Ax Crazy / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

Sometimes being a Mama Bear takes you to extreme places.

Axe-Craziness in Live-Action Films.

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• Liza in 68 Kill, who turns what should have been a simple burglary into a string of murders.
• 7eventy 5ive: The killer in is both crazy and uses an axe to kill people.
• 8 Ball Clown: 8-Ball is a mentally unstable, heroin-addicted clown who can, and will, kill unsuspecting people.
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God: Don Lope de Aguirre is a mad conquistador with delusions of godhood who violently terrorizes his followers.
• Alien³: Walter Golic is by far the craziest convict. Even though he didn't kill the two inmates that the others suspect him of having murdered (the Alien did it), he is still a homicidal nutcase. When he's contained in the infirmary in a straight jacket, he turns to Ripley and suddenly reminisces about a few women he knew back home. Then he looks her in the eye and says that she's gonna die too.
• American Psycho: Patrick Bateman is a successful stockbroker by day, serial killer by night. Maybe. But regardless, he's still an incredibly crazy individual. It's no wonder why he provides the image for the trope's main page after all!
• Babes in Toyland: Played for laughs:
  Barnaby: Item 1: Kidnap Tom.
  Roderigo: * Makes throat-slitting gesture*
  Gorganzolo: No, just kidnap him.
  Barnaby: Item 2: Throw him in the sea.
  Roderigo: * Repeats gesture*
  Gorganzolo: No, just throw him in the sea!
  Barnaby: Item 3: Steal the sheep.
  Roderigo: * Stabbing motions*
  Barnaby: No, just steal them!
• At least 3 different Tannens in the Back to the Future franchise:
  • Back to the Future Part II has Griff Tannen, Biff's grandson in 2015. Doc says he has "a few short circuits in his neural implants", and he's not lying; he's even more violent than his grandfather, has No Indoor Voice, and cranks Biff's "your shoe's untied" prank up, where, instead of simply smacking Marty Jr. in the chin, he punches him across the face. He also carries a retractable baseball bat with him at all times, and is all too happy to use it.
  • Biff Tannen-A in the Bad Present of the same movie. Here, he's an absolutely nasty Corrupt Corporate Executive who turns the beautiful Hill Valley into a toxic, crime-ridden cesspool, and is able to get away with murder thanks to his crooked ties with the police and judicial system. It's how he got away with killing George McFly-A in 1973. What's more, he forced Lorraine-A to marry him and presumably raped her continuously for years; he abuses and beats her, along with the rest of "their" family. And he would have killed Marty simply for asking about Gray's Sports Almanac, if Doc hadn't arrived on the scene. He's so violent and fucked up, that Lorraine-A ends up killing him in the early 90's.
  • Buford Tannen in Back to the Future Part III tops both of them. He has a Hair-Trigger Temper that takes next to nothing to set off. He hates his nickname "Mad Dog" so much, he murders anyone who calls him that right on the spot^note Marty was lucky - he's forced into Bullet Dancing, with Buford only ready to kill him after Marty dunked a spittoon on his shirt.. His kills include 12 unnamed men (not including Indians or Chinamen), Doc Brown in an alternate past over $80, and a newspaper editor who "printed an unfavorable story about him" (or a story that Buford found unfavorable, anyways) in 1884. They just stopped keeping track of his kills at that point. He's also a borderline sadist, taking glee in attempting to hang Marty and telling Doc how it'll take 2 whole days for him to die a slow, painful death from a Dellinger gunshot (thankfully, both of them are saved by the other).
• Bad Boys (1995): Fouchet's plan seemed to involve killing everyone he encountered. His first reaction when the cops arrive at the end? Shoot his partner.
• Battle Royale: In the film adaptation, Kazuo Kiriyama shoots down several unarmed girls, grabs their megaphone and puts it to one girl's mouth so everyone within hearing distance can hear the sounds she makes as she dies. This stands in contrast to the original novel, where Kiriyama is still a dangerous killer, but he's more of a quiet sociopath than a sadistically violent lunatic.
• Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski, whose idea of settling a bowling dispute involves pulling a loaded gun on his opponent in front of everyone in the bowling alley. He later smashes up a car that he thinks belongs to a kid who he thinks stole some ransom money in a bid to intimidate him.
• Blood Pi: Amber. She starts off the movie killing her own parents, and when Agnis starts hanging more around the Omega sisters, gets madder and madder. She starts killing people associated with Omega Pi like Professor Milbern and Courtney, and the guy who raped Agnis while she was impaired.
• Blood Red Sky: Eightball is so violently crazy he can barely look at someone without stabbing them, much to the other terrorists' chagrin. He is so crazy in fact, he extracts some of Nadja's blood and intentionally injects himself with it.
• In Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel, Eugene Hunt is a stockbroker and by all outward appearances a normal person but who under the cover of night goes on a killing rampage after he acquires a .44 Magnum from a robber whom the protagonist, rookie cop Megan Turner, shoots early in the film. By the final act of the film he has gone completely ballistic and shoots and kills Megan's friend and later sneaks into her house, strips himself completely naked and brutally rapes her shortly after she has consensual sex with a fellow officer.
• Blue Velvet: Frank Booth is one of the most memorably profane and sadistic psychopaths ever put to film. He will murder, mutilate or batter at the slightest provocation. Merely being in the same room as him is a hazard in itself.
• Body Bags: The killer in the first segment is an escaped mental patient who slaughters people because he's either insane or just enjoys murder. Or both.
• Caligula: The title character. Tiberius also gets a couple of moments.
  Tiberius: Do you think this boy has drunk enough wine?
  Caligula: I think he's drunk enough, Lord.
  Tiberius: So do I! *kills drunk man* Now he is happy.
• Alan Yates and practically all the crew in Cannibal Holocaust are nuts, especially Alan.
• Cape Fear: Max Cady (especially De Niro's version) from both versions. He's a serial rapist who will stop at nothing to make the life of the lawyer who failed to prevent him from doing time a living hell.
• Casino: Nicky Santoro might count, despite being an Anti-Villain. Despite having clear restraints, he is still willing to violently beat and torture people if it's needed or he's angered. Though he's based on a real life gangster.
• Cemetery Man. When the Grim Reaper tells you to kill people, you kill people.
• Child's Play: Chucky is a foul-mouthed Jerkass serial killer possessing a doll, who in every film murders anyone he can, using whatever weapon he can get his little hands on, laughing like a maniac while doing so and insulting them. The only people he doesn’t try to kill are people who he wants to possess or use for his own ends.
• A Clockwork Orange: Alex DeLarge, an extremely intelligent but absolutely devoid of conscience psychopath, who lives only to commit random acts of, as he calls it, "ultra-violence".
• Cloud Atlas: Bill Smoke, Henry Goose, Dermot Hoggins, and the Kona tribe.
• Irina in The Con is On leaves a string of bodies behind her. She kills one man for assuming she is a waitress: showing no more emotion than if she had just swatted a fly.
• Conjoined: Alisa, the conjoined twin of Alina, is prone to fits of murdering people, and tends to fall into fits of mad laughter whenever she does so.
• The Crazy Family: In the second half of the movie, Everyone goes Ax-Crazy
• Crimson Peak: Lucille Sharpe killed one of her parents with a cleaver, and one of them with poison, when she was just a teenager. They were horrifically abusive parents, though, so she was sent to an asylum instead of prosecuted for the crimes. However, it's implied that the asylum just made her worse. When she gets out, she becomes a multiple murderer, killing her brother's wives and their remaining family in order to make off with their fortunes. After she kills her brother for falling in love with someone else, though, she loses the last hold on her sanity, and keeps screaming at the main character that she won't stop until one of them is dead while rushing her with a cleaver.
• The Dark Crystal: SkekZok, the Ritual-Master, is the first to suggest killing Kira when she is captured and is the one who stabs her to death.
• The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  • Mr. Zsasz from Batman Begins. Though he's pretty quiet during his small amount of screen time, the tie-in video game displays him as very much so. It is hinted in the movie as well, since he has some of the tally mark scars he cuts on himself every time he kills someone in the comics. Also, he comes at Rachel and a young boy with a knife in the Narrows when the Narrows are flooded with fear gas.
  • The Joker from The Dark Knight. True to his twisted behavior, Joker is a horrific Sadist who's very open to the idea of senseless violence, and frequently kills or tries to kill people over petty excuses or just For the Evulz. When he's searched by the police, they find a whole lot of things that are already knives.
  Joker: "Guns are too quick. You can't savor all the... little emotions. In... you see, in their last moments, people show you who they really are. So in a way, I know your friends better than you ever did. Would you like to know which of them were cowards?"
  • Bane from The Dark Knight Rises is rampantly homicidal and very good at hiding it. Among his brutal violence, Berserker behavior, extreme sadism, and willingness to kill millions of people, there is something definitely off with him.
• Dawn of the Dead (1978): Wooley just runs around the apartment building in the beginning of the movie shooting everybody in sight, whether they were zombified or not. He was so out of control, the SWAT had no choice but to kill him.
• Death Warrant:
  • The Sandman is a psychotic serial killer who murdered people for fun. Near the climax, he releases all the prisoners from their cells to watch them cause mayhem.
  • The two cons who worked together with the warden to kill prisoners and silence anyone who might expose seem to be in it more out of sadism than any profit.
• Demolition Man: Simon Phoenix, who can be described as Heath Ledger's Joker as played by Wesley Snipes. In fact, he's so bent on murder and mayhem, that it's the main reason John Spartan detects something fishy is going on with Dr. Cocteau, since Phoenix hesitates to kill him, when he never, never hesitates to kill.
• The Departed: Frank Costello is established as this early on when he and French execute a man and woman on a beach.
  Costello: Jesus... she fell funny. (starts chuckling)
  Mr. French: Frank, I really think you ought to see somebody.
• The Descent: Sarah turns into this over the course of the movie. Differs from many examples in that it wasn't a random attack so much as the Ax Crazy making her act on her motivations. Alternately, the movie purposely left open the possibility that she had imagined the creatures and it was really just her slaughtering all her friends. Which would make her much more Ax Crazy, and throughout the whole movie. Only in the Revised Ending, though. In the original ending, there's an additional scene which shows her about to be killed by the very-much-not-imaginary creatures while hallucinating that she's back with her dead daughter.
• The Devil's Candy: Murderous lunatic Ray, who says Satan is telling him to kill children, because the are the devil's...
• Devil in the Flesh: Debbie is a Yandere who kills numerous people and tries to kill her teacher's wife (she has an intense crush on her teacher).
• Dirty Harry: The Scorpio Killer fits this trope in spades. He's a sadistic Serial Killer who kills his victims at random. He goes so far as to bury a young girl alive and threatens to let her die unless he can talk to Harry. When he meets Harry, he says he's decided to let the girl die anyway and tries to kill Harry.
• Django Unchained: While Calvin Candie is a sadistic sociopath, at first, when we know him, seems polite, calm and sophisticated. However, when he learns what Django really wants to do, he has a severe Villainous Breakdown and shows his true violent and psychotic nature with his hammer.
• Dog Eat Dog: Mad Dog has extremely poor impulse control and is prone to outbursts of extreme violence, to the point he murdered his own family in a fit of rage. He actually is aware that he's a monster, and genuinely wants to change, but he's killed by Diesel before he can make any headway.
• D.O.A.: Chester enjoys hurting people. He especially relishes the gutshot, since it kills people nice...and slow.
• Dollars Trilogy:
  • A Fistful of Dollars: Ramon Rojo is extremely obsessed with a woman, is widely paranoid, and tortures and kills in cold blood. He is a dangerous psychopath and makes a Slasher Smile during many of their massacres.
  • For a Few Dollars More: El Indio is what would happen if you dropped The Joker into The Wild West. The man rapes, murders and robs without any remorse or pity, commits violent acts spontaneously and enthusiastically For the Evulz, is an Straw Nihilist, and laughs all the way through.
  • The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Angel Eyes/Sentenza ("The Bad") is a very subtle example. He rarely loses his composure, however, notice his maniacal cackle after killing Baker. He is also incredibly sociopathic and sadistic, to the extent that he forces soldiers to play music while other soldiers are tortured.
• Dredd: Ma-Ma is a little more subdued than others but her first act in the film is to order three rival dealers skinned alive and thrown off a 200-foot balcony, after giving them a hit of Slo-Mo to slow their perception of time and drag it out even longer. It's even stated that she has an M.O. for maximum violence.
• The Kodiak bear in The Edge obsessively stalks Bob and Charles, brutally ripping Stephen to shreds and is determined to do the same to them, despite the fact that there must surely be other game around for him to feats on. Apparently the men getting stranded and consequently wandering into his territory really pissed him off.
• Elysium: Kruger is crazy enough that he uses his goddamn katana to cook food with. What makes him one of the most batshit insane villains yet is his horrifying reputation for being a human-rights violator and for having a very bad habit of blowing people up, going as far as calling an injury that he inflicts on those who get in the way "a flesh wound", before blowing them to chunks. And once he finds out Delacourt's "classified info" was a total system reboot for Elysium, he decides to kill Delacourt and get the data himself to turn Elysium into his personal hell.
• Depraved Homosexual Tony in The Escapist. Lenny Drake, a boxer with a Hair-Trigger Temper, also borders on this at times.
• Fargo: Geaer Grimsrud is set off into murderous rages by seemingly the slightest things. In fact, in one scene he actually uses an ax.
• Fatal Attraction: Alex, although she doesn't seem like it at first, becomes an extremely deranged version of your typical Stalker with a Crush.
• Fight Club: Tyler Durden. He is brutal, unpredictable, sadistic, very open to murder, a Mad Bomber, commits brutal acts randomly, and is generally a Straw Nihilist who lives a life of pure hedonism.
• Friday the 13th: In the first installment, Pamela Voorhees goes on a murderous rampage against the consuelors of Crystal Lake Camp, holding them responsible for the death of her son Jason. Jason himself picks off where she left in the sequels.
• Full Metal Jacket: Pvt. Pyle suffers a massive mental breakdown and becomes this due to the abuse of Sgt. Hartman and the bullying of his fellow recruits. He ends up killing Sgt. Hartman before turning the gun on himself.
• Gamer: Hackman is a mountainous inmate who enjoys killing way, way too much. Lampshaded when Kable notes that he really isn't right in the head when Hackman comes to boast about killing another prisoner.
• Gangster No. 1: Gangster is not quite right in the head and his preferred weapon is a hatchet. He certainly fits the bill.
• G.I. Joe: Retaliation: Firefly, the Mad Bomber and Demolitions Expert of Cobra.
• Godzilla:
  • Okay, he's not human or anything close to it, but Godzilla's adversary Gigan is an excellent example. A forty-storey Psycho for Hire, Gigan is best remembered by the fanbase for looking badass, having scythes—and subsequently chainsaws—for hands, and his clear enjoyment in slowly carving chunks off of his opponents. In a series defined by giant monsters stomping all over Japan, Gigan is one of the few who is obviously getting a kick out of it, and his very deliberate sadism makes his sanity rather questionable, even by this franchise's standards. Plus, anyone who puts a buzzsaw in their chest has got to be a lunatic.
  • It doesn't matter what King Ghidorah is supposed to be doing, who's in charge of him this film, or who he has to fight - King Ghidorah will always do two things: destroy anything he can get his heads on, and laugh like a maniac the entire time.
• GoodFellas:
  • Tommy De Vito is a sadistic mobster liable to open fire at the slightest provocation, irritation, or inconvenience. He also murdered Billy Batts in an extremely brutal way. Pesci had trouble playing the role because he could not understand a character who reacted violently to everything. This was particularly true of the scene where Tommy kills Spider. From Pesci's perspective (or any other sane person for that matter), having someone that you've been ragging on telling you to go fuck yourself was no big deal. He finally decided that Tommy would simply not be able to understand that Jimmy rewarding Spider and asking Tommy if he was going to let Spider get away with it was all meant in jest, instead choosing to see it as a insult.
  • Jimmy Conway is a very subtle example. We rarely ever see him lose his cool demeanor, and he comes off as a rational individual. Then the corpses of nearly everyone who participated in the Luftansa Heist start popping off everywhere.
• A Good Woman is Hard to Find: Leo is very unstable and his solution to virtually every problem is violence. When Sarah shows up with Tito's severed head, even he and his mooks are taken aback and decide she's a "psycho."
• Grandmother's House: The woman in the blue dress reveals herself to be murderously insane sometime after she wakes up in the trunk. On of the first things she does is attack the kids.
• All of the ghosts in The Gravedancers. Their only goal is to violently destroy those who desecrated their graves. It is literally true in the case Emma who was an axe murderer when she was alive, and uses an axe as her weapon when she comes back from the dead.
• Grosse Pointe Blank: Dan Aykroyd's character Grocer manages to come off as Affably Evil until the climactic firefight, where it becomes immediately obvious that he's batshit insane.
• Halloween: Michael is somewhat of a subversion, in that he is more calm and quiet than crazy, but is still a cold-blooded homicidal maniac without conscience who is driven to kill.
• A Haunting at Silver Falls: Jack, from the sequel, is a cruel murderer who attacks rather indiscriminately. At first, it seems that he's doing it because it keeps him from being haunted by Anne, but after Anne is defeated for good, he continues to torture Jordan's friends until being killed as well. It's clear that he's not only unstable, but that he does enjoy killing for killing's sake.
• Inglourious Basterds: Hugo Stiglitz is a lesser, 'heroic' example, having violently stabbed 13 Gestapo officers to death. The Basterds themselves are also this in the same vein as the aforementioned character.
• The Irishman: Tony Pro. Part of Hoffa's problem with him is his tendency for violence despite being a member of the Union. He once had a Teamsters brother killed simply for running against him as Local 560 President.
• Hard Boiled: Johnny Wong, the leader of a Hong Kong weapon smuggling ring, is a ruthless gangster with no qualms about gunning down in cold blood anyone who stands in his way, including helpless hospital patients.
• The Hitcher: John Ryder is one of the most chilling and disturbing examples. A completely insane Serial Killer who kills for fun. He will make you think twice before you give a hitch hiker a ride.
• The Hitch-Hiker: Meyers is completely unstable. He has no remorse and thinks that being a real man means being a killer.
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1: The Capitol 'hijacks' Peeta into becoming violent and unpredictable.
• In the movie Infini a bio-agent infects a search and rescue crew and turns them all violently insane, driving them to kill each other. Turns out it's trying to find out who among them is the strongest so it can evolve.
• Jack the Giant Slayer: Wicke comes off as just slightly unhinged during a lot of his screen time. Whenever Roderick gives him the cue to either kill someone or that he's going to do it himself, he reacts with glee and excitement, and when that's not happening, he's usually trembling and/or smiling eagerly about doing whatever it is they're planning to do next.
• James Bond:
  • From Russia with Love: Donald "Red" Grant is a ruthless SPECTRE hitman who pulls off a number of successful assassinations throughout the film without so much as a grimace, and is described by his superiors as a "homicidal paranoic". We later learn how much he really enjoys his job when he holds Bond at gunpoint and taunts him about how he's going to torture him, even though that would ruin SPECTRE's plan to fake Bond's suicide.
    Grant: The first one won't kill you, nor the second, nor even the third. Not 'till you crawl over here and you kiss my foot!
  • A View to a Kill: Max Zorin is really enjoying himself when he is gunning down his employees near the climax. And by the end of the film, he's completely lost all of his sanity to the point of using a literal ax to try and hack Bond to death, all while cackling like an evil and insane homicidal maniac.
  • Licence to Kill: Dario◊; The youthful main henchman◊ of the drug cartel kingpin, Sanchez. Dario is a handsome but monstrous young man who was so extreme that even The Contras kicked him out. He personally cut the heart out of the man Sanchez's girlfriend was sleeping with, implied to have raped and murdered the wife of Bond's friend (the latter who had his legs eaten off by a shark) and who just loves to cause gruesome mayhem with a creepy giggle◊ and a Slasher Smile.
  • GoldenEye: Xenia Onatopp is a Psycho for Hire for the Janus Syndicate who actually derives sexual pleasure from the act of killing. Her favourite murder method is asphyxiating men between her Murderous Thighs while having sex, and she practically orgasms when gunning down unarmed technicians at the Severnaya facility.
  • Quantum of Solace: Dominic Green becomes this towards the end when James ruins his plans and destroys his facility, at which point, he completely snaps and uses an actual axe to try and chop Bond into pieces, all while screaming like a complete lunatic.
• Jaws: The sharks from the Jaws movies are far more aggressive and destructive than great white sharks normally are.
• Johan Falk: Seth Rydell is a more subtle example. He appears rather calm and collected than characters of this trope tend to be, but throughout the film-series he commits many very violent acts often for petty reasons. The best examples are: In the very first film he appears in, he has his gang brutally beat a gang-member to death for merely doing business on his own; assaulting another gang-member out of a suspicion that he might've talked to the police (which turned out to be false); and kidnapping a rival-gangster and tries to blackmail him by pouring gasoline over him and then setting him on fire for being cocky instead of talking.
• Juice: Bishop, as the film reaches its climax.
• As Julia X progresses, the depths of Jessica's insanity become more obvious. She abducts Sam and plans to murder him for no reason. She fatally stabs Julia with a pair of scissors, and makes a frenzied attack on The Stranger, stabbing him multiple times in the chest.
• Kill Bill:
  • Elle Driver is a venomous, hateful, Rival Turned Evil who distinguishes herself from the other ruthless killers of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad by being the most evil and malicious member.
  • Gogo is simply a violent, sadistic sociopath who, quoting The Bride, "Makes up for her young age with madness."
• L.A. Confidential: Dudley Smith is a very subdued and disturbing example. He never loses his cool demeanor, and he comes off as a rational individual. However, he's a sadistic, murderous sociopath who enjoys killing and torturing.
• Last Action Hero: Ripper, a fairly generic ax-murderer, is one of the antagonists. The fact that he's a hulking, semicoherent clone of every other Ax Crazy slasher on film is surely deliberate, as he's a fictional character from a rather trite series of lowbrow action flicks.
• The Last Boy Scout: Milo is outwardly calm and collected, but he's a violent psychopath who casually and repeatedly guns people down for the bare minimum of reasons. He gets progressively angrier and more unhinged as Joe repeatedly outwits him throughout the film until he has a full-blown Villainous Breakdown and starts firing at everything in sight.
• Lizzie Borden's Revenge: It is a film about Lizzie Borden. The axe-craziness can be taken as read.
• Lord of War: Andre Baptiste Jr. is known as a cannibal, and he shoots civilians for sport. His father as well, as he callously shoots one of his own men for even looking sideways towards his woman. They're both usually more restrained, though.
• The Loved Ones: Lola. She has Brent kidnapped and tortured because he turned down her offer to go to prom with her, as he already had a girlfriend, and she has a lot of Parental Incest Subtext with her father, who helps her in her schemes. It's also made clear that she's been doing this for a long time and enjoys it.
• Madhouse (2004): Clark Stevens becomes this at the end of the movie .
• Man Bites Dog: Benoit is a completely unpredictable Serial Killer. His crimes are sometimes motivated by money, but they are generally completely random. At his birthday party for example he's ecstatic about trying his presents... and shoots one of the attendees in the head without warning. He then continues enjoying the party like if nothing happened.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Iron Man: Obadiah Stane at the end of the movie. He tries to kill Pepper and starts a violent rampage. He's willing to kill anyone, even children.
  • The Incredible Hulk (2008): After Emil Blonsky transforms into The Abomination, his Blood Knight tendencies push him off the deep end and goes on a destructive rampage.
  • The Avengers (2012): Loki, the main villain, announces his arrival on Earth by killing a bunch of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents with the evil spear of doom that Thanos gave him. He proceeds to kill many more people over the course of the movie. In addition to his violent behavior, though, it's a sign that someone has to be particularly mentally unstable when Bruce Banner, a man with a super-powered alter ego and serious anger-management issues, describes him by saying that his mind is a bag of cats and you can smell the crazy on him.
  • Ultron from Avengers: Age of Ultron is pretty ax crazy, too. His behavior, if possible, is even more erratic than Loki's, who may have been acting on outright delusions at some points. This is especially true after Ultron decides to give up trying to improve humanity, and instead tries to destroy it.
    • Is that honestly ax crazy or just the horror of machine logic? After all, machines with sufficient intelligence deciding humanity needs to be wiped out for the greater good due to its negative characteristics is practically a trope in itself.
  • Thanos takes this even further than both Ultron and Loki. While outwardly calmer and more respectful than Loki and Ultron, he's been killing on a planetary scale for a very long period of time, and his ultimate goal is to use the considerable power of the Infinity Stones to kill half of the universe, which drives the plot of Avengers: Infinity War. His 2014 self in Endgame is even worse, being a lunatic who wishes to completely destroy everything to rebuild it anew after discovering that the surviving half of the universe would not simply let his actions go undone.
• Masquerade (2021): The male burglar is established as violent almost immediately when he bludgeons Sofia to death with a hammer, repeatedly striking her until the floor is covered in blood. His female accomplice is clearly horrified, even though her face is mostly concealed.
  Woman: Stop it. Stop! This is not part of the plan.
  Man: It's changed.
• Matilda adds a good dose of Ax Crazy to the Trunchbull in addition to her cruel treatment of her students. The first thing she does when she suspects intruders in her house? She bull-charges from room to room, leaps down from the second floor, bringing down her chandelier in the process, and eventually starts swinging an Olympic hammer around and randomly smashing it into her possessions.
• Menace II Society: O-Dog will murder anyone without much provocation.
• Mortuary (1983): Paul, once he's revealed to be the killer, starts acting more erratic and kill-happy.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger killed children for fun before he bought it, and then he became a dream-haunting ghost who has even more fun killing teenagers. Bad sense of humor, too.
• The Night of the Hunter: Harry Powell. Despite his calm, collected demeanor, he's a serial killing lunatic.
• No Country for Old Men: Anton Chigurh has his reasons, and he's more coldly logical than crazy. He does, however, have one of the primary traits of a true Ax-Crazy, which is the immense amount of danger involved in engaging with him.
• No Escape (1994): Merek and the Outsiders are a violent group making up the majority among the convicts, who wage constant war on the more peaceful, civilized Insiders for no particular reason (except presumably them having something to do).
• Once Upon a Time in the West: Frank is a very subtle example, since we rarely ever see him lose his cool demeanor. However, he's a sadistic Psycho for Hire with a very twisted, morbid viewpoint of his actions: He states that "people scare better when they are dying".
• Esther (or better said, Leena Klammer) from Orphan. As stated by Dr. Värava, Leena was the most violent patient in the mental hospital, always trying to hurt the other patients and staff, resulting in the majority of her time being spent in a straitjacket. Her signature scars came from trying to break out of it.
• The Professional: Norman Stansfield has the habit of murdering families while humming Beethoven, in fits of drug-induced lunacy (though it doesn't help that he is also a death obsessed psychopath). Imagine Alex DeLarge if he were a DEA agent.
• The Proposition: Arthur Burns is a well read and very deep Warrior Poet...who just happens to have a penchant for gang-rape and mass murder.
• Psycho: Norman Bates, when the mother side of his personality is in control, brutally stabbing anyone she needs to kill over and over again.
• Rambo: John Rambo himself has shades of it in the first movie. One time, he mistakes a kid out hunting game for one of the officers pursuing him and Rambo has to force himself to let the kid go. Col. Trautman himself lampshades this during the climax where he accuses Rambo of having wanted to initiate a fight from the beginning. And overall, he's a traumatized shell of a man, unable to feel anything in the midst of atrocities.
• Red Eye: Rippner tries to kill Lisa's dad and Lisa and herself during his Villainous Breakdown following Lisa stabbing a pen through his neck.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera has Luigi Largo. He's been described as walking around with a flask and a knife, drinking and stabbing anything that gets in his way, including his own employees. He's also tried to strangle his brother in 'Mark It Up'.
  I'm the smartest and the toughest!
  I will find a hole and fuck it!
  If there ain't one, I will make one!
  Luigi don't take shit from no one!
• Reservoir Dogs: Mr. Blonde/Vic Vega, while certainly being the embodiment of cool, is a sadistic monster who nonchalantly murders and tortures innocent people for the hell of it while dancing to catchy tunes on the radio. Let's just say, the scene he is most famous for is a classic case of crossing the Moral Event Horizon.
• Retroactive: Frank is unhinged and homicidal, and doesn't need much prompting to go on a destructive rampage. Discussed when Brain mentions that he thought Frank was obnoxious, but didn't expect him to be an insane psychopath.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Never steal Dr. Frank N Furter's spotlight while he's holding a pickaxe. It may be the last thing you do. Meat loaf, anyone? He can also be pretty intimidating with an electric carving knife.
• A Room For Romeo Brass: Morrell appears to be just a lonely eccentric, but he soon reveals his true colours when he threatens a disabled boy with a knife for a harmless practical joke that made him appear foolish in front of the woman he is obsessively fixated upon, threatens to kill the boy's family, and then threatens to kill the boy's best friend (and brother of the object of his lust) when the woman rejects him. However, compared to several of the others on this list he's an unusually laughable and ultimately rather pathetic example; his attempt to make good on his threats is put in its place when the best friend's estranged father — who hasn't taken any of Morrell's shit throughout the movie — charges in, gives Morrell a good kicking and sends him skulking away with his tail between his legs and the promise that, if the boy's father ever sets eyes on him again, he'll be the one who ends up dead.
• The Salton Sea: Pooh-Bear is both crazy and extremely dangerous. For instance, he nearly castrates the protagonist out of paranoia and because it's amusing to him.
• Scanners II: The New Order: Peter Drak is a telepathic psychopathic murderer whose only joy is killing people.
• In Scare Campaign, Rohan is the 'stooge' the crew bring to the abandoned psychiatric hospital to prank him by convincing him that the building is haunted. However, Rohan turns out to be a former inmate of the hospital who snaps and starts murdering the crew; even coming after Emma with an actual axe. Except 'Rohan' is actually an actor, and is part of an elaborate set-up to prank Emma and the murders are fake. The real murders start later.
• Scarface (1983):
  • Hector the Toad, who forces Tony to see his friend Angel dismembered with a chainsaw.
  • Tony Montana himself is a milder case. Although while his growing addiction to drugs increases, he gets increasingly aggressive and violent.
• Schindler's List: Amon Goeth, the ruthless SS commander who oversees the extermination of the Krakow Ghetto, definitely counts. His first scene in the movie shows him using the prisoners in his concentration camp as target practice. He gets way worse from there. And worst of all, it's all Truth in Television — the real Goeth was one of the most evil Nazis to ever live, who did all of this and worse things to his victims during the Holocaust.
• Se7en: John Doe, an extremely vicious Serial Killer who bases his murders on the Seven Deadly Sins.
• The Shining: Jack Torrance is a strangely sympathetic example, as we witness him get more and more delusional and alienated from his family. But when he finally goes off the deep end into crazytown, oh boy do we know it, and Jack Nicholson plays it as over the top as he can, terrorizing and going after his wife with an axe.
• Shrooms: Tara, after she is driven crazy by the death bell mushroom. For bonus, she uses an axe to commit most of her murders.
• The Silence of the Lambs:
  • Hannibal Lecter is a cannibalistic serial killer, although a rather polite one. He escapes from his cage bludgeons his captors to death with a cool, detached expression on his face. He's the Villain Protagonist of the sequel, where he actually cuts off his own hand in order to escape at the end. Anthony Hopkins himself would be the first person to tell you that the guy's crazy.
    "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and A Glass of Chianti. *hisses*"
  • Buffalo Bill tries to build a suit from the skin of the women he murders because he thinks that wearing it will help him become female.
• Single White Female: From the number of people whom Heddy kills and impersonates she certainly seems to fall under the Axe Crazy heading.
• Slaughter High: Marty is driven insane after his disfigurement in a Deadly Prank in high school. Years later he stages a Reunion Revenge and kills his tormentors in a variety of brutal and inventive ways that involve acid, electricity, a sword, a javelin, a lawnmower...
• Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers and Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland — The almost perpetually chipper and cheerful Angela Baker . Originally a kind of puritanical killer she just degenerated into killing for the sake of killing after a while.
  Angela Baker: I've never chopped wood before, but I've chopped other things!
• Snow White & the Huntsman: Queen Ravenna. Other versions have always been self-centered, vain, and downright cruel, but this version will kill anyone who defies her without a second thought. Plus the implication that she's killed plenty of kings in the past.
• Spider-Man: Far From Home: Quentin Beck was once fired by Tony Stark for being "unstable". Judging from Mysterio's overall behavior throughout the film, it's highly likely that Iron Man wasn't wrong...
• Star Trek:
  • First Contact:
    • Picard, after being confronted with the decision to destroy the Enterprise or to continue fighting a near-hopeless battle against the Borg.
    • The Borg drone that was originally Lieutenant Hawk is noticeably aggressive and murderous, as he attempts to kill Picard outright rather than assimilate him.
  • Star Trek (2009): Captain Nero wakes up in the morning looking for new shit to blow up. And with advanced tech from the future, he can actually accomplish this. Sometimes he switches it up a little and becomes a Bladed Romulan Sceptre Crazy, instead.
• The Stepfather: The eponymous killer, whose sanity is shaky at the best of times, goes from perfect All-American dad to a ranting attacker who beats people to death with a wooden board or stabs them in them in the face with a rake at the drop of a hat.
• Taxi Driver:
  • The psychopathic passenger played by Martin Scorsese is likely one, he even claims to be it. "You must think I'm pretty sick, right?" (and laughs).
  • Travis Bickle acquires a few traces of this throughout the film, going on a murderous rampage by the end.
• Total Recall (1990): Benny becomes this after being revealed as The Mole, chasing Quaid and Melina with a huge drilling machine while mocking them.
• Tough Guys: Leon Little is a hitman who's been waiting thirty years for Harry and Archie to get out of jail so he can kill them, even though his employer has been dead for most of that time. Leon expresses regret that he didn't shoot Richie after knocking him unconscious in a hostage situation. When he's forced into an Enemy Mine situation with Harry and Archie during the train robbery, he suggests wrecking the train for the fun of it.
• Transformers (2007): Bonecrusher hates axes. They're nice for hurting things he hates more, though.
• Transporter 2: Trigger-Happy Lola, the villain's Dragon. "Actually, my problem's not medical. It's psychological." (shoots the nurse.) And a few moments later: "What seems to be the problem?" "Me." (yet another burst of gunfire.)
• Trick or Treats: Malcolm loses his marbles in the films climax, having mistaken Linda for his ex-wife Joan and gotten rather kill-happy.
• John Candy's titular character in Uncle Buck pretends to be this to scare his niece's boyfriend Bug.
• In the climax of Under the Bed, the monster stops trying to be subtle, and goes on a rampage through the house to get to Neal and Paulie.
• Universal Soldier (1992): Sgt. Andrew Scott goes bonkers in 'Nam and murders his squad and a whole Vietnamese village, making for himself a necklace made from the ears of his victims before he is stopped by Lt. Luc Deveraux, who also dies in the process. After dying and being turned into an Universal Soldier, he eventually recovers his memories and returns to his old, murderous habits to persue his vendetta against Deveraux, who has also been turned into an UniSol
• Versus: The Yakuza with the Green Shirt (Kenji Mastuda) from Kitamura's seems to be utterly and completely unable to be serious or show any signs of normalcy through the movie; he constantly makes faces and sounds, laughs like a maniac, screams and overall draws attention to himself by simply being a nutjob in every scene where he's present.
• In The War Lord (1965), Draco ends up becoming mad enough to attempt to kill his brother Chrysagon out of the jealousy-fuelled years he spent in his shadow in addition to the Parental Favoritism of their father towards Chrysagon.
• The Watcher: David Allen Griffin when he is about to kill his victims becomes very quiet and focused on killing, getting great pleasure out of doing so.
• What Keeps You Alive: Jackie turns out to be a ruthless sociopath who attempts to murder Jules (as she did prior wives) and later also casually murders her neighbors after they find out.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit:
  • Judge Doom is for the most part, a calm, cool, and collected version. Then after he gets flattened he loses it and tries to kill Eddie in incredibly sadistic ways while letting Toon Town be wiped off the map.
  • Also from the film is one of Doom's weasel henchmen Psycho, who is always seen carrying a razor while in a straitjacket and has Wingding Eyes.
• Winterskin: Agnes is revealed to be this as the movie goes on, being a Yandere to Billy, and a Serial Killer who likes skinning her victims.
• X-Men Film Series
  • While flinging fireballs at the cops in X2: X-Men United, Pyro starts to get a grin on his face and enjoy himself.
  • Jean Grey as the Dark Phoenix in X-Men: The Last Stand.
  • Victor Creed from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, has a bloodlust that only mindless battle seems to satisfy.
  • Viper from The Wolverine.
  • All of them combined have absolutely nothing on X-24 from Logan. He's an evil clone of Wolverine, if he had the mindset of a rabid attack dog and was completely stripped of his sanity and morality. In fact, X-24 is so murderously psychotic and feral, he can't even speak in coherent sentences.
    • Donald Pierce deserves an honorable mention. He's a sadistic and heartless mercenary who has no problem using torture, murder, or any other amoral crime to get what he wants, even if his victims are usually children.

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