The Worst:

Anakin Skywalker in RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)



So after three films and six ardent years of my impressionable childhood and pubescence, George Lucas delivers an incredibly satisfying climax as Darth Vader finally comes back to the righteous side of the Force by killing the Emperor (in one of the very best “villain falls screaming to his death” scenes ever), and then, after a tantalizing glimpse beneath the mask in The Empire Strikes Back, the Dark Lord of the Sith is finally revealed...as Egghead? As soon as Vader’s face was uncovered, I immediately wanted to un-see the image, which completely undermined everything that was cool and mysterious about the galaxy’s biggest badass, turning what could have been a heart-tugging farewell into an embarrassing goof. And then, to make matters worse, Egghead suddenly materializes at the grand finale Ewok rave with the shiny, happy ghosts of Yoda and Ben Kenobi...a scene Lucas inconceivably managed to make even worse decades later by adding Hayden Christensen. What’s that thing the kids say nowadays? Oh, yes: epic fail. (AO)

Jimmy Durante in IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD, WORLD (1963)



Stanley Kramer's "ultimate" slapstick comedy attempts to compensate for its director's lack of any sense of humor with sheer tonnage of comic performers. And what better way to set the tone for what follows than with a series of close-ups of a beloved old man looking very uncomfortable as he lies against some rocks coughing and raving while dying in pain? Judgement at Nuremburg was funnier. (PN)

Some poor bit player in RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD, PART II (1985)



Nothing sums up Sylvester Stallone's distinctive brand of cheeseball heroism like the scene from this movie in which Rambo encounters a Vietnamese soldier who reacts to the sight of the leathery white war god by staring at him in gaping awe, patiently waiting for John Boy to take aim with his bow and exploding arrow and blow the fellow to bits. One theory holds that the guy had reached the point of welcoming the chance to get out of the movie and couldn't find a good, hard rock to beat his head against. (PN)

SHIRLEY MACLAINE, THE CHILDREN’S HOUR (1961)



There’s nothing particularly grotesque or shocking about Martha Dobie’s suicide in The Children’s Hour. The character, nicely played by a young Shirley MacLaine, hangs herself in the barely-seen way characters used to do in the old Hays Code days; in fact, it’s considerably less gory than the Lillian Hellman play upon which the film was based, in which she shot herself in the head. The reason it belongs in the Cinematic Graveyard of Infamy isn’t because of the circumstance, but rather the cause: The Children’s Hour, despite a substantial clean-up job by producer Sam Goldwyn, director William Wyler, and screenwriter John Michael Hayes, was a play about two women accused of lesbianism. The storyline is changed to hinge on the sin of adultery to satisfy the Production Code, but there’s plenty of subtext still in place, and most filmgoers at the time were hardly ignorant of the attendant publicity surrounding the film that made it perfectly clear what was really going on. The death of Martha Dobie thus became the most prominent example (though hardly the last) of the “that gay’s gonna die” syndrome in American motion pictures, where any prominent homosexual character, or even one that’s hinted to be homosexual, is guaranteed to be dead by the end credits. (LP)

ROBBI MORGAN, FRIDAY THE 13th (1980)



Robyn “Robbi” Morgan isn’t the best-known actress in the world. She hasn’t had a film or TV credit in 25 years, and if she’s known at all today, it’s for being the wife of third-tier game show host Mark Walberg. Likewise, her character in the first Friday the 13th movie wasn’t important; she had no key lines, a forgettable personality, and no impact on the plot at all. She even died in a fairly ordinary way for a movie of this sort, getting her throat slit as she sat behind the wheel of a car. So why are we including her on the list of the all-time worst movie death scenes? Call it our very own Tomb of the Unknown Victim. Morgan’s death at the hands of Ma Voorhees was the first contemporary murder in the first Friday the 13th movie, and thus, the first of a massive wave of teenage mortality in the dismal 1980s heyday of the slasher flick. More teens died on screen at the hands of vengeful psychopaths from 1980 to 1990 than died in the real world from violence, car crashes and drug overdoses combined, and the very first of them was Mrs. Mark Walberg. It seems her suffering will never end. (LP)

JACKIE EARLE HALEY, WATCHMEN (2009)



Jackie Earle Haley already had one memorable on-screen death to his credit when he started filming Watchmen. In 1975’s Day of the Locust, he plays a child star who is gruesomely murdered by a character with the not-yet-ironic name of Homer Simpson. Many fans of the Watchmen comic believe that the death scene of the brutal vigilante Rorschach, played by Haley in the film version, is an emotional high point of the book; terminally dedicated to his own unshakable sense of justice, he determines to expose the film’s villain, but he’s confronted by Dr. Manhattan. Knowing his fate, Rorschach shows emotion for the first time in the book, crying in the snow and screaming “DO IT!” to the man who will, seconds later, murder him. The movie, as it does with many scenes from the book, gets it exactly wrong; by implicating Dr. Manhattan in the villainous scheme, it changes the whole dynamic of the action. Haley plays the scene defiantly instead of helplessly. And worst of all, when the deed is done, we cut to the character of Nite Owl witnessing the killing (no one sees it happen in the book), and he reacts with the biggest dramatic cliché in movies: he raises his arms to the sky and shouts “NOOOOOOOO!” (LP)

WOLFGANG KEILING, TORN CURTAIN (1966)



Alfred Hitchcock enjoyed torturing both his leading ladies and his audiences, so it’s no surprise that his films featured a number of memorable demises (see Psycho, elsewhere on this list) or near-demises (who can forget the sight of Grace Kelly being brutally strangled in Dial M for Murder – from an audience point-of-view shot, no less?). Torn Curtain isn’t one of Hitch’s better movies; it’s a slow-moving, generally weightless Cold War spy thriller made after his post-Birds career short-circuit. But it does feature a death scene that, if it’s not one of the worst ever made, is at least one of the most uncomfortable to watch. Wolfgang Keiling plays East German espionage officer Hermann Gromek, who Paul Newman finds himself in the position of assassinating in a remote farmhouse. Gromek turns out to be harder to kill than Rasputin, and the battle between the two men turns into an agonizingly brutal showdown: the German is beaten with a heavy kitchen tool, choked, pummeled with a shovel, stabbed with a butcher knife, battered about the head repeatedly, and finally crammed head-first into a gas oven, where he slowly and painfully suffocates. It’s hard to watch, even by Hitchcock standards. (LP)

AL PACINO, SCARFACE (1983)



Al Pacino, apparently, is well on his way to becoming the movie biz’s King of Bad Deaths (see The Godfather Part III elsewhere on this list). You can almost trace the point of his career decline to the day he decided to take the lead role in Brian De Palma’s Scarface, an influential and endlessly watchable but not actually any good movie in which he does not so much play Cuban drug lord Tony Montana as overplay him. Or, to be precise, over-overplay him. There is not a single drop of subtlety in this entire movie, from the first frame to the last, and Pacino passes up no chance to not only chew the scenery, but eat it completely and swallow it in one gulp. Everything from his outrageous accent to his beyond broad body language is yards over the top, and that applies to his death scene as well: playing like a parody of the video game it would eventually become, the movie shows us Tony Montana, coked to the gills from a sandbox-sized pile of powder on his desk, mowing down wave after wave of faceless assassins, and twitchily spitting out Oliver Stone’s amusingly loopy dialogue until his final, gory, spasmodic exit. Just like the rest of the movie, you know it’s terrible, but damn – you simply can’t look away. (LP)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce