesn’t shine, even in the tropics. He dies in indescribable agony as the snake eats its way out. And the audience applauds wildly.
Howling 2: Werewolf Bitch (1985)
ZC: In a dumbed-down and infinitely more entertaining sequel to the Joe Dante classic, Christopher Lee battles a bevy of new-wave, leather-clad werewolves. The beasts’ collective yowl is itself a weapon so powerful that a heroic dwarf’s eyeballs burst from the sheer racket. In slow motion. From three separate angles.
Phantasm 2 (1988)
ZC: The Phantasm series takes a nebulous premise, sharpens it, and stabs you right in the brainhole. In the second entry, The Golden Kill comes with one of those patented, murderous orbs whirring into a man’s spine, then grinding its way through his torso and throat, eventually stifling his dying screams as it comes to rest in his internally shredded face.
The Boss (1973)
LN: People who go to the Alamo a lot have seen this one before in our pre-show clips. Henry Silva breaks into a projection booth, subdues the projectionist, and starts blasting away at mobsters in the theater with some kind of high-powered, rocket-propelled grenade bazooka. Rather than making the gangsters simply blow up, he makes them blow the fuck up. Into little chunks of pasta fazool.
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