Top List Thursdays – Top Ten famous last words

Anyone can film a death scene. Why, with some liquidised cherry-flavoured Halls in your mouth and a bit of coaching from your local soccer team, you’ll have audiences believing that you really have been on te receiving end of a fatal bludgeoning. But what really sells such a scene, are your final words. You need to meake them count. And these ten chaps certainly left an impression with their last utterances.

• Jurassic Park

Clever girl…

You don’t need a long-winded speech to leave your audience thrilled. Sometimes, you just need to cut the fat and get down to the nitty gritty of how you’re about to die. And that’s something that expert hunter and tracker Robert Muldoon does when he realises that a few hundred thousand years of evolution and a fancy shotgun are no match for the primal tactics of a devious Velociraptor looking for some local game ranger cuisine. On a related note, I usually scream this line whenever I find more than one bee hovering around me.

• Commando

I’m not going to shoot you between the eyes, John, I’m going to shoot you between the balls!

While most villains empty their bladders when faced with the pure unrelenting machismo of a 1980s action film hero onslaught on their base and various henchmen, some still manage to stand their ground when faced with such unbridled ferocity. Like Bennet, who has balls the size of small galaxies as he prepares to face off against a pissed-off Arnold Schwarzenegger who has come to retrieve his daughter. At this point, we all know that Bennet is going to die a gruesome death with a final pun hammered into the death-blow, but not before the maniacal soldier takes one final verbal crack at Arnie.

• Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope

You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

If there is a life after death that involves coming back as a moderately useful ghost that offers bad advice, then I’m going to start taunting cybernetic masters of the dark arts right bloody now. It’s not just a great moment in cinema when the legendary Jedi master is struck down, but one that has some emotional poise and talent attached to it. Even if Obi-Wan himself did consider the film to be “Fairy tale rubbish”.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage. But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two…

Ina  film filled with human actors, HAL was undoubtedly the most memorable. Despite being little more than chips and boards, the PC had a mind of its own, and was frighteningly more human than anyone else in the movie, before it eventually powered down for good and started slowly regressing. Kind of like an iPhone before you trade it in then, really.

• Children Of Men

Pull my finger.

The world is buggered. Reproduction is a distant memory and no one has heard a baby cry in many, many years. To me, that’s heaven, but to the cast of Children Of Men it was a very real apocalypse where humanity was faced with extinction. And in a bleak movie such as this, there was at least one ray of sunshine in the form of Michael Caine’s Jasper. Faced with certain death at the hands of a militia looking to get their agenda on with only fertile woman around, Jasper faces death with the only weapon he has in his arsenal. The good ol’ fart joke.

• Zombieland

Heh, Garfield, maybe.

Zombieland is just a magnificent movie all the way, for taking the zombie apocalypse genre and making it fun. But the best scene in the film, has to be when the gang find and hang out with legendary actor Bill Murray, who has managed to adjust rather well to the end of the world. Unfortunately, his acting skills are perhaps a tad bit too realistic, winding up with him getting a lead nomination in his chest. When asked if he has any regrets in life, Murray briefly mentions one certain Monday-hating cat before he shuffles off.

• Monty Python And The Holy Grail

Right! Silly little bleeder! One rabbit stew coming right up!

At a certain point in the cult classic Monty Python And The Holy Grail, you’d imagine that nothing could possibly frighten King Arthur and his Knights. After all, they’d faced the dreaded horror of French Knights, a three-headed bitchy giant and a legion of horny nuns. How dangerous could a rabbit of all things possibly be? That’s something that the beefy Sir Bors finds out, the hard way.

• Blade Runner

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

But sometimes, a grand speech can move you. it’s the core theme of Blade Runner really, as the renegade Replicants chase that which they cannot have; A longer life. And when faced with that inevitable end, Rutger Hauer’s performance just nails the moment perfectly, as Roy Batty faces the end with a quiet calm and an air of dignity.

• Day Of The Dead

Choke on ’em! Choke on ’em!

But on the other, other hand, nothing beats a final line wherein you hope to take as many of your killers with you as possible, as Captain Rhodes belts out one hell of a memorable quote from a slightly forgettable film.

• Scarface

I’m still standin’, huh! Fuck! Come on! Go ahead! I take your fuckin’ bullet! Come on! I take your fuckin’ bullet! You think you kill me with bullets? I take your fuckin’ bullets! Go ahead!

Hopped up on a mountain of coke. Angrier than an entire comic book convention waiting for the Twilight panel to be over. Pretty damn horny because he couldn’t sleep with his sister. Man, Scarface was one messed up film. Going at full speed all the way, Tony Montana never ever slowed down as he worked his way up the American dream, shifting drugs and killing the competition. Naturally, that made him some enemies.

And with his enemies clsing in on his mansion, his sister dead and his sanity a distant memory, Tony decides to go out on a high note, swearing, killing and massacring various goons in one drug-fuelled rampage that technically counts as an entire Grand Theft Auto game, before eventually succumbing to his wounds and ending the film.

 

Last Updated: August 21, 2014