Half The Man He Used To Be / Live-Action Films

• Bishop survives being torn horizontally in half by the Alien Queen in Aliens. Being a robot with no vital organs kinda helped in the survival process.
• Happens to a lot of victims in Atomic Shark, most notably to some guy on a water-jet-propelled flyboard. The initial strike removes his upper half, but the jets keeps his lower body up in the air until the shark returns for a second helping.
• The titular character in Axeman tries to kill Doug this way. It doesn't work, so he hacks the poor sap to death instead.
• In The Banana Splits Movie, Thadd gets brutally sawed in half by Fleegle as a "magic trick", while his fianceé Poppy is Forced to Watch. We see the gory aftermath when Fleegle opens the box and shows it to Poppy.
• Bangkok Dangerous 2008: When Joe fights an Elite Mook and takes out said mook by shoving a grenade into his belt before slamming him into a wall. The mook gets ripped into half from the waist by the subsequent explosion in a rather messy and gory way.
• In The Beekeeper, Clay pulls an Elevator Failure on a bunch of heavily-armed goons who tried to pursue him through an elevator, and they rush to get out before the mini-bomb detonates and sends the lift plummetting to the ground floor. The unluckiest of them is sliced in half when caught between the falling elevator and the threshold.
• In Beetlejuice, a woman in the afterlife waiting room is separated at the waist, but still able to move both parts of her body. (An example of Jacob Marley Apparel that is common in the film. Apparently, she'd been a magician's assistant in a 'sawed in half' trick gone wrong.) A hilarious scene involving her is shown at the end of the movie when the title character strokes her leg, and her upper half — who is "sitting" on the other side of him — angrily hits him with a magazine.
• The Black Demon: The two workers left at the offshore rig dive underwater. One comes up in one piece. As for the other, Paul tries to pull him out of the water, not realizing the megalodon has chewed off his lower body.
• Happens to a Delta in Black Hawk Down when his lower body gets blown off by a Somali RPG. Though he's played by Kim Coates so it's not that surprising.
• Subverted in the finale of Blade (1998) when Blade chops Deacon Frost in half, but the upper body only separates a few inches before his vampire god powers (and a lot of blood) pull the parts back together again.
• Also done to a vampire in Blade II, except this cut was vertical, and it successfully killed the vampire.
• Blood Surf: John is bitten in half by the crocodile, and still dangling from the roof of the engine room when he dies.
• Botched: After Dimitry is Caught in a Snare, Alex cuts him in half at the waist with a sword.
• The Bride With White Hair: The titular Bride wields a razor-sharp whip, which can slice people into chunks. A mook gets hit at waist level and becomes two halves instantly.
• Call of the Undead: At one point, two people are trying to get into the rapist/murderer's house to get away from some zombies, one of which is crawling towards them, missing its lower half.
• In Captains Courageous: It happens when the Portuguese fisherman suffers an accident while deep sea fishing. Because he was submerged up to his neck in the ocean, his wounds were not visible. He announced his predicament through an interpreter, so the boy he had been taking care of wouldn't know how bad it was.
• Happens to Talen when he is rammed by the eponymous car at the end of The Car: Road to Revenge. His upper half is lying inside the car, cut off at the windscreen, while his lower half sprawls on the road and is run over.
• Variant: In The Cell, a horse is split into a sequence of slabs by the descending glass plates of a deathtrap. As it's a Journey to the Center of the Mind sequence, the horse's various sections remain alive.
• In Cemetery Gates, Ed the Fisherman is cut in half at the waist by a single swipe of Precious' claws.
• Children of the Corn:
  • Scarecrow Earl in the third film is defeated when he is cut in half from his waist.
  • Doc in the fourth film is cut in half when a possessed hospital gurney (that produces a switchblade) rams on him.
  • Isaac punishes Rachel for her treachery in the sixth film by cleaving her in half vertically with a machete.
• In Clash of the Titans (2010), Calibos rips an Argosian soldier in half with his bare hands.
• Hud in Cloverfield. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment but if you watch closely, the monster swallows his legs, letting the upper body fall to the ground.
• In La Comunidad Domínguez gets crunched in two when he tries to get out of an elevator that is breaking down, afterwards he loses his grip and the upper side of his body falls down the elevator shaft.
• Happens twice in Creep Van.
  • At the beginning, some teenager tries sneaking into the van through an open window, which shuts while he's halfway through it, slicing him in half.
  • Later, after a woman delivers a beat down to a Jerkass mechanic, the van smashes her against a wall, which crushes her in half.
• Damien: Omen II features a man being cut in half at the waist by an elevator cable.
• This occurs by way of subway train to a rapist in Daredevil (2003). Urich observes the police carting away "Jose Quesada... and the rest of Jose Quesada."
• Darkest Sword: The main villain of this Taiwanese wuxia is halved from the waist by the titular weapon, an Absurdly Sharp Blade that earlier on slices a tree vertically in half.
• In Deadpool 2, this happens to Wade by a freshly-released Juggernaut.
  Deadpool: OH MY GOD! I CAN'T FEEL MY LEGS! I CAN'T FEEL— oh, they're right here.
• Three of the victims in Deep Blue Sea (Russel Franklin, Tom Scoggins, and Susan McAlester) are bitten in half by the sharks before being eaten.
• This happens to a Mook in Die Hard with a Vengeance; there's a brief shot of the cable slicing him in two, and then we see the two heroes drag the corpse away side by side, one holding his wrists and the other his ankles.
• Don't Look: The killer does in Alex by cutting him in half at the waist with a chainsaw.
• This happened some time ago to a character in Doom, when a Teleporter Accident sent his upper and lower halves to different destinations. Due to futuristic medicine, he lives, but as half a body permanently attached to a wheelchair/life support system.
• Escape Room (2017): Anderson is killed by being sliced in half by a descending partition in the Air-Vent Passageway.
• The Eunuch: Part of the Establishing Character Moment for the titular Villain Protagonist, after killing an official and his wife for treason. The official's 10-year-old son tries retaliating, but the Eunuch grabs the child and flings him towards a halberd held vertically by one of his soldiers, resulting in the boy being halved from the waist.
• During The Teaser of Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain, Amy's boyfriend finds her lying partially in the bushes, begging for help: her body obscured from the waist down. When he tries to lift her up, he discovers that she has been cut in half at the waist, and all of her intestines spill out on the ground.
• Gunnar Jensen's first onscreen kill in The Expendables (and the first of over 200 onscreen deaths in general) is an unfortunate Somali pirate which he shotguns into half from the waist.
• Final Destination:
  • In Final Destination 2, Rory suffers a transected torso courtesy of flying barbed wire.
  • In Final Destination 3, Kevin gets torn in half during the rollercoaster disaster premonition.
  • In The Final Destination, the Daniels couple get bisected by cables during the racecar disaster premonition.
• Five Element Ninjas: In the final battle, one of the ninja mooks tries sneaking up on the protagonists by hiding himself in a hollow tree, ready to ambush, but the protagonist noticed him and simply slice the tree, ninja and all, horizontally into half.
• Freaky has Mr. Bernardi bisected vertically by a table saw.
• Happens in Freddy vs. Jason to one of the supporting teens; having been possessed by Freddy, the teen stares down a stalking, pissed-off Jason and looks seemingly defenseless — until he jabs two syringes full of tranquilizers into Jason's neck and injects him with the full dose. Unfortunately for the teen, that's his last act as a living person; before Jason's lights go out, he uses his machete to cut the teen in half.
• Friday the 13th Part III: Andy is killed while he walks on his hands, and is later found cut in half.
• Godzilla vs. Kong have this happening to a skullcrawler who's the Worf in demonstrating Mechagodzilla's powers. Said skullcrawler ends up being lasered into half after a 30-second Curb-Stomp Battle, with it's guts spilling all over the place.
• Golden Swallow have a scene in the bandit legions' underground lair, where failed minions are executed by a guillotine... whose blade is positioned to fall at the waist. One bandit henchman even proves his allegiance by strapping himself underneath the machine and dropping the blade on his own waist.
• One of the fights in Gladiator sees a fighter cut in half at the waist by the large blades on the wheels of her own war chariot.
• In Havenhurst, after Tammy gets dropped into the building's basement, she finds Wayne on an operating table with the lower half of his body missing, a huge cut going up his torso from the bottom, and his entrails hanging out.
• Hellboy (2004) has the talking corpse of Ivan, who was cut in half at the midsection, and, still not dead, shot through the skull.
• Heroes of Sung: The film's main villain, Wan-Yan, is killed by being vertically cut into half. The camera actually lingers on the right half of his corpse for a while.
• The Heroic Ones: This is the horrific, horrific fate of the 13th Prince, via being pulled apart by four horses. The last thing audiences see of him is his upper head and torso, sans limbs, legs and most of his body's lower half.
• Happens briefly in Highlander III: The Sorcerer, when Connor cuts Kane in half horizontally. But then he uses his powers to join the halves and the fight continues.
• During the Hellish Copter moment in High Risk when the hero crashed his chopper in a hotel's penthouse, the chopper's blade detaches and cuts a fleeing terrorist into two above the waist.
• In the most horrific scene from The Hitcher, psycho killer John Ryder ties Nash, between a Mack truck and its trailer, commandeers the cab, revs up the engine and threatens to rip her in half if he doesn't speak to Jim, the protagonist. The police enlist Jim, whom they had previously suspected was the killer, but are now convinced of his innocence, to try to negotiate with Ryder, but when Jim confronts him, Ryder orders him to shoot him. Jim refuses because Ryder's foot is on the clutch and if it slips off, Nash will die anyway. Ryder gets pissed and insults Jim, then shifts the clutch and the accelerator, resulting in poor Nash getting ripped in half before Jim's very eyes.
• Samantha is sliced in half with barbed wire in Hold Your Breath.
• Horrorvision: The Cyborg overseeing the original Horrorvision computers has nothing below his belly.
• Ichi the Killer: Brain-case to balls.
• Immortals climaxes with a massive battle between the Gods led by Zeus, against the Titans. More than one Titan gets gruesomely bisected, with Zeus slicing a random Titan diagonally in two.
• One of the victims in Intruder is found cut half, with his upper and lower body in two dumpsters. He also has a "1/2 price" tag on him.
• I Origins: Sofi dies this way courtesy of a malfunctioning elevator and Ian pulling her out a second too late. All the more disturbing because it comes out of nowhere and Ian (and the audience) believe that she's okay for a few seconds before realizing what happened.
• In I, Robot, Sonny hurls another robot into an energy field that disintegrates most forms of alloy or composite. Before collapsing, it staggers about for a moment, then turns to reveal it's lost half its head and body.
• The first Jaka Sembung ends with the titular hero fighting the evil Ki Hitam, an immortal sorcerer who shrugs off having his legs, arms, and even head severed, with the appendage simply reattaching seconds later. Jaka Sembung then lands a slash through Ki Hitam's waist and halves him perfectly, before using both hands to hold Ki Hitam's upper and lower body apart, calling for his allies in the resistance to set each halve on fire to destroy the villain for good. This time it works.
• Jurassic Park:
  • Jurassic Park (1993): Implied to have been the fate of Gennaro, the cowardly lawyer who got munched by the T. rex.
    Muldoon: I think this was Gennaro.
    Sattler: [several feet away, looking clearly disturbed at something off-screen] I think this was, too.
  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park has Eddie Carr torn in half by two T. rexes, who then eat him.
  • In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Eli Mills ends up getting eaten and torn in half by a T. rex and a Carnotaurus, before a pack of Compsognathus munch on what is left of him before they all run off.
• In Justice League (2017) and Zack Snyder's Justice League, quite a few Parademons felled by Diana's sword end up in two pieces.
• During the Crazy 88 sword battle in Kill Bill the Bride hands this out to one unfortunate Mook, who is split in half right down the middle with her Hattori Hanzo sword.
• In King Kong Lives, Kong grabs one of the hunters that tried to capture it and breaks him in half.
• A nonlethal version happens to Ronald Reagan in King's Row, in which he wakes up from surgery and says the famous line, "Where's the rest of me?" Reagan, by the way, plays a notorious playboy who had taken an interest in the surgeon's daughter.
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, the first Lancelot gets sliced from head to toe by Gazelle, thus opening the position for a new candidate.
• The Lady Assassin delivers two in a row in the final battle, with the titular heroine, Lui Si-niang killing both The Dragon and the Big Bad in this fashion (horizontally for the former, vertically for the latter, both accompanied by a genorous dose of High-Pressure Blood).
• In The Last Stand a mook's torso falls separate from his waist thanks to a Vickers machine gun.
• Although we, thankfully, never see the actual aftermath of it, this is heavily implied to what happened to James Bond's colleague, Saunders, in The Living Daylights after being the victim of a booby-trapped sliding glass door by Necros. Well, in addition to other things.
• In the wuxia film The Magic Blade, Fu Hung-hsueh have to fight a legion of expert fighters in the climax. One of them tries sneaking up on Fu behind a wooden frame, but Fu sees his opponent in time and hacks him together with the frame into two. Although the gory parts are obscured by the frame, but it's clear that Fu's victim is cleanly halved.
• The Man Who Saves the World ends with the protagonist karate-chopping the evil Wizard in half. In a movie riddled with Special Effect Failure, this one stands out as the single most hilariously bad special effect of them all.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Avengers: Infinity War, a few Outriders try forcing their way past the barrier surrounding the Wakandan army. Some of them end up getting bisected at the waist.
  • Avengers: Endgame has Hawkeye slicing at least one Outrider into two with his katana.
  • In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Scarlet Witch kills Captain Carter this way by severing her torso at the hips with her own shield, with the Gory Discretion Shot barely concealing her legs standing on their own in the background.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: Gamora (the alternate timeline version) cuts one of The High Evolutionary's Hellspawn in half with her sword in the climactic hallway fight scene.
• Men in Black: Edgar the Bug is blown apart at the waist when K fires his BFG inside the Bug's stomach. Amazingly, this didn't kill Edgar; it took a second shot from another BFG to do that.
• Men in Black II: The Worms are cut in half at the waist, but it only appears to be a mild inconvenience until they pull their two halves back together.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail: King Arthur chops off the Black Knight's limbs off one by one until his torso sitting on the ground is all that's left.
• My Way: A Korean conscript suffers this fate during the battle against the Russian tank platoon, courtesy of a tank running somewhere above his belt while the guy's too injured to move. His pants are what's holding his torso and legs together.
• Night at the Museum: Teddy Roosevelt, a wax statue, after getting run over by a stagecoach. Sacagawea fixes him not too long after.
• Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight: The policeman who gives Zosia a lift gets sliced in half down the middle of his body by one of the killers.
  • In the sequel, after Zosia, now infected with black alien goo, jumps Sergeant Waldemar and attacks him, he is then seen crawling back into view. It's apparent he no longer has the lower half of his body, which is pretty much confirmed in the next shot.
• Not Another Teen Movie: A guy gets tackled from both sides by football players and Hilarity Ensues.
• In the Shaw Brothers martial arts epic, The New One-Armed Swordsman, this happens to The Lancer of the film, prompting the Handicapped Badass hero to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Pacific Rim
  • In the first film, fast-swimming kaiju + BFS = this.
  • In Pacific Rim: Uprising the Mega-Kaiju is blown in two by Gipsy Avenger kamikaze-dropping from orbit.
• In Paranoid Park, the main character hops onto a train and scuffles with a security guard who catches him. However, the guard loses his footing and falls onto a second set of tracks as another train approaches. The result is an unnerving scene in which the guard crawls away from the tracks, minus the lower half of his body.
• The killer in Pieces corners one of his victims in a bathroom, and she gets cut half with a chainsaw.
• Pitch Black:
  • "Where's Johns?" "Which half?"
  • Shazza, who gets ripped in half and carried off still screaming by a swarm of juvenile Bioraptors.
• Rambo IV: In the film's excessively gory climax, the jeep's driver gets the upper half of his body disintegrated when Rambo grabs the 50. cal machine gun and fires it at him from point blank. A minute later the lower half of his body falls out from the side of the jeep. A few random mooks ends up getting bits and pieces of their bodies ripped to shreds by the 50. cal as well, at least one which is cleanly halved from the waist.
• In Resident Evil (2002), one of the troopers is cut in half by a Frickin' Laser Beam in the Laser Hallway leading to the Red Queen's lair. He dies, but there's no gore at all. On YouTube at 1:25.
• Savaged: Following the final battle, Zoe has been cut in half at the waist by Trey's chainsaw, but—being a Revenant Zombie—still cannot die.
• Happens to one of the Rangers in Saving Private Ryan during the Omaha Beach landing sequence. Captain Miller is dragging a wounded comrade out of the water when a mortar explodes nearby, throwing Miller to the ground. When he gets back up and resumes dragging, the soldier is now dead and has been blown in half.
• A favored fatality of the Saw franchise, several victims throughout the movies are decapitated in this manner.
  • In the opening trap of Saw V, Seth Baxter is strapped to a bench and dismembered by a pendulum-like blade.
  • In the Acid Room of Saw VI, William Easton has his body split in half as an effect of the acid that was activated by Brent.
  • In the Public Execution Trap of Film/3D, Dina, the girl who's cheating on Brad and Ryan, is dropped forcefully upon a rotating saw blade when they agree that she is the one who should die in the trap.
• In Scarecrow Slayer, Deputy Larry is killed when the Scarecrow cuts him in half at the waist.
• Secret Service of the Imperial Court ends with the hero, Zhao Bu-Fan, battling the vile Eunuch Wang. Zhao's killing blow on Wang begins with severing the villain's left hand... before finishing it with a vertical bisection. In one slash.
• Shanghai Grand: In the first shootout, an unfortunate mook falls into a set of rotating gears on a ship and gets messily ripped into half by the waist.
• In Signs, Graham's wife is hit by a car. He is told that she is basically cut in half and the car is the "only thing holding her together," but we don't see it.
• In Slashers, Chainsaw Charlie slices Rebecca in half at the waist.
• In Slaxx, Jemma gets her entire lower half bitten off after trying on a pair of possessed, killer jeans. Libby later finds her body stuffed under the bathroom sink, her guts spilling out.
• Brom gets cut in half by the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow (1999). It's also/probably a Shout-Out to The Phantom Menace, since the stuntman who played the Horseman was also Darth Maul.
• The Commando Brick Bazooka from Small Soldiers ends up like this when he falls off of Alan's bike. He recovers, though.
• Sybil is ripped in half after being dragged through a floor in StageFright -Aquarius-.
• In Stargate: Continuum, Qetesh uses an enhanced blade to cut Ba'al cleanly in half from the waist up.
• The bugs in Starship Troopers have a fondness for this trope, being giant insects. Carmen's commanding officer gets herself cut in half by a descending bulkhead door.
• Star Trek Into Darkness: As Harrison is blasting away at Klingons with a gun in one hand and a BFG in the other, he uses the latter to completely vaporize the upper torso of one who's attacking Kirk.
• Star Wars:
  • Happens to several battle droids throughout the prequels.
  • Darth Maul has this happen to him in The Phantom Menace when Obi-Wan takes Qui-Gon's lightsaber and carves him in half across the waist. Maul survives the experience.
  • Referenced for laughs in LEGO Star Wars: The Padawan Menace: a poster reads "Darth Maul's Emporium: Prices Cut in Half!"
  • At the end of The Empire Strikes Out, he gets split in half again when he gets sucked into space.
  • In Revenge of the Sith, if you look carefully, you can see Poggle the Lesser being bisected and having both his arms and his tendrils cut off when Darth Vader kills him and the other Separatist leaders.
  • In the finale of Rogue One, Darth Vader cuts a rebel soldier in half after slamming him into the ceiling, then doesn't bother looking at his bisected corpse.
  • In The Last Jedi, Supreme Leader Snoke gets sliced in half by Kylo Ren, allowing him to usurp leadership of the First Order.
• Strike Commando: Jakoda dies in this method when Ransom shoves a grenade into his mouth, the ensuing explosion which vaporizes his upper half, leaving behind a pair of legs and a little bit of waist.
• The Suicide Squad: King Shark rips a soldier in half vertically.
• Tales from the Hood 2: In "Good Golly", Zoe gets cut in half by a rapidly descending door—shaped like a set of teeth—in the museum.
• At the climax of Ted, the title character is ripped in half while trying to escape the main antagonist. It is not played for laughs and Ted being a teddy bear doesn't lessen it, though he does try to relieve some of the tension by comparing himself to the Aliens example above.
• Terminator:
  • This happens to the title character in The Terminator. Of course, being a Determinator, he naturally didn't let this stop him chasing Sarah Connor.
  • Later happens to the T-X in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which forces her to crawl after her target.
• Happens when Ben Moss gets caught between two glass doors slamming shut in the remake of Thir13en Ghosts. His front half slowly slips down to the floor to reveal his rear half still stuck to the bloodied glass, internal anatomy on full display.
• The 2009 Japanese horror film, Teketeke, based on the urban legend of the same name. (See Urban Legend folder) In the film itself, the Teketeke is depicted as a Vengeful Ghost with only half a body after suffering a railway accident, and a supernatural Serial Killer who had a penchant of killing students by severing them into half from their waists.
• At the climax of the Taiwanese fantasy film The Thrilling Sword, the prince has to fight 3 immortals, whose weak spots are their armpits, waist, and mouth, in that order. The second immortal dies when the prince cuts him in half, where his lower half walks off for a few seconds before dying.
• Transformers Film Series:
  • In the climax of the first film, Megatron does it to Jazz, quipping that he doesn't want "a piece" of Jazz, he wants two.
  • Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen:
    • In the opening action sequence, Sideswipe does a balletic jump over the Audi R8, Sideways, lands in front of him and grounds his built-in sword blade so that as the Decepticon drives forwards he cuts himself in two lengthways. He then proclaims "Damn, I'm good".
    • During the battle in Egypt, Mixmaster starts shelling the human troops. Enter Jetfire. Mixmaster promptly loses his legs to the ex-Decepticon, who apparently decides that isn't enough and stomps Mixmaster's head off.
• In The Tripper, Frank Baker gets cut in half vertically with a chainsaw.
• Due to a case of Deadly Dodging in Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, one of the college kids falls head first into a wood chipper. Tucker tries to pull him out but from the perspective of the other college kids it looks like Tucker is shoving him in.
• In UHF, Conan the Librarian hacks a patron vertically into half via BFS… as penalty of overdue books.
• Ultraviolet (2006), Daxus is vertically sliced in half by Violet, the only way you could have made it out was because he was set alight, in total darkness!
• Happens to a random werewolf in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans.
• U.S. Seals II: The Ultimate Force (a low-budget DTV actioner) ends with the Big Bad played by Damien Chapa suffering this fate via his own katana. Vertically, in a surprisingly graphic manner considering the budget.
• In A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, during the Art Shifted claymation scene, this happens to an unfortunate hot dog vendor when he gets crushed by a snowball hurled by a giant, rampaging, murderous snowman.
• Violent Shit has one of the poor victims of Karl the Butcher being sewn in half (and the saw appears to cut through the belt harmlessly...).
• Two captured Polish soldiers are tied alive to horses and ripped in half in Volhynia - a real execution method.
• Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story: The major source of angst in Dewey's life is the fact that he accidentally halved his brother with a machete when they were little. His father shouts, "You're not half the boy Nate was. You're not even half the boy that the top half of Nate was after you cut him in half!" He is eventually forgiven by his father after the old man accidentally halves himself while trying to kill Dewey.
• The page image is Dr. Loveless from Wild Wild West, who before the film lost his bottom half in an explosive-filled accident. Punned repeatedly by Jim West (and Loveless himself, as shown by the caption), including using the name of the trope.
• In The Woman, the feral woman cuts Brian in half after Peggy frees her.
• In X-Men: Days of Future Past Colossus is torn in half by a pair of Future Sentinels.

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