See the first part of this article here.Ellen Ripley (ALIEN/ALIENS, 1979/86)
Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley is just hanging out on the intergalactic transport ship Nostromo, leading the often-dull life of a Space Teamster, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, her idiot captain decides to land on the remote planet LV-426 to investigate some stupid distress signal emanating from a crashed spaceship. Now, as we all know, responding to distress signals is one of the top five most insanely boneheaded tactical decisions any science-fiction/horror space traveler can possibly make, but this doesn’t stop Captain Numbnuts from ordering his crew to get their asses down there and dope out the spooky alien wreckage.
Of course, once they go down to investigate, some dumbass crewmember decides it would be totally hilarious to stick his face in one of the strange egglike things he finds in the smoldering wreckage of the derelict ship. He subsequently winds up with some crazy xenomorphic crap stuck to his face, which serves him right for being a moron.
As if the fearless leader of the Nostromo wasn’t doing enough to ensure the complete annihilation of his crew through his own encyclopedic incompetence, when a nasty hideous bloody parasite creature busts out of the doomed guy’s chest and starts running around the ship burning everything with acid and doing bong hits in the broom closet, the captain still doesn’t show the appropriate level of concern. Instead, he’s just like, “Whatever—I’ll handle this little bastard,” and starts climbing around the oxygen-ventilation ducts like a jackass looking for this stupid little 2-foot-tall animatronic teddy bear, when all of a sudden—POW—he comes face to face with a 7-foot crazy as hell bug-monster that bites faces, spits acid, and (in the sequel) detonates even the most kickass robots into a cloud of gross white cyborg juice with its prehensile spiked tail. When this beast starts running around waxing the entire crew one by one, Ellen Ripley proves she’s the only person on board with the stones to grab a blowtorch, rescue Jonesy the cat, activate the ship’s self-destruct system, get into the escape pod and kick that bastard bug creature in its football-shaped head Pele-style like 50 times until it breaks its skull and flies out into space.
Ripley is such a hardcore ass-kicking chick that as soon as she wakes up from hypersleep after her first adventure, she turns right around and burns rubber back to the xenomorph-infested LV-426 with a bunch of tough-ass Colonial Marines and Paul Reiser to “investigate why we’ve lost contact with the colonists” (read: kill everything that moves). Crap hits the fan pretty much immediately. Marines are eaten by Aliens, stuff pops out of half-dead colonists’ chests, face-sucking monsters scurry around—and through it all, Ripley is fragging bugs and driving APCs through walls like the goddamned Kool-Aid Man. When Reiser is all like, “Hey, we need to study these Aliens and not kill all of them,” Ripley’s like, “Screw you, Paul Reiser, you can just go get eaten by them” (and he does). Bill Paxton starts acting like a little bitch, so she slaps some sense into him and tells him to stop being such a damn woman all the time and grow a pair (he eventually does, but it’s too late).
Eventually, crap finally starts getting out of control, so she decides to nuke the entire planet from orbit and call it a day. The Alien Queen decides it doesn’t like Ripley’s bad xenocidal attitude, so the face-crushing heroine responds to this complaint by jumping into a ‘mech and robo-punching the bitch’s lights out with a couple of titanium knuckle sandwiches before launching it out into the vacuum of space to join its idiot friends. That’s just what happens when you mess with Ellen Ripley.
Peter Washington (DAWN OF THE DEAD, 1979)
A lot of people don’t have the stones to make it through the zombie apocalypse. When the crap hits the fan and everyone starts eating each other all over the place, you can basically count on your life expectancy dropping harder than X on a X. What’s left is the cream of the crop, the constantly and consistently lucky and the total wackjobs who have been stockpiling Gauss rifles and Mossberg shotguns since the start of the Cold War in a triple-enforced nuclear-warhead-proof steel bunker buried in their backyards. It’s Darwin’s natural selection, only with more brain-eating and fewer manners. Only by finding a guy like Peter Washington (played by Ken Foree in George A. Romero’s masterpiece DAWN OF THE DEAD) do you have even the most remote chance of making it out of this situation alive. Basically, he is the Cade Courtley for situations in which there’s no more room in hell.
Pete’s a badass because he does what needs to be done and saves a handful of people who, in all honesty, would probably have died from a fatal shaving accident (apocalypse or not) without him. When he finds a basement full of zombies chowing down on some unprocessed Soylent Green, he caps the whole lot of them while everyone else is off praying and crying or burying their heads in their hands and bitching about the weather. He fights bikers, kills zombie children and does what needs to be done to keep on kicking undead balls. When everyone starts freaking out, he verbally bitch-slaps them back into the game, and does it all with a cool, laid-back attitude. Eventually, he decides he’s had enough of saving all these dillholes from their much-deserved slaughter and sends them on their way so he can go off and die in peace without all the crying and whining, but the badass hero instinct in him won’t let him die like that, so instead he fights his way out, flies off into the sunset and lives to rock faces another day.
Jason Voorhees (FRIDAY THE 13TH, 1980, et al.)
Young Jason Voorhees drowned during a summer stint at Camp Crystal Lake because his jacknut camp counselors were far too busy drinking old bong water and fornicating like wild animals in heat. Totally ripcrap pissed that he died in such an un-badass manner, Jason now constantly seeks bloody vengeance by ruthlessly disemboweling camp counselors, negligent authority figures, drug addicts, prostitutes, teenagers and anybody who is either drinking, partying, having sex, breathing or generally just hanging around being not dead. When he’s not living underwater like an undead, sword-swinging Godzilla, Jason enjoys stabbing people in the gonads, breaking windows and/or getting struck by lightning.
A six-and-a-half-foot-tall mountain man running around in the woods wearing a hockey mask and carrying a machete pretty much demands to be taken seriously, and Jason Voorhees is certainly no exception to this ancient rule. In addition to perpetually looking like a demonic cross between Ron Hextall and a rotary tiller, he’s just an unfeeling, merciless, pointy death machine who breaks partying teenagers in half just because he’s really got nothing else going on in his life.
Jason’s primary implement of trauma-inducing devastation is the machete—a solid, time-honored method of killing people that’s been effectively utilized for centuries. Not only is he quite efficient at decapitating fools with the thing—three at a time, in one case—he can also hurl it with deadly accuracy, which is totally sweet. As great as it is to slice a guy in half while he’s walking around on his hands or bisect the face of a kid in a wheelchair and kick him down some stairs, Jason doesn’t even need his three-foot blade to ruin coeds’ weekends worse than a DEA raid on a Cancun beach resort in the middle of spring break; he’s more than capable of using anything and everything at his disposal to quickly wreck the bodies of dumbhead teenagers anywhere he finds them. Over the years, he has killed folks with meat cleavers, pitchforks, knitting needles, hacksaws, corkscrews, scalpels, spears, tent pegs, scythes, harpoons, wrenches, ice picks and hypodermic needles. One time he picks up a girl in a sleeping bag and smacks her against a tree, just to be a jackass. Another time he pops a dude’s eye out by squeezing his head, and yet another time he punches a wannabe boxer’s head off with a right hook. Hell, even Freddy Krueger can’t stop this bastard: Jason pulls Freddy’s arm off, impales him with his own glove and makes off with the iconic villain’s severed head. He’s also an expert marksman with a crossbow, which is pretty rad, and it seems like everywhere he goes, chicks end up taking their shirts off, which is gratuitous yet enjoyable.
You can’t kill this guy, either. He has been shot, blown up, drowned, burned, electrocuted and beaten down with everything from axes to hammers, but he just takes a lickin’ and keeps on decapitating coeds. Even when you drown his ass or shoot him in the brain with a nail gun, he just gets struck by frigging lightning and pops right back up again like nothing’s wrong. Hell, they even cryogenically froze him once and shot him into space, but this homicidal lunatic just defrosted several thousand years in the future, became a cyborg somehow and went right back to his nasty habit of murdering young people while they’re off having sex.
Ash Williams (THE EVIL DEAD, 1983; EVIL DEAD II, 1987; ARMY OF DARKNESS, 1993)
I’m not entirely sure that I would classify EVIL DEAD II or ARMY OF DARKNESS as “horror” per se, but I’m also not inclined to call the nice folks at IMDb dirty filthy lying bags of dishonesty either; and seeing as how I generally attempt to find a way to work a Bruce Campbell character onto pretty much every list of badasses I’ve ever written, I feel that this is perhaps an appropriate venue to briefly discuss the man who is almost universally recognized as one of the greatest fictional badasses to ever grace the silver screen, with his chainsaw hand and bloody ultraviolent undead-murdering hijinx.
Ash is kind of a doofus in the original EVIL DEAD, but he more than atones for his previous sniveling cowardice in the sequel when he severs his own hand at the wrist, defeats the evil appendage in single combat and replaces it with a fully functioning chainsaw. This guy is essentially dropped into the middle of what can only be described as hell on Earth, and winds up spending pretty much the entire duration of EVIL DEAD II and ARMY OF DARKNESS shoving his one good fist into the hideous flesheating gobs of a wide variety of nightmarish fiends. When he isn’t hooking up with babes, he’s cleaving demons in twain and popping off ghoulish faces with epically bitchin’ no-look headshots from a sawed-off shotgun. As if his onscreen powers of seemingly unlimited face-exploding ass-kicking aren’t hardcore enough, he also has some of the greatest one-liners ever scripted. Hell, ARMY OF DARKNESS was like 16 years ago, and people still can’t seem to stop quoting it at every conceivable opportunity, a practice that I somehow find simultaneously amusing and annoying.
Now here’s the great thing about Ash: He’s one of those larger-than-life neck-crushing wrecking balls of destruction for whom the audience is ready and willing to set aside all pretense of reality, physics and rationality. We believe it simply for the sake of admiring a massive supply of unrivaled badassitude. Nobody questions why this guy can engineer a fake iron hand capable of crushing steel, how he’s able to shoot a zombie flying through the air off a trampoline or why he gets the girl even though he’s a total jackass to her at every opportunity. It’s simply because he’s Ash, and that’s just what he does. He’s a badass, and that’s how it is.
Guitar Wolf (WILD ZERO, 2000)
The band Guitar Wolf are the heroes of the movie WILD ZERO, a movie that resulted when the scripts for ROCK ’N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, DAWN OF THE DEAD and a crazy anime movie were all dropped into an industrial paper shredder, taped back together and made into a feature film. There are hordes of zombies, squadrons of UFOs and a sleazy manager who wears hot pants all the time that need a severe beating and/or exploding, and Guitar Wolf are just the guys to do it. When not wailing out three-chord songs about exploding blood on their guitars or combing their meticulously slicked hair, these crazy, super-violent Japanese greasers are saving the world one zombie fireball headshot at a time. When they run out of bullets, they also apparently have access to for-some-reason magical glowing guitar picks with which they can kill their undead enemies, and once the local area is depopulated of the walking dead, they hop onto their flame-shooting motorcycles or vintage cars and roll out to the next town, drinking and generally having the time of their freakin’ lives.
As if that were not hardcore enough, the cleverly named lead singer Guitar Wolf also provides moral instruction to his biggest fan Ace as an apparition—kinda like Val Kilmer in TRUE ROMANCE, only if after Elvis was done talking, he ran a flying saucer through with a sword hidden in the neck of his guitar (that seriously happens). Most of these moral teachings read like Andrew WK’s Twitter feed, with Guitar Wolf usually either screaming “Rock ’n’ roll!” at the top of his lungs or talking about how “love knows no borders, genders or nationalities.” If this was the voice in my head, I would be able to roll up a metal skillet like a burrito and bite a chunk out of it for breakfast every morning to get my daily nutritional value of iron.
Guitar Wolf are awesome because they’re so over the top that they go light years beyond cheesy and never let up on the throttle. They are wholly devoted to rock ’n’ Roll, cappin’ Zs in the dome until their heads pop off, blowing crap up, drinking heavily, not giving a damn and owning a limitless array of equipment that is also capable of shooting out fireballs and/or laser beams.
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