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 let loose to go
00:14mad. Free to go as over the top as they wanted, almost 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 buddy action
00:35film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman and not think they had fallen into an
00:40alternate dimension. In 1997, it was just another in a long line of oddball pairings. Rodman at this
00:46point was at the height of his success as a player and a paparazzi show-off, a controversial figure
00:51even then. Then he got it in his head that he wanted to venture into the movie business,
00:56seeing 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 it were
01:11from an action script template made on some screenwriting software somewhere. Complete
01:16with personal vendettas, you-know-him-better-than-anyone speeches and the unlikely friendship
01:21that forms between Van Damme and Mickey Rourke's character, it's all just played worse in this flick.
01:27That is, except for the aforementioned Rourke's character and his death. See, the actor was miles
01:32away from Sin City and credibility in general at this time, so he's settled for crap like this.
01:38As a result, the end of the film finds him standing on an active landmine in a Greek stadium
01:43which explodes just as he's attacked by a marauding tiger. It's best not to question
01:49such a slice of cinematic heaven, so I'll just leave it there.
01:53Number 8, 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 and, for the
02:12most part, weren't disappointed. Though it's diminished returns upon sequels do make audiences
02:17forget just how much goodwill the original earned, and there is still plenty to get a kick
02:22out of in Sharknado. But it's also a bit of a bore, with almost a half hour of character development
02:28that goes nowhere and a lot of actors clearly there just to cash a paycheck. What makes it
02:33exceptional though is how much payoff there is there in the final act when that finally comes,
02:37from the insane junk science to the perfectly timed fall from helicopter to flying shark's
02:43mouth, but nothing stands out as much as the epic chainsaw finale.
02:47See, after all the Sharknados are extinguished, a falling shark heads towards our hero,
02:52who is literally called Finn by the way. Like, do you get it? Finn. Finn liking a shark, Finn.
02:58No one said this movie was so. Well, as the shark is falling, he's also running towards it,
03:03so he leaps towards it, trusted chainsaw in tow, only to be swallowed whole by a poorly rendered
03:10CGI great white. Seconds later though, he's cutting through its innards and rescuing himself.
03:15We've seen so bad is good done wrong with Snakes on the Plane, and this was how it was meant to be.
03:217. Stop Motion Hamburgers – Better Off Dead
03:24Four years before John Cujack forever became everyone's favourite awkward crush in Say Anything,
03:29he was your average teen in standard 80s teen comedies, often as a second or third character.
03:35The exceptions, One Crazy Summer and Better Off Dead, were both handled under the sage guidance
03:40of director Savage Steve Holland, and you know he's reliable because he's willing to include his
03:45nickname right there in the credits. The latter of these, Better Off Dead, finds Cujack in a typical
03:51suburban teen environment, except for when he's challenged to take part in a drag race. There's
03:57more lunacy, like the unfunny running joke of the newspaper boy who stalks Cujack relentlessly
04:02just for a bill of two dollars, but the moment you know studios became afraid of Savage Steve
04:06and just handed him the camera, is the fast food stop motion dance sequence. At this point,
04:12Cujack's character begins to suffer from hallucinations after being dumped by his girlfriend,
04:17and while working, he imagines himself as a Dr. Frankenstein figure and the meat as a corpse.
04:23The burger, reanimated, finds a family of hamburgers, some with instruments, and hilarity
04:29ensues. I say hilarity because it's not really funny, it's just kind of, well it's absurd isn't
04:34it? This was a long, long time before sausage pie. Number six, lip syncing to Roy Orbison,
04:40Blue Velvet. Audiences only vaguely knew what to expect out of Blue Velvet at the time,
04:46as it was director David Lynch's first trip into modern American suburbia after his work in
04:50arthouse projects like Razorhead and, due to Mel Brooks' insistence, big budget Hollywood films
04:56like The Elephant Man. After his failure adapting Doom though, something he did after turning down
05:00an opportunity to helm Return of the Jedi, Blue Velvet on paper looked like an interesting thriller.
05:06A young all-American boy is walking through a field in Anytown, USA when he suddenly
05:11finds an ear. Where did said ear come from? Well, the film turns out to be less interested in that
05:17as the camera pans down under the perfectly cut grass lawns to the seedy insect-filled underbelly.
05:23And welcome to where we're spending the rest of the movie, with people replacing insects.
05:28And leading our descent into sadosexual madness is Dennis Hopper,
05:32snorting nitrous oxide and expounding on his love of Pap's blue ribbon. And the rabbit hole just
05:37gets deeper, until we get to the point where Al from Quantum Leap appears and lip syncs to
05:42Roy Orbison's in-dreams. Oh, and all the while Dennis Hopper's character is just kind of going
05:47nuts in the background. This is the scene where Blue Velvet truly goes bonkers and ratchets the
05:53insanity up to the next level.
05:55Number 5, 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 Drived Angry.
06:494. 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
07:15broke a rule or two along the way, most notably offering a child in an explosion of blood early
07:20on in the film just to let audiences know it wasn't screwing around. Now, future films in the
07:26series, apart from maybe three, felt like tired retreads of this one, always trying to outdo the
07:31blood and viscera on screen, but this was the rare moment where a mainstream horror felt properly
07:37shocking. 3. Give Me The Elephant – Darkman
07:41Oddly, the most comic book-like director Sam Raimi ever got was with a film that had no
07:45comic book source material. Frustrated with his inability to secure the rights to The Shadow,
07:50in 1940's radio character voiced by Orson Welles, Raimi and his brothers set out to create their own
07:56comic hero origin story. And everything you'd later see in his Spider-Man movies is actually
08:02kinda present in Darkman. I mean, the scene in which Spidey beats the mugger who killed his
08:06uncle Ben is pretty much shot for shot the scene in which Liam Neeson's Peyton Westlake is beaten
08:12by the mafia here. After this scene, once Westlake is burned beyond recognition and impervious to
08:17pain, he goes on a revenge spree, imitating his killers with artificial skin and turning them
08:22against one another. As you might have guessed from this director, there are plenty of zany
08:26moments along the way, most of them dealing with Westlake's homicidal glee, but the best
08:31is when he actually tries to be normal. After perfecting his skin for up to 99 minutes in the
08:36sunlight before it melts, he starts courting his former fiancée, eventually taking her to
08:41the amusement park. Here, he falls into the weirdest fight ever, but Raimi shoots the entire
08:46event with all the flair and energy of a panel from Tales of the Crypt or something, much in
08:51the way that Creepshow did a decade previous. 2. 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
09:27out during a heist at the Cannes Film Festival. In this scene, everything is in place for the
09:32heist to go off. Every player has their role. There's the lead, who seduces the model wearing
09:38the diamond-crested clothing meant to be thieved, there's the scuba diver with the blowtorch,
09:42the guy in the van, etc etc. But very quickly, the film betrays convention when none of the
09:49characters actually do their job, and instead are screwed over by the lead. Now it may not
09:54always make literal sense, which is why it ends up on this list, but it does always make
09:59cinematic sense, even when it's subtly screwing with its audience.
10:031. Rambo, Conan and Gandhi – UHF Nothing serves as convincing evidence that
10:09everyone was doing cocaine in the 1980s than Wierd Al Yankovic's feature film UHF. At least
10:15Weird Al here had the coherency to write a script that did make sense while still including side
10:20clips that would work equally well in an era-appropriate Saturday Night Live skit.
10:24And it was the producers, presumably also out of their minds, that gave him the greenlight for
10:29this movie. Now a cult classic, Yankovic's work has time to indulge his every whim,
10:34from conning the librarian to an ultra-violent Gandhi who orders steak medium-rare before
10:40gunning down his opponents. And to its credit, pretty much every clip tops the one preceding it,
10:45allowing a bit of flow to what could have been just a disjointed crazy mess.
10:50Still, 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. What do you
10:56think about these surprising scenes, and are there any interesting ones I missed off here?
11:01While 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.