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TOP 5 VILLAIN DEATH SCENES IN SCI-FI HISTORY | geekleagueofamerica.com

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TOP 5 VILLAIN DEATH SCENES IN SCI-FI HISTORY | geekleagueofamerica.com.

These five selections are indeed all excellent, however I must admit to my personal preference being the death of the final Alien in the rather poorly done Alien Resurrection. For all this films slogging along the last action scene in the film really is quite (and literally!) visceral to watch. After you witness the “birth” of the hybrid Alien, and after it knocks it’s Alien mothers head clean off it tries to show affection for the blended Ripley. The way she cuts herself on her “child” and then throws her acidic blood at the viewport out into space you can see right from this point where the film is going.

I think that this scene takes the cake for me because it’s quite disgusting to watch, essentially the hole into space with the pressurized atmosphere in the ship leads to an inexorable drawing in of the closest objects to that orifice leading out to space. Then the FX team toy with you, maybe the Alien Hybrid will make it in it’s escape away from the orifice of doom, but we all know that the movie wouldn’t be able to move forward if that was the case, so the hybrid has to die. So it gets sucked towards the orifice and in one very small moment it’s greasy flesh is protruding out into the vacuum of space and then, well, like a rollercoaster it’s all downhill from there. It’s screaming and growling at being betrayed by Ripley is the first bit, then as it gets progressively hoovered out into space through a very tiny hole, the screaming and growling become more of a surprise leading to a kind of painful pleading for help. There really isn’t any help possible, because as the events unfold, a majority of the creatures internal organs are being crushed, blended, and evacuated into space. Then quite gratuitously they show the hybrids literal disemboweling. The keening scream and pleading cries get more pronounced and I actually feel a sense of sympathetic panic for the hybrid. Then, and at the end where it gets really quite awful, the screaming stops because the hybrids pulverized lung tissue is now a gel being pushed out into space and you see just it’s head, then the skin gets hoovered off and the skull. Little waypoints of disgusting horribleness the whole way along.

I vote for this villain’s end because it wasn’t really technically a villain, it was an unwanted maybe-hero as it’s only real action was to kill the true villain, the Alien Queen that “birthed” it. But it had to be disposed of, and this particular approach, well, it reaches in deep and grabs you in the gut and twists and toys with you. Much like witnessing a car doomed to a very horrific collision, you can’t really respond, you just watch in a kind of sickened awe.

It’s the kind of scene that none of my squeamish friends should ever witness. The entire sequence is exceptionally gory, visceral, and the sound effects just push it over the top for me. What a way to die – blenderized and hoovered out into space. There is no playing dead and surprising the “hero” from that point!

Easter Tidings

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It’s Easter time, which is one of the very-important-so-lets-go-to-Church Christian Holidays. Many Christians, well, the good ones, have been involved with some sort of lenten fast for the past forty days and it doesn’t end until Easter Sunday, which is in two days from today.

As a used-to-be-Christian who now regards himself as somewhere between a secular humanist, a buddhist, and a neo-pagan this holiday is much like all the other Christian holidays, which is to say, a giant batch of goof in order to facilitate cultural assimilation. The big holidays for Christians are Christmas and Easter. The birth and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Now, Christmas has it’s own special sort of silliness. We chop down trees and dress them with baubles and we have figures that occupy popular consciousness and the “Baby Jesus” only appears as a sideline player in that yearly conflagration of economic stimulus and material goodwill. The other holiday, the one we are adjacent to now, is Easter. Once again we have a cultural hodgepodge of really goofy things all colliding at the same time. At the core of it should be, but isn’t, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I’ll get to the silliness of that later on, but bear with me. The holiday is supposed to be solemn with a celebration of this one mans ability to somehow pop back to life after being dead and through resurrection cleansing our sins in the eyes of God. Except none of that matters. Children don’t give a flying rip about Jesus Christ, he’s just a suave white guy (usually) who appears in quickly flashed artistic impressions of historical events and kids just get a general sense about all the hocus-pocus behind it all and just shrug because for a child the notion of death and resurrection are meaningless concepts. To Children, summer lasts forever and nobody dies. What kids associate with the holiday is the exact core of what the Christians tried to subvert by laying their tripartite-dead-notdead-heavy_mystery_time-God on top of pagan rituals. Like Eostre. A pagan germanic tradition that occurs in April and involves candy, rabbits, brightly colored eggs, and a host of deities from faiths that Christians find distasteful, like Eostre herself, a goddess, or Freyja, a teutonic goddess. So, in order to culturally assimilate the unwashed barbaric hordes you don’t try to kill them off en-masse, instead you co-opt their rituals and you pretend that it’s always been this way. You get to their children and before you know it, after a few generations come and go, the entire backstory has been whitewashed and a new narrative has been put in it’s place. The problem with whitewashing an old narrative is that it quite often hangs around. People still do the same things even if they don’t really know why any longer. So Christians assemble (like the pagans), they celebrate Easter (the pagans celebrate Eostre! Wait, it’s so close!), people assemble Easter Baskets full of candy, dyed eggs, fake plastic grass and a host of rabbit icons… holy crap. We’ve fallen completely off the Christian wagon kids! This is all dirty no-good filthy pagan crap! Where did Jesus go, we misplaced him, oops. But at the end, after all the egg-hunts and eating of chocolate rabbits, which, I must say is about as pagan as you can get, turning an icon into something edible and sweet, BOGGLE… and then to eat an Easter Ham, which I think is a really mean thing that Christians do as Jesus was a Jew and !@#$ KOSHER and last I checked PIG WAS NOT KOSHER oh whatever. After Easter dinner then everyone gets in their finery and toddles off to Church. Then and only then do we get heaping helpings of the steaming pile of Jesus Christ narrative. It’s a lot like Jesus Christ the cannon, being packed with Jesus Christ grapeshot and aimed at the belching rabbit-icon-eating/pig-eating/non-kosher horde of barbarians and fired with magical Jesus Christ gunpowder of guilt.

Even the timing of the holiday is annoyingly pagan. The Christians really don’t get how to whitewash and properly murder and cannibalize mythic narratives. They establish that Easter is the Sunday closest to the first full moon after the vernal equinox! What the HELL does the vernal equinox or the !@#$ MOON have to do with Jesus Christ? Huh!?! Oh wake up! It’s got nothing to do at all, it’s just a bunch of confused old men trying to retain control on what amounts to being an uncontrollable herd of sweaty messy barbarians. When you go to Church next, look around. Now imagine what it looked like 1600 to 1800 years ago. Never mind, it’s the same thing, only now you all think it’s true and believe and that’s really all that matters. You’ve bought the Christians cart of goods that they have for sale, but you still do quintessentially pagan things! If belief gives godlings life, then Krampus, Santa Claus, and Eostre are very much alive and well. Keep being good, keep eating rabbit icons, and keep on futzing about with dyed eggs! Eostre needs all your belief energy to even stand up to Big Daddy, JC, and the Spook.

Speaking of dead things coming back to life, the resurrection itself. What a monumental pile of hocus-pocus if I’ve ever seen it. We have never seen anyone go from well and truly dead to alive all on their own, except for once, 2000 years ago. Sure. What’s more plausible? That Jesus Christ died, went through hell, and then was resurrected, OR that he was nailed to a cross as a form of capital punishment, where he lapsed into a coma from exposure, malnutrition, and poor hydration then when “dead” hauled off the cross and then laid in state. Then after recovering from being in a coma, got up and wandered off?!? What if that was really what happened?

So Christians elect to believe that a dead man suddenly popped back to life and then they see the miracle of that and then tacitly agree to suspend all rational thought thereafter. Accept it, it’s the word of God. Accept it, it’s in the scriptures. Accept it, you have to if you believe. Accept it, or you’ll be a sinner.

Get off the collective cross, we need the wood.

So, enjoy the Easter fantasy. The pagan rituals you still perform without knowing why. Still buy into the narrative sold to you by the Christians and never feel any hint of awkwardness that you’ve suspended your own rational thoughts and given control of your actions over to old men who don’t even notice your existence. It sounds so silly, but, there it is.

And people wonder why we haven’t been visited by aliens or have mastered space travel. If you were an advanced alien culture, and you saw the kind of hocus-pocus that we humans readily believe in, would you elect to just do nothing or would you watch us very carefully to make sure we never leave the third planet from this unremarkable star on the edge of a very unremarkable galaxy?

So embarrassing. We aren’t ready, at this rate we won’t ever be ready. Not really.