10 Deleted Scenes That Would've Ruined The Film
You can criticize Hollywood for their often glaring inaccuracies or their attempts to cast dead actors, but the very existence of deleted scenes proves that they are capable of reining things in and making good decisions. Still, you have to wonder why so much money and time was spent filming some scenes that remain utterly baffling, and would have fucked up the rest of the movie had they been left in. Scenes like ...
Nothing can fuck up Cracked's new Adventures in Jedi School mini-series.
Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines -- Schwarzenegger the Southern Sergeant
Say what you will about Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but it grossed over $400 million worldwide, and it knew exactly what kind of movie it was -- a popcorn blockbuster. However, if the following scene had gotten through the edit, it could have turned Rise of the Machines from a pretty average action film into a pretty laughable screwball comedy.
The Deleted Scene:
The scene shows a boardroom full of military personnel and Cyber Research Systems executives watching a promotional video announcing their latest achievements in killer robot technology.
"We calculate its odds of destroying the entire human race at less than 40 percent.
Which makes it much safer than Project Sarandon."
We learn that these new robots will be serving on the frontlines on the battlefield. We also learn why the body design of the Terminator robots are based on Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to the video, Chief Master Sergeant William Candy (Schwarzenegger) has had such an impressive military career that they've decided to model the Terminator robots after him.
"Why does a robot need to be huge? Wouldn't basing it off of a little guy be cheaper?"
But when he opens his mouth, we realize he's not the emotionless, hardcore, aggressively Austrian Arnold we've all come to know and tolerate -- his voice has been overdubbed by that of a giddy, excitable Southern goofball. Grinning like an idiot, Chief Master Sergeant Candy is all "Howdy" and "Shucks," like the biggest, dumbest cousin of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. The voice is ridiculous, the dubbing job is jarring and unsettling and the whole concept of the scene is utterly pointless.
"The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has a muscle fetish and wants an easy lay. It's our job to hook him up."
Obviously the filmmakers need to explain why Terminators don't sound like the Rich Texan from The Simpsons, so one of the executives says he doesn't like the accent. Then the man in the screenshot below turns and, in an aggressively Austrian accent, says, "We can fix it."
Also, he looks sort of like Arnold, too, for some reason.
Get it? The idea is that they liked the body of Arnold, but he had a ridiculous Southern accent, so they replaced it with the voice of some unnaturally deep-voiced scientist! That's exactly the kind of wacky comedy you crave in a movie about time-traveling robot monsters.
Why is he on that treadmill? What new, useful data could that possibly provide robot scientists?
Why It Would Have Ruined the Movie
This scene, trying to explain why all the Terminators look like Arnie, is bewildering for so many reasons, and not just because it was a question that literally no one was ever asking at any time. We've accepted the fact that Terminators have to be naked when they go back in time because clothes can't time travel, or whatever, we're already on board with your logic at its most bullshit-tastic; you don't need to explain anything to us.
Sure. The robots have to be naked and covered in skin to travel through time. That's perfectly logical.
But since you did, you've only raised more questions. Why would humans have been developing the Terminators when, in The Terminator, Kyle Reese said that it was the robots who actually designed and built them as a way to infiltrate the humans? Why, about 20 years after crushing the humans, would Skynet honor the inferior humans' choice of face when it came time to build the Terminators? Are we assuming the deep-voiced man with the Austrian accent recorded his voice for the project before Skynet became self-aware and gunned him down?
We're going to go with "no."
It took a decent stretch of the imagination to enjoy the believability of Rise of the Machines in parts, but something tells us this scene would have gone a little too far into the absurd.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit -- Pig-Faced Nightmare Fuel
You mainly remember Who Framed Roger Rabbit for two reasons -- it was the first time you realized a cartoon could give you a tiny boner, and for Christopher Lloyd's pants-shittingly nightmarish reveal at the end. But an arguably more disturbing scene was cut.
The Deleted Scene:
After Eddie (Bob Hoskins), who is trying to clear the titular Roger Rabbit's name, is caught snooping around Jessica Rabbit's changing room and accused of being a panty thief, Judge Doom has him kidnapped and sent off to Toontown, which terrifies Eddie.
You can tell he just pooped by the look on his face.
We don't know what exactly goes on in Toontown, just that when Eddie is released the next day, he has the head of a Toon pig covering his own. How the hell Toons have the ability to create their own Toons and attach them to humans is beyond us. All we know is that the result is pretty alarming.
"It's like Porky Pig plus the Predator plus you guys I just took a lot of acid!"
He tugs and pulls at it to no avail, then runs home and does what any sane man who has just had a Toon animal's head attached to his body by a group of anthropomorphic mobster weasels would do and showers in fucking turpentine.
Don't try this at home. Unless you have to off a psychotic cartoon character.
As he does so, the head of the Toon pig starts to break apart and come away from Eddie's face.
Thankfully we don't see that, as it's silhouetted behind the shower curtain, but we do see the horrifying aftermath as the bits of terrified fleshy swine Toon get washed down the drain.
"GAAAH I can see Bob Hoskins' junk! Also, my face!"
Why It Would Have Ruined the Movie:
Remember, Roger Rabbit is only effective as a movie if the audience feels for the Toons -- if we accept the fact that Toons are capable of having the same kinds of emotions and personalities as humans. They have their own set of rules and can take a good beating, sure, but otherwise they can feel sad and scared, and they can certainly feel pain. So seeing the obliterated remains of a still-living Toon pig face being washed away in the shower by an albeit reluctant advocate of Toon rights doesn't exactly make for a fun family night in. The protagonist of a movie isn't supposed to start killing off the people he is trying to protect, without even so much as an afterthought.
Eddie "Valiant" our collective ass.
Clerks follows a day in the life of an average, ambitionless, self-absorbed but ultimately kind of likable quick-stop clerk, Dante, and his best friend, Randall. It's the ultimate low-budget success story that created the behemoth that is Kevin Smith (figuratively speaking of course). Clerks is one of the best movies where ultimately nothing happens, which was entirely Smith's point. The movie's sharp and observational dialogue made up for the ultra low budget and the fact that the most "exciting" thing to happen is a rooftop hockey game. Strange, then, is the gun-toting ending that could have been.
The Deleted Scene:
The first 10 seconds of that clip are familiar if you've seen the movie. Dante takes his post at the counter, Randall reminds Dante that his store is no longer open, and then credits. Unfortunately though, the deleted scene keeps going. Dante goes back behind the counter, and then the movie switches to a point of view shot from outside. You know the one -- it's the kind you always see in a horror movie from the killer's perspective right before he murders someone, just to prove the situation is serious.
Except if this were a horror movie, someone inside that store would be getting laid.
Unfortunately for him, Dante forgets to lock the door after he closes the shop, because the armed robber quietly walks in and, without a word, calmly shoots Dante, killing him.
Bunch of savages in this town.
The final few seconds play out like disturbing news footage from the aftermath of an armed robbery gone wrong rather than the end of a cult comedy. Dante lies bloodied on the floor, his blank dead face staring at nothing.
Fade out. Cue nothing over the credits but ambient noise, followed by the now-eerie sound of a till being operated. Hockey games, arguments about Star Wars, blowjobs, life-- it's all meaningless. Everything dies.
In retrospect, that would have been a good thing for fans of Jay and Silent Bob to learn early.
Why It Would Have Ruined the Movie:
Did you read that part about how blowjobs are meaningless? For a start, it's depressing as fuck. Comedies, especially relatively light-hearted ones like Clerks, aren't exactly supposed to end with the protagonist getting shot for absolutely no reason. What gave Clerks its charm was the fact that many Generation X-ers could identify with the story of two slackers wasting their lives away in shitty jobs they hated. It worked because it spoke to a previously unaddressed demographic. It was the 1990s. It was about people raised by pop culture. It was one of the first movies that dealt with the idea of being stuck somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. It was about being disappointed but ambitionless, frustrated but impotent, but it was still ultimately hopeful, because it proved a community existed. This movie told every confused slacker out there, "Hey, you're not the only one; there are more of us out here, and we're just as lost and scared and into Star Wars and porn as you are. We're in this together, it'll be OK."
"Nah, just fucking with you. Everybody dies, have a good night!" Killing off Dante murders the good will and the comedy in one unexplained bullet. It's not that we're against sad endings; we're against senselessly idiotic sad endings that are forced onto an otherwise pleasant comedy that is 80 percent dick jokes.
When Alien was first previewed to audiences, ushers fainted and people ran screaming from the theater. Over 30 years later, Alien still packs a terrifying punch, and not just because of the moment when John Hurt's dinner is so rudely interrupted. It was the feeling of dread audiences shared with the crew as they were picked off by the unseen alien terror that was really the driving force. It made the movie just as much a horror film as science fiction.
Though it really was a terrible way to end a meal.
The Deleted Scene:
We're near the end of the film. The surviving crew members are almost home safe. Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) is so busy tying up loose ends and cleaning up some machinery that she doesn't even notice the alien waiting patiently, silently, in the middle of the room ....
Until, that is, the alien makes its presence known with a menacing tail whip.
Needless to say, Lambert is horrified. She stares at the alien, she can't move, she's paralyzed with fear. They're all alone in the room, the horrifying alien has her right where it wants her. The alien stands -- or, not stands, but, like, lifts itself up off the ground with its hands and feet, its stomach still up in the air ...
Just like that, Alien will never be scary again.
... and then it just ... walks like that, scuttling across the room like Dr. Zoidberg, or like this is a fourth-grade gym class and it's playing crab soccer.
"Whooopwhopwhopwhopwhopwhopwhopwhop."
The alien stands up later, proving that its feet work just fine and that it must have done that weird, inverted crawl for ... what, intimidation purposes?
Why It Would Have Ruined the Movie:
We know that a lot of our readers are at work and can't watch videos, but really, our best possible answer is "watch that video." Watch it. Watch it again. Watch it real hard. Watch that big, spooky alien fucking line dance its way across the spaceship over and over again until it's clear why it doesn't belong in this or any movie.
It is impossible for anyone but a sumo wrestler to look menacing while squatting.
As Ridley Scott himself has said, the main technique used to heighten tension in the film was to bathe the alien in darkness and only show glimpses of it just before it hauled someone off. The fact that you never got a decent look at it until the very end meant it was your own fucked-up imagination that filled in the gaps of what the entire alien looked like, and therefore what it was capable of. That was Scott's plan; the darkness would be just as important as the alien itself. Even though a lot of work went into creating the look of the evil bastard, Scott specifically wanted it to remain largely hidden from the audience so they couldn't tell it was just another dude in a rubber suit.
"We're gonna give it a mask, too, right? We should probably give it a mask."
So to go from having the alien only show itself when it mouth-fucked someone in the face to showing it scrabbling around on its obvious man-feet would have undone all the tension Scott had spent the past two hours trying to maintain.
Ghostbusters -- Suddenly, Bums
Ghostbusters is up there as being one of the best comedies of the '80s, not least because of the improvisational style Bill Murray brought to the role of Dr. Peter Venkman. His performance produced some of the most memorable moments in the film. It makes sense then that a scripted scene was cut from the film, as it could have been memorable for all the wrong reasons.
The Deleted Scene:
Nothing that visually exciting happens in this scene. It's night time, there's a park, and two crazy bums are talking about Nicaragua, boxing and karate. Then Rick Moranis' Louis runs by screaming. Pretty standard. Oh, except for the fact that the bums are also inexplicably played by Murray and Dan Aykroyd.
We know this is offensive. But to whom?
Yes, for no reason at all, Murray and Aykroyd played two roles each in Ghostbusters, even though no one else did. Since Louis is running around screaming, fans of the film know that this scene would have taken place moments after the Terror Dog (as it was known) chases Louis out of the hotel, and right before Venkman goes up to Dana's apartment and resists the temptation to fuck a demon-possessed gatekeeper. They just show up to break up the action in an awesome movie to have a completely random debate about who would win in a fight between a heavyweight boxer and a karate master.
Apparently, New York bums wear ascots made of tin foil.
What's more than just weird about Murray and Aykroyd doubling up as bums for the film is the fact that Murray is clearly channeling Carl Spackler from Caddyshack.
Or maybe he just moved to New York and changed his name.
Why It Would Have Ruined the Movie:
Ghostbusters is a pretty strong film, so this might not have ruined it, but it certainly would change every conversation from "Yeah, I liked Ghostbusters a lot" to "Yeah, I liked Ghostbusters except for that fucking pointless bum scene." It would function as the "Octopus's Garden" of Ghostbusters, an aggravatingly goofy, out-of-place aside that ruins an otherwise incredible piece of work.
Not unlike the Ghostbusters cartoon.
Blade -- Deacon Frost on the Blob
Blade was a dark and violent comic book movie before dark and violent comic book movies were "in." Indeed, it could be argued that Blade kick-started the Marvel movie juggernaut that's stronger than ever today. In the actual ending, Blade rampages, beats the shit out of a ton of shitty vampire dudes and has a lengthy sword-and-fist fight with Deacon Frost. The fight concludes when Blade loads Frost up with several syringes full of some kind of vampire poison. The final syringe, in fact, is kicked by Blade right into Frosts' fucking head. Then Frost explodes.
It's awesome.
The Deleted Scene:
In the deleted ending, Frost turns into a blood tornado with a face and spins around in circles until Blade simply waits for him to accidentally absorb the vampire poison.
At first it looks like Frost has burped out some thick cranberry juice, but soon the blood consumes him, pouring out of his mouth and filling up his pants in one huge clotted mess.
The vampire blood god looks like the worst half of a PB&J.
Instead of kung-fuing the vials of blue vampire poison into Frost's body, Blade waits patiently while Frost turns into a blood tornado with a face.
Above: Not what Bram Stoker had in mind.
Blade tries to whisper some witty one-liner about the poison, but Frost can't hear him, because he's already turned into a blood tornado with a face.
Also, in the Blade universe, vampire blood is the same color and consistency as cranapple juice.
Why It Would Have Ruined the Movie:
Fucking blood tornado with a face, you guys!
No, but we actually do have more to say. Blade was released in 1998, the same year as Armageddon and Godzilla, but it had less than a third of their budgets, so the focus really wasn't on visual effects. The few effects seen in the film were used to good ... effect, but only because they were so brief.
Case in point.
Turning Frost into a blood tornado with a face at first sounds like a really stupid idea, but as you can see from the 1998 visuals, it's actually completely fucking stupid.
Not unlike the year 1998.
Even back when Blade was released, this would have looked a bit ropey, and after two hours of ass-kicking vampire action, you don't want the audience's last impression to be of an angry twister made of the Kool-Aid guy's diarrhea.
Donnie Darko -- Predict This
Donnie Darko was both praised and criticized for its nonlinear and fantastical narrative, but it was undeniably original. Whether you loved or hated Donnie Darko, you certainly couldn't argue that director Richard Kelly tried to dumb it down for the lowest common denominator.
It took us two years to realize that wasn't a hand doing the peace sign.
The Deleted Scene:
Not a whole lot happens in this scene. Donnie Darko is impaled at the end of his bed, quietly shaking as he waits for sweet death, or the end of the "Mad World" montage, whichever comes first.
"Hurry ... the fuck ... up."
Why It Would Have Ruined the Movie:
One of the things people love about Donnie Darko is the weird, poetic, ambiguous way Donnie's death is handled. Sacrificing himself, staying in bed and getting crushed by a jet engine, would stop a series of events that would result in the love of his life getting killed. If he did it consciously, well that sure was sweet and noble of him. The way the room is shot in slow motion being consumed by the engine gives Donnie a mysterious and classy exit from the film, the kind of exit that would be appropriate for a self-sacrificing hero in love.
Nothing says "mysterious" and "classy" like "crushed by a jet engine."
But if Kelly had then cut to Donnie sitting there quivering like a stuck pig, that mystique would have been entirely shattered. No more poetry, no more class, just Donnie, twitching like a lunatic for 1o seconds.
Hancock -- Blast off. With My Dong.
Hancock was a sort-of-alright movie with a charming cast. It's about a superhero who is also kind of an asshole (Will Smith), his new nonsuper friend (Jason Bateman) and his friend's smoking-hot wife (Charlize Theron), who (spoiler) is also a superhero.
The Deleted Scene:
So Hancock is in a bar and a random chick walks in and clearly wants to put Hancock's dick in her hand. She's been looking for him everywhere because she's way into the idea of nailing a superhero.
Even one who smells like a bottle of Jim Beam left out in the sun.
The woman stares at and aggressively hits on Hancock long enough that he finally agrees to be a gentleman and take her back to his trailer for some super-boning. Wasting no time, she pounces on Hancock and tries to slap his ass with a package of Jiffy Pop the second she enters his trailer.
"Do you want some popcorn on your ass? You -- oh, you don't? Oh ... I guess that's just me, then."
Before they get started, Hancock, deep concern in his voice, tries to warn her that when he reaches the so-called "mountaintop," she should be as far away as possible. But because she's as dumb as she is horny, the message doesn't look to be received, as she seems to assume everything Hancock says is a sexual euphemism she just hasn't learned yet.
"Oh, yeah, I'll be far away. I'll be far away all over your testicles ... right?"
Refusing to hear any more warnings, the woman jumps on Hancock and they start pounding away, shaking the trailer wildly.
If this trailer's a-rockin', don't come a-knockin' unless you fancy death by supersonic sperm.
Just when Hancock is about to reach climax, he shouts "mountaintop" and unceremoniously throws the woman across the room onto a couch.
Then this happens.
In case it's not obvious, those are holes in the roof of Hancock's trailer. Hancock puts three sizeable holes in the roof of his trailer as he blows his load into orbit. His semen shot through the ceiling and into space.
The woman, understandably in shock, heads to the bathroom. While in there, Hancock stands outside the door and gets all sweet and emotional, thanking her for being understanding and offering to take her on a romantic super-flight.
But she's too freaked out, and there's nothing Hancock can do. She sneaks out a window and drives away.
Why It Would Have Ruined the Movie:
On one hand, we respect that the filmmakers decided to show this. After all, if everything about Hancock is super-powered, it stands to reason that his semen would be, too. It's a nice deconstruction of the all-powerful heroes like Superman that we rarely think about.
On the other hand, he blasted holes in the ceiling of his trailer with his sperm. And, hey, Charlize Theron's character is just as much of a superhero as he is. If this scene had been included, it would mean Charlize had the lady equivalent of super-powered genitals, which would mean her very grounded, down-to-earth husband, Jason Bateman, was either totally unaware of it, or totally cool with it, and neither would make sense.
"It's terrifying -- one Kegel and my dick would be gone."
When making a movie featuring time travel, there are many things you have to keep track of if your film is going to make sense. Luckily, Terminator 2: Judgment Day largely managed to avoid screwing with the timeline, and only the most savagely nerdy will try to nitpick their way through the story to find some seam that doesn't quite fit with the rest of the timeline. The inclusion of this scene, however, would have seen James Cameron shit all over everything we'd just spent that last two hours enjoying.
Titanic hadn't come out yet, and he couldn't afford to pull nearly as much shit.
The Deleted Scene:
After we watch Arnold melt himself, we immediately cut to the MEGA HAPPY ENDING. We fast forward to the new future, where the war was averted and everything's just great.
Apparently at some point the world's great architects sat down and pondered, "How can we make D.C. even uglier?"
Aside perhaps from Linda Hamilton's narrative skills. Those aren't so great. She is now in her 60s and sitting in a park, and says "August 29, 1997 came and went. Nothing much happened. Michael Jackson turned 40."
Hear that? It's the sound of millions of '90s-era boners suddenly shriveling up and dying.
Connor's narration goes on, saying that Judgment Day didn't come, and she wanted to yell at everybody that every day was a gift and they should use it well. Instead of yelling, however, Connor blearily tells us that she got drunk instead. What better way to value your precious moments in a peaceful world that you were fundamental in bringing about than by getting shitfaced because you're too lazy to yell?
"Every day is a gift you ungrateful bastaURRRRRGH."
She goes on about a dark future still existing for her all while someone rolls past on a distinctly unfuturistic-looking skateboard and two others play the most baffling game of Frisbee ever.
Shitty retro-futuristic props, or foreshadowing for Terminator 5: Rise of the Disks?
She then says her son John now fights "on the battlefield of the Senate, his weapons are common sense and hope," before merrily tying her granddaughter's shoelaces and watching her play in the park.
Why It Would Have Ruined the Movie:
Wait wait wait. Hang on a minute. How the hell can John Connor even exist if the war has never been fought? If the future is so rosy, surely there is no need for Kyle Reese to go back in time to bone Sarah Connor and produce John, let alone a granddaughter. What in the name of Sam Fuck is going on?
And why does John Connor look like he belongs in a goddamn Enzyte ad?
The reason the actual ending worked so well was because it was just as bleak and uncertain as the rest of the movie had been. To go from a dark and grim story featuring a badass Sarah Connor to a sunlit park with Frisbees and a contented (if possibly drunk) old crone with a Senator for a son would have ruined everything. Obviously, like this ending should have never gone beyond the script stage, let alone the "Let's put Linda Hamilton through six hours of makeup and spend a whole bunch of money inventing the perfect future" stage.
A horrifying future where orange denim dungarees are back in fashion.
It feels a little cruel to criticize this bewilderingly Certified Fresh final installment of the Star Wars franchise when it's been done so many times before. But fuck it.
The Deleted Scene:
Obi Wan and Anakin meet up with Darth Grievous, who is holding a Jedi friend of theirs whom we've never met and don't care about. He then says "Stinking Jedi" and murders her.
It's awful and pointless. We don't know who this Jedi is and we have no reason to care about her, but that's OK, because Obi Wan and Anakin don't seem to care, either. They're more into the idea of finishing each other's sentences like two galaxy-crossed lovers.
This happened. George Lucas wrote it and everything.
As stupid as it is for them to finish each other's sentences for absolutely no reason, it gets worse when Lucas decides to let the audience know that the Jedi have a series of secret codes. Anakin and Obi Wan are surrounded by fucking droids or whatever and, to hide their plans, they communicate via a series of eyebrow rubs, nose twitches and mustache twirls, the way a baseball coach gives signals to his pitcher, except this is supposed to be a goddamned Star Wars movie. So, Anakin does this ...
And Obi Wan says, "No, no, no, no ... might I recommend ..."
"Mustache twirl, perhaps?"
And he twirls his mustache, which Anakin shoots down, explaining that there are "Far too many for that." Then Anakin proposes that they ...
"But have you considered eyebrow rub?"
Obi Wan agrees. Apparently, "chin rub + eyebrow rub + eyebrow rub" translates to "Let's use our lightsabers to cut a perfect circle in the floor below ourselves," because that's exactly what they do.
Why It Would Have Ruined the Movie:
Let's ignore the fact that, even though Jedi are Wizard Knights with actual magic, they developed a secret language of face-touch codes. And let's ignore the fact that one of the codes is "mustache twirl," even though Anakin's lack of mustache precludes him from ever suggesting it. (Seriously, even if he thinks the mustache twirl would be the absolutely perfect maneuver in battle, he'd never be able to communicate it.)
How is Yarael Poof to signal danger without a nose?
And let's ignore the fact that, of all of the crunch-time scenarios that Jedi think might come in handy just for "whatever," one of them is "Cut a hole in the floor with our lightsabers and drop down, hoping that our new tunnel doesn't lead to certain death."
Except let's not at all ignore any of that, because it's all fucking terrible. More than anything else, this scene is remarkable because even George Lucas thought it was too stupid to be in one of the Star Wars prequels. Do you have any idea how stupid a concept needs to be for George Lucas to say, "Ehhh, we should probably cut that"?
Precisely this stupid.
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For scenes that we actually needed, check out 7 Famous Movie Flaws That Were Explained in Deleted Scenes. Or check out some scenes we're glad never got filmed in 6 Deleted Scenes That Prove the Book Isn't Always Better.
And stop by LinkSTORM to see the deleted scene that explains Bucholz' existence.
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