Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray, KINGPIN (1996)



Bowling is enjoyed by millions of Americans of all ages, but in the Farrelly brothers' second film Kingpin, the professional bowling circuit is portrayed as being forever trapped in the seventies. Professional bowlers are seen as sleazeball would-be lounge lizards, dressing in garish clothes, doing cock-of-the-walk victory dances, and relentlessly chasing women when they're not bowling. But in Kingpin, the most telling remnant of their faded vocation is almost certainly the hairdos they sport. In the seventies, Harrelson's Roy Munson and Murray's Ernie "Big Ern" McCracken were well-coiffed slicksters. Two decades hence, they try, with varying degrees of success, to maintain their youthful appearance by engaging in that age-old solution practiced by creepy old men the world over — the comb over. True to their characters, Big Ern is better at maintaining the façade — his 'do looks like a woodland creature parked itself atop his pate, but at least it doesn't reflect the light. But once the rivals take to the lanes for the climactic showdown, Big Ern shows his true colors. Usually a cool customer, he lets the stress get the better of his hair, and it gradually begins to detach from his head, until it resembles the world's largest ripped seam. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kate Winslet's Clementine speaks of having mood hair, but we'd like to think that, as with so many great things in cinema, Bill Murray got there first.

The Leningrad Cowboys, LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA



Rock'n'roll has a history of some pretty questionable hairdos, but none like those worn by the Leningrad Cowboys. Almost surely the most rockin' band to get their start north of the Arctic Circle, the Cowboys first entered the scene as the brainchild of director Aki Kaurismäki, who assembled some of his rocker pals for his 1989 stone-faced mockumentary, Leningrad Cowboys Go America. In the film, the Cowboys, tired of playing in Siberia, mount an American tour, despite their uncertain grasp of the English language. But if their songs mark them as foreigners, their hair is positively alien, with all members sporting uniform black pompadours, each with a large, unicorn-like forelock pointing out into the distance. As the film progresses, we discover that this hairdo is actually a congenital signifier of musical skill — the musically-challenged cousin who stalks the combo has but a tiny tuft to his name. Unfortunately for the Cowboys, the U.S. tour is mostly a washout, but they'd find more enduring success at home following the fall of the Iron Curtain. They appeared in two more features, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses and the concert film Total Balalaika Show, in which they teamed up with the Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble, as well as over half a dozen music videos directed by Kaurismäki. Finally, the Cowboys made their triumphant return to the American stage for the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall. All the while, the band remained true to their roots, never touching so much as a strand of those terrible, awesome hairdos.

Demi Moore, STRIPTEASE



Some might think the obvious choice here would be G.I. Jane, but somehow even a number-one blade on a pair of clippers only revealed that Demi Moore had a perfectly shaped head, and didn't diminish her hotness in the least. The same cannot be said for the bangs-and-blow-dry look of Striptease. Yeah, we know she's supposed to be playing a stripper, but those are clearly hair extensions, and not very flattering ones at that. Most people at the time were probably distracted by the reveal of Moore's surgically enhanced breasts (we liked the originals just fine, thank you) and there are certainly many places the finger of blame can be pointed in this nuclear stinkbomb of a movie — but you shouldn't underestimate just how bad a haircut had to be back then to make Demi Moore look unattractive.

Kevin Costner, THE BODYGUARD (1992)



The story behind one of Sir Kevin's more laughable haircuts (and, if you've seen his mullet in Robin Hood, that's really saying something) is actually kinda touching: The interracial romance-thriller The Bodyguard was originally conceived as a vehicle for Diana Ross and Steve McQueen way back during the 1970s. When the film was finally made in 1992, starring Costner and Whitney Houston, the star decided to try and channel McQueen; to do so he adopted the legendary icon of cool's trademark close-cropped haircut, which looked fantastic on McQueen but downright surreal on Costner. That said, Costner did have the last laugh: The Bodyguard was one of his worst films, and a stain on screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan's career (it had been his first script — turns out he made up for it with The Empire Strikes Back), but it wound up being a huge hit. Indeed, we're not unconvinced that Costner's follicular follies in this film didn't lead indirectly to the George-Clooney-and-his-Caesar-haircut craze a couple of years later. There you go, folks — one more societal ill you can blame on Kevin Costner.

Nicolas Cage, NATIONAL TREASURE (2004)



Full disclosure: For weeks the spot for this entry stood empty on this list, with simply the words "Nicolas Cage, FILM TO BE DETERMINED LATER" holding its place. Because let's face it, any number of films starring Nicolas Cage from the past few years could go here — from the god-awful toupee he sported in Ghost Rider to the goofy balding curls he fretted over in Adaptation (of course, we don't hold that last one against him, not only because his bad hair was a plot point in that film, but also because we have this disturbing suspicion that, had nature been allowed to take its course, that's what Nicolas Cage's real hair might actually look like today). But we're going with National Treasure, for the simple fact that we spent the whole film staring at the slug-like patch of weave at the very tip of the actor's forehead. Seriously, this isn't hair, it's a lid. In these later years, Cage and Kevin Costner have switched places, but if you'd asked us fifteen years ago which of the two would allow himself to go bald gracefully while the other kept trying new ways to make himself look like he had something resembling a "full" "head" of "hair," the answer might have been different.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

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