7 Insanely Dark James Bond Scenes They Hope You Forget

7 Moonraker -- Bond Murders Two Scientists For No Reason

Back in the '70s and '80s, society's idea of a super-cool spy was a 50-year-old man awkwardly jogging through action scenes and hauntingly pressing his body up against 20-something ingenues, to the erotic delight of absolutely no one.

Yes, we're talking about Roger Moore, who made some of the most ridiculously campy Bond movies. Nobody at the time seemed to notice, presumably because of the welcome distractions of Rubik's Cubes and cocaine. One of the goofiest of Moore's Bond movies was Moonraker, 1979's blatant attempt to cash in on the popularity of Star Wars by sending James Bond into space. In the movie, Bond stumbles upon a secret lab owned by Hugo Drax, a famous billionaire who's secretly an evil villain.

Bond's not exactly sure what the two scientists are up to, so when they leave the room, he sneaks for a closer look.

Now, Bond's not a scientist (unless you count excessive drinking and spreading venereal disease as a "science"), so it's no surprise that he can't figure out the chemical properties of a solution by simply picking it up and staring. So instead of, say, taking a couple of vials back to Q for analysis, 007 opens one of the vials and leaves it standing in a precarious position before dashing secretively out of the room.

Not surprisingly, when the scientists come back, they knock over the vial ...

... which turns out to contain some kind of toxic gas that kills them both while Bond observes from a secure position, not unlike a child hiding behind the couch from a scary movie.

It's pretty fucked up that instead of doing some basic detective work, Bond uses the scientists as guinea pigs. Sure, they might be bad guys, but they also might not be. They're just a couple of scientists, and they're working for the Bond-verse equivalent of Richard Branson. For all we know, they may think they're producing weapons to help fight terrorism, or a better first-class commercial flying experience. Regardless, Bond never bothered to find out before locking them both in a death trap.

But at least he solved the mystery without having to run an errand, so ... good job?

James Bond isn't exactly known as a master of disguise. The reason his cover gets blown 90 percent of the time is that he walks around telling the bad guys his real name. Even barring that sloppiness, it's kind of insane that enemy agents don't simply shoot any British guy in a tuxedo who orders an insanely specific martini at fancy casinos.

The reason for Bond's reluctance to fully commit to an undercover operation is arguably explained in You Only Live Twice, starring Sean Connery. Unfortunately for fans of things that aren't cartoonishly offensive, he goes undercover as a Japanese person.

The procedure to make Bond Japanese is performed by group of disguise artists who aren't allowed to wear clothes, presumably because it would interfere with their process.

The procedure itself involves laying pieces of rubber-like material over Bond's eyes to make them "Japanese", in a complicated procedure known as "Racist Subterfuge".

They also add a Japanese wig, to replace the wig Sean Connery was already wearing.

The results speak for themselves:

Technically speaking, the disguise works brilliantly, because that homunculus in no way resembles Sean Connery. However, if we're being sticklers, we have to call it a resounding failure, because he looks absolutely nothing like a Japanese person.

Apart from this seamless transformation, Bond is trained to become a ninja, which takes approximately a single afternoon. Even after all of that effort, the enemy agents somehow manage to see through his disguise almost immediately, so turning Bond into a racist caricature didn't even accomplish anything, other than alienate future audiences once the 1960s came to an end. Though to be fair, a 2002 Bond film featured a Korean guy using plastic surgery to become a white British dude, so maybe turning Sami, Xhosa, or Cincinnatian is just something that happens off-screen every day in James Bond Land.

At the end of For Your Eyes Only, Bond stops Melina Havelock from killing the villain with a crossbow, either for moral reasons or because crossbows are silly and Bond didn't want to appear to be condoning ridiculousness.

Melina has a good reason for wanting to smoke the bad guy, though: He killed her father. But Bond is right when he insists that killing is never the answer, and urges her to turn the villain over to the police. It would be a powerful moment ... if it weren't for the fact that earlier in the same movie, Bond pushed a guy off of a cliff for virtually no reason.

This guy wasn't some kind of genocidal madman or world-threatening genius -- he was a petty henchman who wasn't armed and was trapped in a car on the edge of oblivion. Bond was only too happy to gently kick this random clown shoe right the fuck over. Even Roger Moore himself thought that this scene was messed up, later saying that he "wasn't comfortable with it, if truth be known."

So ... killing isn't the answer, unless no one else is around. Then all bets are off, and Bond is murdering everyone.

4 Goldfinger -- Bond Sexually Assaults a Woman

Of course, a big part of these movies are the "Bond Girls" -- women who somehow can't resist the charms of a vodka-soaked sociopath. The love scenes are creepy enough, but one classic actually finds Bond sexually assaulting someone.

In Goldfinger, Bond famously meets a woman named Pussy Galore, because why fucking bother giving her a real name? The "love" scene between her and Bond is one of the most uncomfortable moments in 007's 50-year history, because nothing about it seems remotely consensual. Bond corners Pussy (*sigh*) in a barn, and when she tries to leave, he grabs her. Ms. Galore understandably defends herself by judo-ing him to the floor.

Bond retaliates by throwing her to the ground, because both his authority and his manhood are being questioned.

Eventually, he lunges on top of her, and she winces at his sexual advances while he leers like a fucking madman.

This seems in stark contrast to the other Connery-era love interests, who seem utterly bedazzled by his sexiness. If anything, he's less interested in them.

Even worse, the reason Ms. Galore is immune to Bond's charms (which is hinted at in the movie, but made explicit in the book on which it is based) is that she is a lesbian. Which kind of explains her name. In the book, Pussy shows "no sexual interest in Bond until he forces himself on her."

So yeah, let's not dance around the wording of this. James Bond forced himself on this woman. You know what the great thing about Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt is? They don't rape people.

3 Casino Royale -- Bond Is Constantly Fantasizing About Raping His Girlfriend

When the Bond series was rebooted with Daniel Craig, it was a return to the gritty roots of the character as depicted in Ian Fleming's original novels, as opposed to where the movie series had gone, what with Pierce Brosnan kitesurfing across a tsunami.

Part of the reason Casino Royale worked so well was that it depicted a real relationship between Bond and his doomed love interest, Vesper Lynd. That's right, it took the producers of the Bond films over 40 years to figure out that having Bond actually care about a woman instead of treating her like a wadded-up piece of Kleenex was much more rewarding for audiences.

If we knew what he was really thinking, though, Casino Royale may not have been such a hit. In the original book, we get a window into Bond's inner monologue, in which he describes sex with Vesper as having the "sweet tang of rape." A sentence so bafflingly vile that NASA may want to find a new orange drink to give their astronauts.

He goes on to say that he "wanted to see tears and desire in her remote blue eyes and to take the ropes of her black hair in his hands and bend her long body back under his."

Jesus, even when Bond is seemingly being romantic, his insane brain wants to turn everything into a kaleidoscope of violence and brutality. If they made an Inside Out-like movie about Bond, his mindscape would look like a Hieronymus Bosch painting drenched in alcohol.

2 Live And Let Die -- Bond Has A License To Be Racist

In the first Roger Moore Bond movie, Live And Let Die, Bond squares off against Mr. Big, one of the few notable black villains in the entire series. And by "squares off," we of course mean "force feeds him a pellet that inflates his body until it bloodlessly explodes."

Up to that point, all of the villains in Bond movies had been dispatched in realistically gruesome ways (boiling chemicals, falling out of a private plane, etc.). This was the first time 007 ventured into the realm of dispensing Looney Tunes justice. At least Bond didn't use the N-word. Except he did, later, in the book Diamonds Are Forever, while thinking back on this adventure.

And remember when Bond had to face Oddjob, the mute but relentless henchmen from Goldfinger? Bond didn't only hate Oddjob because he was throwing deadly hats all over the place; he literally thought that Koreans were "lower than apes."

This is less "super-cool secret agent" and more "racist grandma after her second glass of wine."

1 Thunderball -- Bond Ditches A Dead Body With A Pleasant Young Couple

Despite sounding like a high school metal band, Thunderball is in fact a 1965 Bond adventure. At one point in the film, 007 is trapped in public by an enemy agent, and is forced to dance with her in order to prevent a chaotic outburst of violence that could injure civilians (this was in an era when dancing was an appropriate response to being cornered by an enemy of the opposite sex). Suddenly, Bond notices the agent's accomplice pointing a gun at him from behind some nearby Mardi Gras curtains.

Thinking quickly, he spins his nefarious partner around to absorb the bullet meant for his scowlingly handsome face.

Then ... Bond just keeps dancing, swinging around an obviously dead woman, Weekend At Bernie's-style. The assassin apparently only had a single bullet or was catastrophically late for an appointment, because he doesn't bother trying to shoot Bond again.

Instead of leaving her body in a dark alley or dumping it in a bathroom stall like a gentleman, Bond sits her lifeless husk down with a blissfully unaware couple and basically tells them to watch her while she "rests".

So for the rest of their lives, that couple is going to remember their delightful Bahamian vacation as the time that chuckling Scotsman dumped his murdered girlfriend at their table and walked away into history.

The only way this could possibly be any worse for that unsuspecting couple is if Bond made some kind of insidious pun as he walked away ... which of course he does.

Man, that isn't even a good pun. Fuck you, James Bond.

J.M. McNab co-hosts the pop culture nostalgia podcast Rewatchability, which can also be found on iTunes. Follow him on Twitter @Rewatchability.

And let's not forget what a rampant bigot 007 is. See what we mean in 5 Ways James Bond Was WAY More Insane In The Books. Or see why living in the same universe as this guy would be pretty unfortunate in 22 Unseen Repercussions Of The James Bond Universe.

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