Movies That Were Probably Made By a Spasm of Six Year-Olds on Acid: The Top 75 Action Films Poll Results Thread

Road Warrior was #16. I suspect Fury Road would make the top 5. My guess would be it would have an okay shot at #1. And it might deserve it!

otm to both posts

FC is my favourite ever i think

also gotta say if you enjoy anything about schwarzenegger or OTT ridiculousness in an action movie, you will love commando. get a group of friends together and go to town. i think as a kid the box convinced me it was gonna be heavy and boring, and no aliens or sci-fi stuff to hook me in, but it's basically a quippy, silly, video game, complete with a string of mini-bosses on the way up to the big showdown. fair warning it also has possibly the highest body count of any movie in the whole list, and mostly all in the last like 20 minutes of the movie. he kills so many people!

yeah he does!

also fair warning, the dead people are almost all Henchmen Of A Central American Banana Republic Strongman, which probably qualifies on the racism trope-o-meter.

casting irish lads would have looked funny tbh

i mean ok but cmon but ok

Full list, for anyone who can't load the thread:

75 APOCALYPTO
74 INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
73 GOLDFINGER
72 VANISHING POINT
71 DIRTY HARRY
69 (TIE) THE HURT LOCKER
69 (TIE) DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE
67 (TIE) CON AIR
67 (TIE) BRANDED TO KILL
66 ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
65 SIN CITY
64 INFERNAL AFFAIRS
62 (TIE) DEMOLITION MAN
62 (TIE) TAKEN
61 MAD MAX
60 JAWS
59 THE FUGITIVE
58 CASINO ROYALE
57 COLLATERAL
56 THE INCREDIBLES
55 ENTER THE DRAGON
53 (TIE) MIAMI VICE
53 (TIE) KUNG FU HUSTLE
52 GET CARTER
51 AKIRA
50 LA FEMME NIKITA
49 DISTRICT 9
48 TOTAL RECALL
47 THE WILD BUNCH
46 THE GREAT ESCAPE
45 COMMANDO
44 THE KILLER
43 THE FIFTH ELEMENT
42 SPEED
41 BULLITT
40 YOJIMBO
39 LE SAMOURAI
38 DAWN OF THE DEAD
37 TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.
36 THE MATRIX
35 INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE
34 CRANK
33 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
32 THE BOURNE IDENTITY
31 THE WARRIORS
30 THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM
29 THE BOURNE SUPREMACY
28 ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
27 BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA
26 THE DARK KNIGHT
25 PREDATOR
24 POINT BREAK
23 BATTLE ROYALE
22 THE THING
21 KILL BILL VOL. 1
20 POINT BLANK
19 THE TERMINATOR
17 NORTH BY NORTHWEST
17 STARSHIP TROOPERS
16 THE ROAD WARRIOR
15 THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
14 THE FRENCH CONNECTION
13 THE SEVEN SAMURAI
12 ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
11 HARD BOILED
10 BLADE RUNNER
9 LÉON: THE PROFESSIONAL
8 HEAT
7 RONIN
6 CHILDREN OF MEN
5 ROBOCOP
4 TERMAINTOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
3 RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
2 ALIENS
1 DIE HARD

I'm surprised at the poor showing of martial arts movies. They don't seem to have been ruled out, since Enter the Dragon is on the list.

there were definitely some in the nominees (see: TOP 100 ACTION FILMS OF ALL TIME NOMINATIONS AND DISCUSSION THREAD ) but they're swamped by stuff closer to the American Blockbuster Action Movie template...

big trouble in little china tbf

Okay, I guess I need to rep harder for Cobra as it ticks a lot of Dr. C's Commando boxes. It's the most ridiculous movie ever. The baddies are satanists who ritually clank fire axes together in an abandoned warehouse. Marion Cobretti is the most overly try-hard badass in history.

Couldn't find an uninterrupted clip of this scene, so you're missing the bit between these two clips when Cobra crams his newspaper inside a bbq grill and tosses his housekeys like a hardman in an attempt to impress all zero people who are watching him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32sLgUoj91o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SxN_U2H0Xc

All to the tune of Miami Sound Machine. More like Camp-brah, amirite.

i love the OTT final monologue of the Night Slasher, what is he even talking about?

You want to go to hell? Huh, pig? You want to go to hell with me? It doesn't matter, does it? We are the hunters. We kill the weak so the strong survive. You can't stop the New World. Your filthy society will never get rid of people like us. It's breeding them! WE ARE THE FUTURE!

a layup for Cobra:

Marion Cobretti : No!
[aims his gun]
Marion Cobretti : You're history.

separately, i wanted to gauge ILX interest in a crime/thriller/mystery/detective/film noir poll. i don't think it's been done, it would cover all eras, etc...

there are a lot of films that i think slipped through this poll and some others that would be interesting to discuss in a rollout.

that could be cool! i was looking up lists of movies under that basic umbrella recently cause my friend wanted to do a "noir" marathon but they were feeling pretty broad-minded, at one point the shortlist included like, The Getaway and Sugarland Express alongside Midnight Run and Pierrot le Fou. unfortunately we got started late and only got through Chinatown and uh, Brick. anyway though i like it... pretty huge range of things to cover... could be cool, could be unwieldy, probably would be fun. i'd assume things like TLaDiLA and Le Samourai would qualify despite their 'action' placement...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wk-jT9rn-8

xp re Cobra, i love that Miami Sound Machine song.

totally down for a crime poll.

It's funny though how i think culturally Taken is the Neeson action film everyone talks about (understandably perhaps) while in the meantime every single non-Taken franchise action film he's made since is better.

True. I particularly liked Run All Night, A Walk Among The Tombstones, and The Grey. Haven't seen The Commuter yet.

This life's HARD man, but it's HARDER if you're stupid! aka CRIME/MYSTERY/THRILLER/NOIR movie POLL nominations thread

the William Friedkin poll

to live and die in la well discussed in this thread

I'd searched for Warrior with no results, then expanded the entire thread and ctrl+f'd every mention of "mad max" without Road Warrior showing up, so blame Americans for this I guess

yeah Fast Five is the real golden point of the Furiouses

AF: I thought I'd seen Jaws, because I knew every reference well enough to joke about it for decades, but watched a remaster in the cinema five years ago and realised that I'd just read some of the novel and all of the MAD magazine version when I was a kid. It's really good, definitely worth seeing with an audience

Crank is probably diminished bc its mostly shit sequel just tried to recreate it and go one up on everything without doing anything new, but the original is really smug and self satisfied and Statham I think is at his most unlikeable in these films.

this is crazytalk, Chelios is adorable (and tbh more of a real person than almost any Statham character). Spy is probably the only film he's better in? BUT: the biggest crazytalk is thinking that there was any way Crank 2 could possibly go OTHER than one-upping everything. And in fact they do plenty that's new in the course of that, like two characters transforming into kaiju of themselves in the middle of a fight scene.

its no 16 on the list

surely statham career-best in snatch

yeah but as Road Warrior, not Mad Max 2. outside the fold, there was no indication it placed

i had a lot of fun on this thread. back in the day.

i'm a bit Statham-agnostic, i think his brand of brute charisma has its charms but not all of the time. i'm completely down with any style or type of movie but Crank didn't work for me as well as it did on others, ultimately. my beef w/it is ultimately pretty limited, i won't argue much one way or another, not even for Crank: High Voltage which i just couldn't get w/whatsoever. i have no issues w/Crank placing, nothing in this poll for me is a total hard pass.

most Statham films are pretty empty, but he's got to do something to keep busy until Neveldine & Taylor win $113,000 on a scratch-it and make Crank 3 in a weekend with an iphone

ten years since we polled Statham!

hey, this guy knows what's up:

also, Crank 2 is in no way worse than Crank 1 - it just simply couldn't exist without the former, and is openly a distillation and exaggeration of the wondrousness of its predecessor. It is truly a tragedy that this was a box-office flop, and that we shall be denied the otherwise inevitable glory of CRANK 3-D.

― oh sh!t a ¯\⎝⏠___⏠⎠/¯ (sic), Thursday, July 15, 2010 10:35 AM

also day and knight is an unofficial mi imo

Fair.

I have seen most of Jaws, but I think it was something I was paying sporadic attention to as a callow youth, so I missed most/all of the build-up and only remember the gorier later bits.

Possibly similarly with Commado, or tbh I may just have watched a lot of "100 best Arnie lines!" Youtubes. My Arnie shame is clearly Total Recall, made all the worse by the fact that I have seen the remake (on a plane, mind).

I have a to-do item (on the "this list may see me out" list, mind) to catch up on all of these - I'm far more likely to get to it than the Comedy poll, for sure.

this is crazytalk, Chelios is adorable (and tbh more of a real person than almost any Statham character). Spy is probably the only film he's better in?

statham is an absolute fucking treasure in spy, i unironically love that guy

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

many xposts to Dr C but posting vmic I will say that Mad Max is a must-watch.
Especially if you have seen and/or enjoyed Fury Road.
If you’ve seen Fury Road then it is worthwhile bc Mad Max pulls off a similar level of vehicular intensity & creativity with absolutely no money & no cgi, just pure gonzo creativity. And Immortan Joe = the same actor that is Toecutter in Mad Max.

Though caveat: Mad Max is a no-budget 70’s movie and is paced as such. Lotta weird sidetracks (saxophone!) so it does have a bit of an Mst3k-fodder feel at times.

if i may counter in the interests of balance

mad max 2 is the movie you will recognise in fury road

mad max one is just an australian dildo biker gang documentary with little enough action

i'd always avoided it because i'd heard it starts with some horrible act of violence against his family or something?

yes, also SPOILER SPOILER a dog ;_;

ah no that doesnt happen til like an hour in

nothing at all happens before that

srsly its an interesting movie but it really isnt as marketed

it's true that max's family don't make it out alive (spoiler alert) but it's not a particularly graphic end iirc?

veg very much otm that mad max is both fantastic and also a bit of a victim of the circumstances of its shoestring production

mad max is kinda the proof-of-concept, mad max 2 is a phenomenally exciting sharpening of miller's vision, thunderdome is an odd, charming but undeniably inferior quasi-kids-movie and fury road is takes all the good parts of the previous three and turns them into the gleaming, machine-tooled apex of the whole thing

yep

also lotr villains spotting iirc

Touchez pas au Grisbi
Classes Tous Risques
The League of Gentleman
The Silent Partner
The Anderson Tapes
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Milan Caliber 9
Cash on Demand

Wrong effing thread!

yeah bizarro otm

MM1 does show some pretty awful violence against women. Partly because it is an exploitation movie and partly because the story is intended to push Max beyond sanity in the worst ways imaginable. but it’s def not entirely a “fun watch”

i just dont like ppl skipping 1 and going straight to 2. it bugs me.

Has anyone put together a reel of all the scenes in Wild Bunch with the bunch just collectively laughing maniacally?

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 11:10 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i believe sam peckinpah did, it was called "the end of the movie the wild bunch"

― the jazz zinger (s1ocki), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 8:15 AM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i lol hard every time i think of this post

I finally watched Red Dawn over the break (it's on Amazon Prime). Back when I was an actual spasming 6-year-old, I had seen tv commercials for the network premier of Red Dawn and gotten all worked up about it and my parents agreed to let me watch. But within the first few minutes when the teacher and all the students started getting killed, I was horrified and made them turn it off. This time around I made it all the way through! A very stupid movie, but kinda a blast.

it’s so bananas but a deep favorite

pour one out for William Friedkin #14 and #37 in our action poll, #1 in our uh hearts?
or cars, maybe.

https://imgur.com/dKJr4NV

https://64.media.tumblr.com/848c880abe408d43287347f7fa586e82/tumblr_miwmsaYV5p1qg4blro1_500.gif