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SPOILERS*****SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE*****ALIEN*****THE REFLECTING SKIN

Mora,

In the Dresden scene in SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, Eugene Roche plays an older prisoner who finds a little trinket in the rubble and smiles, pleased with his find. The soldiers see this and without hesitation escourt him away. He is uncomprehending that he is about to be executed for violating their direction not to loot, and is brought a few feet away and shot dead.

You touched on it when you mentioned the inevitability of impending death. It's all happening NOW and it doesn't matter that it's insane that this is happening, that the soldiers couldn't just snatch the thing from his hand and say knock it off or smack him or something. You broke the law, come over here please, BOOM. Game over.

The scene where Parker and Lambert are killed is, to me, truly horrifying. That's an amazing trick when you think about it, because the big chestbursting scene happened many scenes ago--by now, we should be seeing characters ticked off as we move towards our final confrontation. But the moment that gets me is when Parker is about to die--he's a grunt, self-centered and only interested in getting the hell out of there. Yet his attack on the alien didn't strike me as unrealistic, like making a heel nice in the last minute--that character WOULD charge the alien (and lambert WOULD actually be paralized with fear). When the alien opens its jaws and death is at hand, Parker shouts 'Get out of the room!' He's about to die, he knows it, and he sounds like he's actually starting to cry as the moment happens--but he uses his dying breath to tell this other human being to take the chance to escape. Every time I see this and the jaw-tounge snaps out, I jump a little.

The scene in the REFLECTING SKIN involves a guy at a gas station. So few people have seen this that I don't even want to get into what happens, but it's a kick in the guts.

Looking through this list is not only fascinating but emotionally jolting a little. I don't consider most of these disturbing, though some are memorable. I almost listed PSYCHO because that death is so pitiless and it takes place in such a compromised situation--you can feel her vulnerability, and you also like the character, so on top of everything else, her killing seems unjustified.

A couple of these I've just got to see (MAN BEHIND THE SUN, SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION).

The oddest thing about this thread, though, is the mention of Jack MacGowran; I've been reading almost nothing but books about Samuel Beckett for two weeks, and MacGowran's name popped up often, and I was going NUTS trying to place him. (The books were too engrossing for me to even go online and look--that's how much they've impacted me.) And then, here he is...

Rapfred,

Yes, she was. I never even HEARD of FLESH AND THE FIENDS.

Another movie death (two, actually) that gets to me is the end of MIRACLE MILE. While I love so many of those listed above, they touch me or made me sad, but didn't DISTURB. This one does disturb because it's a crappy way to go, and the one character trying to comfort the other in their final moments somehow makes it worse.

The accident that leads to multiple off-camera deaths in THE SWEET HEARAFTER is one of those heart-in-your-throat moments, as is the discovery of a dead body that links all the characters in the same director's EXOTICA.