Brainwashed And Crazy / Live-Action Films

---

• Played with in Angel Heart. Johnny/Harry kills several people under Satan's influence, but it's left deliberately vague whether the Devil is directly compelling him to commit the murders or if he's allowing Johnny Favourite's vile personality some freedom to indulge in these acts and Johnny is keeping Harry from finding out the truth about himself.
• Probably the most iconic example is Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, who is hypnotized into killing people in his sleep as part of a psychological experiment. Or is he?
• In Carefree (1938), Tony hypnotizes Amanda into believing she hates him and loves Stephen. Tony gives Amanda a suggestion that "men like him should be shot down like dogs." Later, Amanda grabs Stephen's skeet-shooting rifle and attempts to shoot Tony with it. It's Played for Laughs.
• In Cube Zero, Haskell is remotely reprogrammed by activating the military chip placed into his brain from when he was a soldier. He tries to kill Wynn and Rains before they escape him.
• The central plot of Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Allen and his prickly female counterpart are hypnotized at an office party. What at first seems like a simple joke (the hypnotist makes them pretend to be newlyweds on their honeymoon) is really a plot to make them rob their employer on the hypnotist's behalf. Lampshaded in that another character points out at the end that you can't make a hypnotized person do anything they don't really want to...
• The leader of the Nebulous Evil Organization in Death Machines makes it clear at the beginning of the film that the titular assassins have been brainwashed to do his bidding by way of a Psycho Serum.
• Revealed to be the reason why The Baroness was working with Destro in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
• Hardcore Henry: All of Akan's cyborg soldiers have had their memories altered in order to induce loyalty to him and Estelle.
• In The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, Peeta has been tortured and conditioned to associate Katniss with mortal danger, so upon seeing her he immediately attacks her and tries to kill her.
• Mad Max: Fury Road: The War Boys are conditioned and trained by Immortan Joe to see him as a godlike figure Back from the Dead. They believe that if they "die historic" and "shiny and chrome" in service to him, that he has the power to resurrect them in Valhalla. This makes merely wounding a War Boy an extremely dangerous prospect as they have no moral compunctions against a Suicide Attack.
• In the first The Naked Gun movie, Reggie Jackson is brainwashed to kill Queen Elizabeth II during a baseball game, and Jane Spencer is brainwashed to kill Frank Drebin. (And later in the series, she'd inflict upon him a fate worse than death: marriage.)
• In Pacific Rim: Uprising when the Shao Industries drones, which were created to replace the Jaeger program as earth's sole defense against the Precursors and their Kaiju, go haywire and start attacking the Jaeger installations, Newton "Newt" Geizler and Hermann Gotlieb investigate and try shut them down, only for "Newt", who had kept a Kaiju brain in his apartment, to reveal that he was orchestrating the return of the Kaiju to finish the job of making earth habitable for the Precursors. When Hermann tells him to not obey the precursors' commands, "Newt" says he's not strong enough to do so, and escapes to set the plan in motion.
• In Ra.One, Sonia is brainwashed by the titular villain, via a glowing ball of "electricity" to the head, and sent off at the helm of a Runaway Train.
• Scanner Cop: Various people around the city are brainwashed by the villain to respond to a hallucinatory trigger. This will make them perceive police officers as monsters and murderers so they will kill the innocent cops in what seems like self-defense.
• During one scene in the Firefly movie Serenity, River, the resident heroic Ax-Crazy and whimsical-in-the-brainpan Woobie, is exposed to a subliminal message buried in a Fruity Oaty Bars commercial. This activates River's deadly martial-arts-killing-machine programming put into her mind by the Alliance, and she proceeds to methodically wipe out a whole bar full of people, even taking down Jayne when he tries to restrain her, and is only stopped when her brother intervenes with a code-phrase in Russian that serves to put her to sleep.
• In the 1994 movie The Shadow, Shiwan Khan sends a mind-controlled Margo on a mission to kill the Shadow. The Shadow breaks her hypnotic trance after she mistakenly shoots a mirror showing his reflection. Margo realizes that, despite Khan never mentioning The Shadow's name, it was Lamont Cranston she tried to kill, because Lamont and The Shadow are one and the same. It turns out that Khan counted on her learning The Shadow's identity, though he didn't count on The Shadow not killing her to keep it a secret.
• In TRON: Legacy, Tron attempted to hold off and defeat Clu while Flynn escaped, seemingly being derezzed in the process. In actuality, Tron was brainwashed by Clu into becoming Rinzler, and evidently became a merciless killing machine until Flynn wonders what Clu did to him during the chase, in which he regains his original memories and turns against Clu.
• In Videodrome, Max eventually becomes compelled by the Videodrome tapes to murder his partners at Civic TV in cold blood. When he goes after Bianca O'Blivion, she reprograms him to kill her enemies (the people who programmed Max to become an assassin in the first place) for her.
• In the first Wishmaster, a cop wishes that a criminal who has gotten away on seven counts for a crime (not stated what kind) would just commit something that the cops could easily nail him for. The Djinn then controls his body from a distance, and causes the guy to turn into an almost-supernatural killer who immediately grabs a cop's gun and starts a shooting frenzy in the police station. He kills a half-dozen cops before he dies from his own wounds.
• The major plot point of Zoolander is that Mugatu offers Derek a trip to a "day spa" to prepare for his runway show, the spa is actually a facility where Derek is brainwashed to attack the Malaysian Prime Minister when the song "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood is played. Makes Sense In Context.

---