I Find It Hard To Believe You Can Shoot That Gun With A Rotting Trigger Finger

The 2008 remake of legend George Romero's Day of the Dead (1985) was abysmal. Nick Cannon is the bane of my existence. Really, dude? Being married to Mariah "5150" Carey wasn't enough of a horror story for you? You had to go and ruin one of the best-loved zombie movies of all time?! Of course it wasn't entirely his fault-- the acting and CGI were absolutely terrible.

It's funny that as technology gets better, special effects are sometimes worse than they were in the 1980s. In the original Day of the Dead, Captain Rhodes gets shot by a zombie then dismembered by a horde of the living dead. The best fuckin' part is when Bub (the gun-wielding brain-slurper) salutes the captain as his guts are strewn across the hallway.

I'm gonna go ahead and overlook the highly unlikely use of a firearm by a rotting sack of skin in light of the pure awesome that is this scene!

In The Event Of A Zombie Outbreak, Resourcefulness Is Key!

This scene from Peter Jackson's Dead Alive--also known as Braindead--(1992) will receive one sentence of introduction and one sentence only.

It took five gallons of fake blood per one second of filming to create this scene.

More Exploding Heads... I'm Sensing A Pattern Here

Battle Royale or Batoru Rowaiaru (2000) is easily one of the most bad-ass movies of all time. Japanese filmmakers are notorious for the kind of ultra-violence that carries this story. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku, this flick is about the government kidnapping a class of students and putting them on a deserted island until they've killed each other off, one by one.

They are each fitted with an exploding collar and a random weapon. Students who refuse to participate--for example, staying in one place for too long-- will have their collars detonated, blowing their domes to high heaven.

Picking one scene from Battle Royale is practically impossible. As my friend Emmet says, "there is a lot of arterial spray in that movie." That said, we'll go with Nobu's exploding head scene.

There's just something about erupting craniums that just really gets me going, ya know?

If Thoughts Could Kill... Oh, Wait A Minute.

This one doesn't need too much of an introduction. It's an exploding head death-- certainly a popular way to kill people off in horror movies. I liked it enough to get it tattooed on my body (true story) so, yeah, I'd say it's pretty freakin' awesome.

David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981) proposes the possibility of killing someone by telepathy. As the tagline says-- "10 seconds: the pain begins. 15 seconds: you can't breathe. 20 seconds: you explode."

Mama Fratelli Finally Gets Hers, Kobe Bryant Styleey.

The thing I always hated about The Goonies is that the evil Fratelli clan is never really brought to justice. Sure, they get arrested at the end but that was one seriously delinquent brood! I wanted to see them get eaten by the octopus or something radical!

(What octopus, you say? And you call yourself a Goonie... There IS a scene with a giant octopus-- Data shoves his walkman in its mouth, saving the day as usual. It was deleted in most versions but can be seen on the DVD. Don't believe me? Fuck you. Go buy it.)

ANYWAYS-- imagine my delight upon seeing Wes Craven's Deadly Friend (1986) where Kristy Swanson knocks Mama Fratelli's freakin' block off with a basketball. That's quite the cannon you got there, Kristy!

Fuck A Slap-Chop! Slice And Dice, Dude!

Vincenzo Natali's Cube (1997) is the reason movies like Saw are even around. Seven strangers, stuck in a maze with all kinds of fucked up traps... sounds familiar, right?

This movie won a bunch of awards, including Best Canadian First Feature Film. It's achieved cult status among science-fiction fans and rightfully so. Check out this scene where homeboy gets chopped into a thousand little chunks of man-meat.

Scha-wing!

Well, If You Don't Want Somebody To Eat Your Fetus Then Stay Away From Those House Parties!

I remember the olden days before I had an X-Box that streams Netflix or a flashy new laptop... I would drag my boyfriend (EX-boyfriend, and thank the little baby Jesus for that) to Blockbuster and scour the shelves for crappy horror flicks, holding them up one after one while he would shake his head in disapproval and suggest some artsy-fartsy bullshit like Brazil.

Being that I am a bossy little bitch, I would veto pick after pick of his until he got so frustrated he would throw up his hands and say, "FINE. Whatever you want." And that is the story of how Steve Miller's Automaton Transfusion (2006) wound up in my DVD-player.

It ended up being complete crap and I received a much-deserved "I told you so." However--and this is a BIG however--, I can't bring myself to completely write off this movie since the following scene is one of my favorites of all time.

A high-school zombie busts into a house party and lurches towards a pregnant classmate. Epic-ness ensues when he punches through her stomach and rips out the fetus and EATS it! She stands, screaming, for a little longer than is realistic and crumples to the ground in a puddle of blood. And THAT, is how it's done.

Upper Jaw, Shmupper Jaw... You Weren't Using That, Were You?

Plenty of people have ripped this movie apart (see what I did there?!) and dismissed it as slapstick or a B-grade wannabe slasher flick. Since when is B-grade a bad thing?

You want a plot? Watch The Crying Game.

Cinematography? Lord of the Rings, son.

Give me, any day, something with a laughably low budget and an abundance of blood. Why spend money on silly things like story development and fancy filming locations when you can blow your whole cash wad on a prosthetic head like Adam Green must have done in his film Hatchet from 2006.

Shooting trespassers is sooooo yesterday. Screw a shotgun, Victor Crowley will rip your face off!

Freddy Krueger Makes It Rain

Ranging from the campy and gratuitous to the truly horrifying, Wes Craven films rarely disappoint. Any garden-variety horrorbuff knows that my list of best death scenes would be an epic fail if I left out the original Nightmare on Elm Street from 1984.

I must admit, I’m a little biased. As far as I’m concerned, any scene that starts off with a young Johnny Depp laying in bed is a good one. How do you take a good scene and make it a great one? Oh, I don’t know… Maybe if Freddy Krueger shows up and sucks aforementioned hottie into his mattress and then makes him EXPLODE into a fucking geyser of blood.

Is it terrifying? Not really. In fact, it’s a little silly. But if you and I have anything in common, that’s why we love it!

Plexiglass Pulverization, Puck Yeah!

Well, maybe it’s not plexiglass but that’s not the point. The point is that little Timmy, that little bitchboy, was bugging the crap out of me for the first half of Final Destination 2 (2003) and watching him get reduced to a pile of goo and guts was the most satisfying part of the whole damn movie.

David Ellis, I must say I think you suck… a lot… but holy hell, this makes the cut!

It’s original, it’s disgusting, and everybody wants to watch some white-bread momma’s boy get crushed to death at the local shopping mall.

I'm Sorry, I Can't Hear You Over The Pureeing of Steve Buscemi!

I know this isn’t the goriest one of all, but this scene from Fargo (1996) has stuck with me since I was a kid as one of the gnarliest ways to leave this green earth.

When Frances McDormand rolls up on Peter Stormare as he is doing his best to cram the rest of Steve Buscemi into a friggin’ wood chipper, I lose it everytime! It’s genius.

For one, that puddle of blood is just… well, it’s huge! And the way the foot flexes when he pushes it with the log looks so real. UGH!

Frances McDormand’s character is classic in this movie and though it’s not really a horror film, it’s one of my favorites.

Her husband is one of the two Coen brothers who wrote and directed this movie as well as about a bajillion other awesome ones.