Five forgettable horror movies with one unforgettable scene
Dedicated fans of horror movies are a unique breed. After all, how many other film fandoms are there where cinephiles know most of what they watch is terrible, but they don’t really care because they simply love the genre? Horror fans are so obsessive, in fact, that many of them would choose a mediocre horror flick over a legitimately good comedy or action film.
At the core of it, horror fans simply love the possibilities of the genre and are willing to give most things a chance to scare them. 90% of the time, they don’t even come close to a scream or a sleepless night, but 10% of the time, they’ll discover a hidden gem that was much better than they expected, and that is like finding a piece of buried treasure.
Every year, more horror movies are released than any die-hard gorehound could ever hope to watch, and most of them are bad. However, every now and again, one of these forgettable movies will have one scene that stands out; a sequence so shockingly brilliant that it becomes memorable outside of the context of the dismal film.
Finding one of these movies is almost as good for a horror fan as finding a gem they can brag about with their friends, and it means that film will always have a slightly soft spot in their hearts. So, without further ado, here are five forgettable horror movies with one unforgettable scene.
Five bad horror movies with one great scene:
The laser corridor (‘Resident Evil’, 2002)
At the risk of damning it with faint praise, Resident Evil is quite handily director Paul WS Anderson’s second-best film. The first is, of course, the legitimately harrowing sci-fi horror Event Horizon. However, the rest of Anderson’s career has been so reliably abysmal that Resident Evil, an objectively not-very-good video adaptation, could still rank second. Sure, he followed it up with a succession of dreadful sequels, but the first movie will always have something going for it: the laser corridor scene.
Before any zombies come into play in Anderson’s gory-but-silly yarn, and long before the characters meet any of the more outlandish monstrosities later in the runtime, Anderson stages a bravura sequence so ingenious, so suspenseful, and so instantly iconic that it’s since been referenced and/or parodied by countless films.
The simple, yet brilliant, scene pits a group of badass commandos against a state-of-the-art laser defence system in an unnervingly blue corridor. Anderson plays with the audience’s expectations, as some of the commandos get sliced and diced, but we fully expect the acrobatic lead soldier, played by Colin Salmon, to make it out in one piece. Instead, he is cut into the most pieces of all when the pesky laser switches to a grid format right before it hits him. Magnificent.
The pool scene (‘The Strangers: Prey at Night’, 2018)
These days, Lewis Pullman is one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising stars thanks to roles in Top Gun: Maverick and Thunderbolts. In 2018, though, Pullman first came to my attention for his roles in the tricksy crime caper Bad Times at the El Royale and The Strangers: Prey at Night, the long-delayed sequel to the 2008 horror flick that starred Liv Tyler. Prey at Night didn’t make as much of a splash as the original Strangers, but it did feature a great scene that arguably made up for the rest of its mediocrity.
In the middle of the film, as Pullman’s Luke runs through an abandoned trailer park trying to escape the murderous advances of the three mask-wearing killers who have already murdered his parents, he falls into the park’s swimming pool. As he struggles to get his head above water, he tangles with one of the killers, known as ‘Pin-Up Girl’, and kills her, but then is overpowered by the much larger ‘Man in the Mask’, who wears an unnerving sack over his head. He manages to stab Luke in the back, leaving him to seemingly drown in the pool.
As directed by Johannes Roberts, the scene is an oasis of beautifully horrific filmmaking in a desert of blandness. The neon lighting that seemed incongruous in the previous scenes comes into focus in this sequence, as it truly makes the visuals pop in and around the water. The camera work is frenzied but still clear, and the scene goes for the jugular in a way that catches the audience off guard. Luke does unexpectedly survive, but by the end of this harrowing scene, you’ll have no idea how.
Clone barbecue (‘Alien: Resurrection’, 1997)
When most people think of the one good scene in Alien: Resurrection, they tend to visualise the incredible scene with two xenomorphs chasing Ripley and her crew through a fully submerged kitchen. Underwater aliens? Terrifying and awesome at the same time. However, at the risk of disobeying my own rules for this list, I’d argue that Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s movie actually has two great scenes, sandwiched in between a lot of forgettable nonsense.
To me, the scene in which a heartbroken Ripley, who has come back to life as a clone made of half-human/half-alien DNA, encounters all the other misbegotten attempts at cloning her is one of the most genuinely upsetting things in the Alien franchise. These grotesque, malformed creatures are all in stasis in a mad scientist’s medical bay, and Sigourney Weaver perfectly portrays Ripley’s horror and sadness as she beholds them.
The scene reaches a crescendo, though, when Ripley finds one of the clones lying on a slab, still very much alive, but so misshapen and twisted that she’s unable to move. Through her mangled visage, she begs Ripley to put her out of her misery, and the crying hero does just that, burning every single clone in the place to death with a flamethrower.
The opening scene (‘Ghost Ship’, 2002)
The opening scene of Ghost Ship is so unforgettable that it’s literally the only reason any horror fan remembers the 2002 movie at all. Directed by Steve Beck, the film is a middling schlockfest featuring a bored Gabriel Byrne going through the motions as the leader of a salvage crew searching for riches aboard the wreckage of the MS Antonia Graza, which sank in 1962. Once on the ship, they realise it is – shock! horror! – haunted, and his crew soon fall afoul of a series of gruesome CGI-fuelled deaths.
However, before any of this boring stuff happens, the movie opens like an episode of The Love Boat. In ’62, an entire ballroom of well-dressed guests is partying away on the Antonia Graza, with the incredibly opulent surroundings lulling the audience into a false sense of security. Beck extends this sequence for several minutes, letting us get to know a few of the characters on the boat before the other shoe drops. And, by other shoe, I mean a series of wires that slice almost every single reveller in half.
The scene turns in a split second into a bloodbath as the dancefloor turns red, people’s limbs are lopped off, and shocked victims writhe around in the carnage as they die. It’s truly shocking, gruesome stuff, with the only surviving character being a screaming little girl who was too small to be bisected by the wires. Grim.
Laurie Strode makes her final stand (‘Halloween: Resurrection’, 2002)
In 1998, Jamie Lee Curtis returned to the franchise that made her a star. Halloween H20 followed Laurie Strode 20 years after the events of John Carpenter’s classic original film, and was the biggest hit the series had seen in decades. So, despite Strode literally decapitating Myers at the end of H20, four years later, he returned in Halloween: Resurrection, and Curtis was along for the ride again. For exactly one scene.
It turned out that Curtis truly wanted H20 to be her last go-around with Myers, and she was angry when producer Moustapha Akkad brought his cash cow back from certain death. So, she only agreed to star in Resurrection if she could be killed off in the opening scene, and Akkad obliged. Not-so-coincidentally, Curtis and Myers’ final showdown is the only good scene in the film, and as soon as Curtis exits stage left, it devolves into some painfully lame claptrap about people filming an internet reality show in Myers’ childhood home. Yes, really.
It’s a pity, too, because Strode’s last stand is emotional, tense, and a fitting way to end her story. She does her best to escape her evil sibling one last time, but when he seemingly has her dead to rights, she chooses her own ending instead. Strode kisses him on his expressionless white mask, tells him, “I’ll see you in Hell, Michael”, and takes a swan dive off the side of a building. To make matters even worse, 16 years later, Curtis erased this death by returning in David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween, which ignored all the previous continuity to bring her back to life. Silly.
