Improvised Weapon / Film

"Harry invited Smithy 'round for an explanation. Smithy didn't do a very good job. Within a minute, Harry lost his rag, reached for the nearest thing at hand, which happened to be a fifteen-inch black rubber cock. He then proceeded to batter poor Smithy to death with it."

— Bacon, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels

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• 2-Headed Shark Attack: No one has any actual weapons to use against the shark besides a gun Lyndsey finds, so they have to settle for trying to hurt it with things like a jagged plank, a barrel of oil, and the altar cross from a church.
• 28 Days Later has Jim wielding a baseball bat (and later a crowbar), Hannah wielding what appears to be a vase of some kind in one scene, and makeshift Molotov cocktails wielded by Selena. Otherwise, real weapons abound.
• Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion: While trying to escape the Al-minya tribe, Lou snatches a couple of baskets and throws them as a distraction.
• Advance to the Rear: During the final battle between Company Q and Zattig's men, weapons include a fire hose, chamber pots, pans, a makeshift catapult built out of old crates, and at least one rolling pin.
• During their newsroom fight in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Veronica Corningstone knocks Ron in the head with a thrown typewriter and whips him with the antenna from a television set.
• In Atomic Blonde Lorraine uses literally anything that isn't nailed down as a weapon. These include a freezer door, a corkscrew, a fire hose, a turntable, keys, a ladder, an electric stove, and a toilet tank lid. When she's stuck in a car with her enemies she even uses her shoes as a weapon, she takes of her heels and slams them into a mooks throat.
• The famous power loader from Aliens is, well, a powered loader, and not intended to be a weapon.
• The Chuck Norris movie An Eye for an Eye has Mako as Norris' sensei knock down one of several attackers, then render the mook fully unconscious by hitting him with a desktop telephone (rotary, no less). He growls, "The warrior uses what is at hand!"
• In Aquaman (2018), Arthur likes to do this.
  • While fighting the pirates aboard the Russian submarine, he uses a hatch cover as a shield and then throws it to knock out a mook.
  • Arthur rips out two spherical concrete stumps and the chain barrier connecting them and uses it as a killer bolas against Black Manta.
  • Mera uses her power over water to turn the wine in the wine shop into improvised spears, and kills two Atlantean soldiers with them.
• The climax of Arabesque shows Gregory Peck killing the villains with a ladder — by jamming it down through the girders under a bridge into the rotor of their helicopter as they fly below trying to shoot him.
• In the Sean Penn film Bad Boys (1983), Penn is in a juvenile prison and about to be attacked by two other boys who run the cell block. Penn knows the attack is coming, so he goes to the soda machine and buys four cans of soda. Then he goes to his cell, tells his bunkmate to leave, puts the four cans of soda into a pillowcase and ties it shut. The two boys walk into his cell expecting a defenseless victim. Penn starts swinging, taking them completely by surprise, and the beatdown he puts on them with his makeshift weapon becomes the stuff of legend in the facility. Both boys were carried out on stretchers. It's notable that his number one target out of all the swings he makes is their faces.
• Used in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, when the Phantasm attacks the Joker, and he has two possible weapons to defend himself with: a kitchen knife, and a loaf of bologna. Guess what the Joker chooses.
• In Beowulf (2007), the title character kills Grendel with a door. While loudly introducing himself.
• In this scene from Beverly Hills Ninja Chris Farley attacks his opponent with fish while Robin Shou (Disguised in Drag) uses a purse and high heels.
• In Big Game, during the fight with Hazar, Oskari attacks him with a fire extinguisher and Moore uses a Doorstopper book to defend himself.
• Black Christmas (2019):
  • Lindsey, our first victim, is killed with an icicle.
  • Riley stabs the cloaked man who first attackes her in the sorority house with her keys.
  • In the climax, the surviving sorority sisters arrive armed with a number of items, including improvised weapons. One sister wields a Hanukah menorah.
• Black Rat: Ryoka builds a spear out of items he finds in the janitors closet, and Misato does an excellent job of defending herself against the Rat's machete using only a fire bucket.
• Blade Runner: Deckard is cornered in a bathroom with two broken fingers, no gun, and the villain Roy Batty has just walked in. His response? Wrest a lead pipe from the wall and beat Roy in the head with it. Roy's response? "Yes, that's the spirit!"
• Jason Bourne is another master of the form in The Bourne Series.
  • In The Bourne Identity, he is attacked by a switchblade-armed operative (who also knows kung fu), and has to defend himself with a ballpoint pen. He then disarms the assailant by brutally jamming the pen in between his knuckles.
  • In The Bourne Supremacy he uses a rolled-up magazine against a former Treadstone assassin and blows up his house with said magazine stuffed in a toaster.
  • In The Bourne Ultimatum, he kills an assassin with a bathroom. No, not things in the bathroom. The actual bathroom.
• The famous scene from Braindead/Dead Alive where Lionel slaughters a horde of zombies with a running lawnmower strapped to his chest.
• In The Burning, Cropsy uses a pair of scissors to stab the prostitute.
• In Children of Men, Theo uses a car battery he finds on the ground to lethally bludgeon Syd in the head in self-defense as soon as the latter manages to squeeze through the steel door separating them.
• The Catcher: Coach Foster stabs the killer in the shoulder with the screwdriver he had been using to adjust the pitching machine.
• The Chronicles of Riddick features the title character killing someone with a tea cup. He then nonchalantly picks up and threatens them with a sardine tin key.
• Coffy:
  • In one scene, Coffy ties razorblades into her afro hair, in anticipation of trouble. When the big Cat Fight erupts, another woman tries to grab her by the hair, with a gory result.
  • When held captive by the bad guys, Coffy sharpens one of her harpins and then puts it back in her hair. She later uses it to repeatedly stab a guy in the neck.
• Colombiana. The final confrontation between the Action Girl and The Dragon involves towels, and toothbrushes akimbo. In the end The Dragon gets his hands on a pistol, only for her to eject the magazine, field-strip the slide, and stab him in the neck with it.
• In "Crocodile" Dundee, the chauffeur who was driving around Mick yanked the in-car phone antenna off of the limo he was driving, and used it as a boomerang to take down a fleeing mook.
• The best thing in Daredevil (2003) was Bullseye's mastery of the Improvised Weapon. Killing someone with a paper clip or a peanut? Badass.
  • In the novelization, the narration says that to him, an ordinary tavern is "an armory".
• The Dark Crystal: Having no weapon whatsoever, Jen uses the Shard of the Crystal to defend himself.
• The Dark Knight: The Joker makes a pencil "disappear" with a bit of Eye Scream. Likewise, his incarnation in Tim Burton's Batman (1989) used a quill pen to kill a local mob boss.
• When Brodie and Zakk from Deathgasm have to defend themselves from two Raimi-style zombies, they use the only tools they can find: Brodie's uncle and aunt's sextoys. They later fashion weapons out of power tools, like a drill-guitar and a weed whacker with barbed wire.
• In Delusions of Grandeur, Blaze uses his sword to cut the (poisoned) cake offered by his so-called friends, and then drops it and joins Salluste in throwing dining plates at the Grandees.
• In Die Hard 2, McClane kills a mook with a handy icicle. In the fourth film, he runs out of bullets and has to take out a helicopter with a car.
• In District 9, the alien Christopher is able to improvise a bomb out some random pieces of alien technology left sitting around. Later on, Wikus uses the Gravity Gun on a prawn mini-mech to hurl a pig at a soldier with rather devastating results.
• Drive, He Said: When Gabriel tries to rape Olive, the two hit at each other with marble busts.
• Dunston Checks In has one in the kitchen of a 5-star hotel. Among the implements used are a ladle, a whisk, and a 20-pound bag of coffee beans. And a wine bottle, almost:
  Grant: NO! NO! That's the Chateau Lafite.
  <Rutledge looks at the bottle>
  Rutledge: Good year.
  <puts it away, fighting resumes>
• In Exam, White stabs Black with a pencil, while Brown tortures Dark with a piece of paper. None of this is Played for Laughs.
• In Eyes of a Stranger in the climax blind, deaf-mute Tracy fends off her rapist with a thrown pot of coffee.
• Both The Faculty and the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street feature the use of the arm of a paper guillotine as an improbably sharp bladed weapon despite the arm of actual paper guillotines being entirely blunt.
• In Fatal Contact, the Japanese fighter puts nails into his gloves and boots for use against the hero.
• The Four Days of Naples: Nazi soldiers are passing down a narrow alley with tall apartment buildings on either side. The people in the apartments start flinging their furniture at the Germans in the alley—beds, desks, sinks, even a toilet. The Nazis are forced to retreat.
• Jason uses many of these in the Friday the 13th series.
  • In Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason attempts to shoot one of his victims with a harpoon gun, but due to being at the bottom of Crystal Lake for five years, he is unable to draw back the rubber bands to fire the spear. So he stabs the girl with the entire harpoon gun.
  • Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Jason picks up a camper in her sleeping bag, and swings it into a tree.
  • In Jason X, Jason kills two holographic campers with each other. In nearly every film in the series, something not intended as a weapon is used as one.
• From Dusk Till Dawn
  • Seth Gecko (George Clooney) uses a shoulderstrap-mounted jackhammer with a wooden stake (with a small cross carved into it for good measure) replacing the drill bit as a vampire-killing tool during the final showdown in the Titty Twister bar.
  • Multiple table legs and pool cues are also used during the first vampire rampage/attack.
  • Father Jacob also combines a table leg and the pump-grip of a shotgun to make a cross to ward off Vamps.
  • The biker Sex Machine (Tom Savini) uses a whip on some of the Vamps.
  • Condoms filled with holy water are used as "grenades" that melt Vampires rather effectively.
• While being chased by wolves in Frozen, Anna drives one off by hitting it with Kristoff's lute.
• Galaxy Quest naturally skewered this one: Jason Nesmith (who played the Kirk-analogue Captain Taggart) is unarmed and running from a huge rock monster. When he asks the crew on the ship for advice, one of them tells him to see if he can "form some sort of rudimentary lathe" (and is promptly shouted down by his less Genre Savvy companions). Both are based on the short story "Arena" by Fredric Brown, published in 1944. The Star Trek version is closer to the original than the Galaxy Quest one, so much so that the credits for the Star Trek episode carry a story credit to Mr. Brown, in order to avoid copyright issues.
• In Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth, a freakin' ferris wheel is used as a weapon. That's how giant monsters roll.
• In Great White, Charlie tapes a knife to the handle of the paddle to make an improvised harpoon to try and drive off the shark.
• Grosse Pointe Blank: Among his post-high school accomplishments, Martin Blank lists "kill[ing] the president of Paraguay with a fork." He later stabs an assassin in the neck with a souvenir pen, and smashes a still-plugged-in television over his business rival's head, electrocuting him.
  • He also dispatches a mook with a frying pan.
• The title character in Happy Gilmore mentions that he once tried to stab somebody with an ice skate during a hockey game.
• In The Heat Mullins makes good on her plan to throw a phone book in Julian's face during interrogation. Mullins also uses a watermelon to subdue Rojas.
• During the subway battle, the title character of Hellboy (2004) gives Sammael a good thrashing with a pay telephone.
• There was a reason Thorin in The Hobbit was called Oakenshield, as he literally used an oak branch to protect himself and win against Azog, as shown in An Unexpected Journey. In his second rematch with Azog, he has fashioned an armored gauntlet reinforced with iron fitting out of the same oak branch.
  • Also Gandalf when they were trapped in a tree and being attacked by wargs. He grabs nearby pine cones and ignited them as impromptu firebombs.
• In Hot Fuzz, Nicholas Angel knocks out an assailant with a flowerpot, and in another scene Doris Fletcher takes out a mad stock girl brandishing a box cutter by whacking her upside the head with a "Wet Floor" sign. Later on in the film, a line of shopping carts becomes a battering ram. There's also the Shoplifter being KO'd with a lobbed spray can. Nearly all of the murders are committed without traditional weapons: part of the church roof, gardening shears, a car and a combination of natural gas and burning food. Only once the NWA is found out do they use guns.
• Played for Laughs in Hot Shots! Part Deux, when Topper attempts to take out a guard using a bow and arrow. After missing every single shot (which the guard hilariously doesn't notice till he turns to look at the wall behind him), Topper then utilizes a chicken and shoots the guard with it. In another scene, he also "kills" a bunch of random Mooks by simply throwing bullets at them with his hand.
• In House of 9, Claire kills Shona by stabbing her in the neck with a corkscrew. Other weapons used include a broken brandy decanter, a scarf and a belt, and a length of pipe.
• Is used three times in the climax of the horror movie Hush, where Anna uses the following to finally defeat the serial killer who's murdered her friends and been plaguing her all night; an extremely loud (loud enough to cause nearby objects to vibrate) and blindingly bright smoke alarm, designed that way because Anna is completely deaf, held directly into his face to stun and disorient him; bug spray directly into his eyes to blind him; and when the killer is just on the verge of choking Anna to death, she reaches for a nearby corkscrew on the floor and shoves it into his jugular, finally killing him.
• In If Looks Could Kill, a gold serving tray is used to kill the French finance minister during his meeting with Steranko at the beginning, bashing him upside the head so hard he's knocked out of his chair and send sliding across the floor and into the wall.
• Indiana Jones lives by this trope. And Indy's not alone. As Marcus says, the pen is mightier than the sword.
  • In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Professor Henry Jones Sr. has killed Nazis with the following: a pen, an umbrella, a flock of birds, and a knowledge of the writings of Charlemagne. In addition to bashing his own son on the head with a vase.
  • Sallah also fights with a newspaper.
  • Marion Ravenwood knocked out a mook in Raiders of the Lost Ark with a Frying Pan of Doom. The pan is mightier than the sword?
  • In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy beats a Nazi motorcyclist by using a flagpole as a jousting lance and then jamming the broken remnants into the wheel of another pursuing cyclist.
  • In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Mutt uses the titular MacGuffin to hit one of the Russian Mooks during the chase through the jungle.
• Ip Man may be a Martial Pacifist, but if pushed has no qualms against using a feather duster, a long bamboo rod, wood pallets etc. to fight.
• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): Winnie and Bernie too later are adept at using whatever they can find as weapons. It starts with Winnie managing to kill the Angel Killer, saving her brother's life doing so, by using some jumper cables from a Christmas tree display and electrocuting him.
• Jackie Chan's characters are considered masters of the form, squeezing it for all its slapstick value. Notable occasions include this sequence, from Jackie Chan's First Strike, using paste tables, his own jacket, a box full of paper, his opponents' fighting-sticks, sheets of plasterboard, a Chinese lion head, a broom and, most famously, a stepladder. Also, in Rumble in the Bronx, see Jackie trying a series of items in succession, after which the mook surrenders when Jackie gets to the 15-inch pipe wrench.
• James Bond:
  • It's rare that Bond uses anything as a weapon that wasn't given to him by Q. However, in Live and Let Die, Bond is smoking a cigarette while he's shaving, when a villain lets a venomous snake into the bathroom. Bond notices it, and ever resourceful, kills it by using the cigarette and can of aftershave to fashion an Aerosol Flamethrower.
  • In The Living Daylights, Necros shows great improvisation skills, infiltrating a MI6 safe house through the kitchen and taking out guards with a headphone cord, rolling pin, electric knife, cooktop, boiling water, and that old standby the cast iron skillet.
  • In Thunderball, Bond and Colonel Bouvar attack each other with chairs, bookshelves, upholstery, and a fire poker. (Bonus points to Bond, who only pulled the bookshelf onto Bouvar because his jacket sleeve had been stuck to it with a throwing knife.) Later, in the movie's climax on the Disco Volante, Bond frantically pummels several henchmen with what appears to be a radio officer's headset, repeatedly slams a small hinged door on a fallen goon, and hurls a heavy-looking chair at another one.
• Justice League: War features Superman hitting several attacking monsters with a tanker truck (hand-held, not driven), then using his heat vision to ignite the contents into a massive explosion. Flash has a more creative one: When the villain tries to kill him with a target-seeking disintegration beam, Flash uses it against numerous mooks by repeatedly changing direction faster than the beam can turn.
• Kayko & Kokosh: In the first episode, Bloody Hegemon tries to skewer Corporal for his failure with a broom... after sharpening it with his teeth in one motion.
• In Kill Bill, after her sword is knocked out of her hands, the Bride kills Go-Go Yubari with a broken table leg with nails in it. She also gets her revenge on the hospital orderly who pimped her out by putting his head in a door and slamming it.
• Once bullets and sharp objects prove unsuccessful in bringing down the eponymous creature in Killer Crocodile, main character has to resort to throwing an entire outboard motor into the thing's mouth. It burrows into the animal's guts, malfunctions, and explodes spectacularly, sending the croc back under the river's surface in flames.
• Kimi: At the end Angela manages to get ahold of a nail gun she kills all three thugs with.
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, during the church brawl, Harry Hart uses whatever's at hand (such as bibles and incense burners) to fight off the churchgoers after he runs out of bullets.
• Kong: Skull Island: Kong utilizes a variety of environmental objects in his final battle against the alpha Skullcrawler, starting off with smashing a huge boulder into its face, using a tree as a club, and finally a boat propeller on a chain as a makeshift flail.
• Kung Fu Panda: Po uses this tactic throughout his battle with Tai Lung, using bamboo stalks, cooking woks, and even firework carts to confuse and outsmart the leopard. It allows the panda to repeatedly gain the advantage over Tai Lung, who tends to rely too much on his own strength.
• In Law Abiding Citizen, all that Clyde wants is his steak. His Porterhouse steak. Turns out, the bone is a pretty effective punch dagger.
• The 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left: Knives, wine bottle, roofing hammer, ottoman, mattress, lamp, hot water. Then there's the Your Head Asplode moment using a rigged microwave oven.
• In Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, a man is beaten to death with a black rubber dildo.
• During the climactic chase of Mad Max: Fury Road Max takes out two Pole Cats with a pair of bolt cutters and beats down Rictus Erectus with one of his own oxygen tanks.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • When looking at the dozens of gleaming, highly polished, technologically advanced flying suits of armor, it's hard to remember that in Iron Man, the very first iteration was improvised in a cave! With a box of scraps! Tony broke out of captivity by building an enhanced-strength, bullet-resistant suit armed with a missile and dual flamethrowers out of spare missile parts.
  • In The Incredible Hulk (2008), the Hulk uses pieces of a broken statue to shield himself from the sonic cannons. He then uses the same pieces to take down one of the cannons and, later, a gunship. During the final fight, Hulk turns a police car into a pair of impromptu boxing gloves.
  • Twice in Captain America: The First Avenger. Skinny, pre-serum Steve uses a trashcan lid as a shield against a bully. And post-serum Steve uses a taxi door as a shield against a Nazi assassin.
  • Iron Man 3 showed that even without his titular armor, Tony will do this to get the job done. With the armor out of reach, he just walks into a hardware store, buys a lot of tools and equipment, and makes a bola, a tranquilizer nailgun, a one-time use stun gun, Christmas bauble grenades/flashbangs, and a glove that functions as a taser.
  • In Thor: Ragnarok, when Loki loses one of his daggers during the Final Battle, he substitutes it with the sharp ends of his horned helmet, hitting Hela's undead soldiers with them. It turns out that those extravagant horns weren't just there to appeal to his vanity!
  • In Black Panther (2018), Klaue uses a powerful sonic cannon to blow up cars. When he is captured and Ross demands to know where he got such an advanced weapon, he says it's nothing but an outdated Wakandan mining tool that he tweaked. Actual Wakandan weapons make it look about as dangerous as a leaf blower.
  • In Captain Marvel (2019), when Carol faces her old squad aboard Mar-Vell's cruiser, The Brute Bron-Char picks up an arcade cabinet and hurls it at her. She blasts through it, sending him flying as well.
• In Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, Ivan Ooze pulls a move similar to Godzilla's above. After he merges with his Humongous Mecha, he grabs hold of an observation tower — the one he was watching the battle from just a minute ago — rips it free, and then uses it against the Ninja Megazord like a club.
• In The Mist, an elderly English teacher clocks a delusional religious fanatic in the face with a can of peas, among many examples throughout the movie.
• Momentum features an entire action sequence where this trope is the norm. The anti-heroine Alex - having inadvertently put a woman and child in danger - races to their rescue. Without any normal weapons to hand, she has to make do with what's available in the house:
  • Alex uses a garden lamp for pole fighting, and later shoves its stake into a man's foot.
  • She then kills a thug by shoving a broken shard of glass into his stomach.
  • While Alex tackles a second assassin, the other woman rushes to her assistance with a toy truck. It proves to be surprisingly effective at bashing in the guy's skull.
  • Alex removes a drilling tool from an assassin's bloody chest. While the actual usage occurs off-screen, the implication is she tortured the guy to gain information.
• In Murder by Proxy, Casey slugs Lance Gordon with the handset of a telephone and knocks him out.
• In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh regularly uses a captive bolt pistol to not only kill people, but blast the locks off doors. He also strangles a deputy with handcuffs.
• In Now You See Me, when cornered by Rhodes, Jack Wilder fights him off first by flinging burning flash paper at him and, when that doesn't work, throwing playing cards.
• Oldboy (2003) features a toothbrush, a claw hammer, a screwdriver, and a broken CD all used as weapons.
• Pacific Rim:
  • The battle between Gipsy Danger and Leatherback in Hong Kong has a short section featuring this trope, with Leatherback first using a crane as an improvised mace, followed by Gipsy grabbing two fistfuls of shipping containers and using them as knuckledusters.
  • The battle between Gipsy and Otachi starts with the former using an oil tanker as an improvised club.
  • During the climactic battle, Gipsy shoves Scunner's face over a hydrothermal vent, using the superheated jets to burn the Kaiju's face.
• Pirates of the Caribbean. It wouldn't be a swashbuckling pirate series without them.
  • In the first film, Jack uses the wrist irons that the soldiers put him in ("Finally!") to take Elizabeth hostage and make his escape.
    • Will uses a red-hot poker as an impromptu sword midway through his duel with Jack in the first film.
    • Elizabeth uses a bedwarming pan to whack one pirate unconscious and pour hot coals on another.
    • A rowboat is used to knock several undead Black Pearl crewmembers to pieces.
    • Elizabeth gets a staff fighting scene using an ornate pole against pirates at Isla de Muerta.
    • Having found themselves without cannonballs, Elizabeth orders the crew of the Interceptor to load everything handy into the guns; a practice resembling langrage in real life, except that instead of special irregular shot it's just cutlery and desperation. They even load in Mr. Gibbs' hip flask, which appears to be made of leather.
  • When escaping from cannibalistic natives in the second film, Jack tries (mostly unsuccessfully) to use the wooden roasting spit he's tied to as a weapon.
    • The Dead Man's chest gets used at least once to wonk somebody in the face.
  • In the fourth film, Jack knocks down several Spanish soldiers while armed only with a coconut on the end of a rope.
• In Posse (1975), Strawhorn unwinds the wire off a straw broom and used it to garotte Wesley and bind him to the bars of the cell on board the train.
• Preservation: When Wit surprises one of the hunters with her gun to the back of his neck, he quickly whips around and sprays her in the face with his asthma inhaler, attempting to give himself time to draw his own gun.
• The Princess: Early on, the princess uses her manacles, a hairpin and large pieces of firewood until she gets her hands on regular weapons. Even afterwards she and her enemies are happy to use whatever they have on hand to get an advantage, including lace, a horned helmet, a necklace of pearls, and a cabbage.
• In The Raid: Redemption, a group of beleaguered cops blow their way out of a room by building a shaped charge out of a propane stove and a fridge. In about 10 seconds flat.
  • And then there’s Rama’s last fight with kingpin Mad Dog, which ends with Rama using a broken fluorescent lightbulb to stab Mad Dog right in the throat.
• In That Darn Cat!, when Zeke and Patti are held at gunpoint by Dan while Patti is holding DC, Patti feigns that the cat is distressed by the situation so that she has an excuse to adjust her grip on DC without being suspicious - and then throws the cat in Dan's face, distracting him enough for Zeke to get the jump on him.
• In the 1992 Brandon Lee movie Rapid Fire, he beats up a pair of crooked FBI agents with a kitchen. Fridge, drawers, doors, cooking implements... he pretty much uses the whole kitchen.
• In [REC] 2 a teenager uses a bottle rocket to take out a zombie.
• Red Eye has a truly righteous incidence of this... with a pen. One of those punchy pens, with the little levers to push to make it punch... It doesn't kill the guy, but they are on a plane at the time and Jackson had already demonstrated how well he'd deal with Lisa's escape attempts. Later weaponry includes a pair of heels and a hockey stick.
• The ape protagonists of Rise of the Planet of the Apes do this a lot. Wrought-iron fence-poles? They make some pretty handy spears. Manhole cover? Throw it at a cop car and stop it dead in its tracks. Helicopter door gunner shooting at you? Throw a heavy length of chain at him.
• In Robin Hood (1973), Friar Tuck and Alan-a-Dale use Alan's lute as a bow to pop the balloon Sir Hiss is using to spy on Robin Hood, to prevent him from blowing Robin's cover.
• RoboCop's data spike is ostensibly only intended for interfacing with computer terminals, but he's found a secondary use for it in stabbing his enemies' throats.
• In the 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio and Tybalt briefly fight with farm tools.
• Santa with Muscles contains a few like weed whackers, a stethoscope, and styrofoam candy canes.
• In Scream (1996) Sydney takes out one of the killers by dropping a television on his head.
  • A fridge door, beer bottles, a rubber machete prop, a golf club, an ice-pick, a picture frame and a phone-receiver in an obvious Take That! to the killer's tendency to stalk his victims over the phone.
  • Sidney also uses a fraternity necklace given to her by Derek, who is at this point, dead to try and damage a killer's eyes when they have her at gunpoint.
• Serenity has Mal face off against The Operative in the final battle. The latter carries a sword so the former pulls out a screwdriver from a handy tool box. A very small screwdriver.
• In Shanghai Noon, he used antlers like a bat'leth, made a blunt rope dart using a lasso and horseshoe, and "piss shirt bend bar"...
• A more popular example can be seen in Shaun of the Dead; the titular hero wields a cricket bat for most of the film. There is also a scene in which Shaun and Ed hurl albums at two zombies, as the zombies slowly meander towards them. In the scene at the pub, they fight the zombie bartender with pool cues, darts, and the jukebox. The swingball pole Shaun used to hit a zombie with the ball was ineffective, but then impaled the zombie to a tree with the pole itself (which stopped the zombie as a threat and helped the group afterwards when they learned to imitate zombies).
• Sherlock Holmes (2009): Watson's pot or hat. See also Holmes' (attempt) with a hammer.
• Smith, from Shoot 'Em Up, kills two people with carrots. He also has an interesting technique for firing bullets when his hands are busted up. He doesn't bother using a gun. He puts them between his fingers and puts his hand over a fire.
• Showdown in Little Tokyo. During Murata's fight with The Dragon, they both break off metal bars in the refinery they're fighting in to use as weapons.
• Sleeper — in a fight with a guard at a futuristic farm, Woody Allen knocks him cold with a strawberry the size of a medicine ball. Earlier he subdued another guard by asphyxiating him with a block of blue cheese.
• So Close:
  • After losing her katana, Sue uses a sliced piece of bamboo in the final fight.
  • She also finishes off the Big Bad by firing her grappling hook into his head.
• Occurs in Spy Kids here. Subverted in that the next movie reveals said device is a weapon, though we still don't see it fire.
• Stargate: O'Neil uses the Ring transporter to kill Anubis.
• Star Trek (2009): Kirk uses his dropsuit helmet as a bludgeoning weapon when he loses his phaser on the Narada's drill.
• Star Wars examples:
  • Every time Jar Jar scores a kill or otherwise does something awesome, it's an (arguably) unintentional playing of this trope. Who would have thought one could accurately fire a blaster by beating the scraps of its previous owner into the ground?
  • Luke's answer to the AT-AT armor being too strong for his Snowspeeder's blasters in The Empire Strikes Back is to wrap tow cables around its legs, tripping it up.
  • Compared to the Imperials' and Rebels' highly-advanced blasters and mechanized infantry, the Ewoks of Return of the Jedi do surprisingly well using large trees on ropes to squish walkers and rock-and-twine bolas to entrap and beat Stormtroopers to death.
• In the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Sudden Death, he kills a man with a chicken bone (here).
• In Surf Ninjas, the mysterious guardian Zatch finds himself without a weapon against ninjas. So he reaches for the nearest object at hand... a skateboard. Which he uses as a Bo Staff.
• In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the title character's first kill, in the heat of the moment, involved him laying into Pirelli with a metal teapot and beating him into unconsciousness before stuffing him into a box. He has to finish him off with his razor because the beating didn't kill the guy.
• Tangled has Rapunzel’s iconic frying pan, which she uses throughout the movie. Flynn even borrows it at one point, and seems to enjoy using it as a weapon. When Rapunzel returns to her rightful place as princess, the entire royal guard starts wielding frying pans.
• In one of the most memorable scenes from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Casey Jones takes out Shredder's Dragon using a golf-club found in the crime-wave warehouse. (Casey's motif is usually other sports equipment as weapons; this gave him a new respect for golf.) Casey is in fact an Improbable Weapon User, as in the battle described above, Casey spends the first half of the fight getting his ass summarily handed to him. The exact moment when Casey turns the fight around and goes from being a punching bag to being a badass, making quick work of The Dragon? When he finds the golf club in a pile of debris into which The Dragon knocked him. In an act of major bowdlerisation, in the sequel the turtles do this throughout the whole movie, most notably in the shopping center at the beginning.
• In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Sarah Connor takes a psychologist as a hostage using a syringe full of cleaning fluid stuck in his neck, and threatening to kill him by injecting it if she wasn't left alone. The same psychologist comments how she had earlier stabbed his knee with a pen.
  • One of the hospital guards uses the plaster cast on her broken arm as a bludgeon to hit the T-800. All it does it break his Cool Shades but at least she tried.
• They Look Like People: In preparation for a final battle between humanity and body-snatching monsters he believes are taking over the world, Wyatt has collected a number of basic tools that can double as weapons, such as a carpenter's hammer and a fire axe. He also modifies a nailgun to shoot nails from a distance.
• Used occasionally in The Three Stooges. One short that took place in the Civil War era had Curly using a meat grinder for its intended purpose while the stooges were trapped and under heavy fire. Then Moe and Larry accidentally spill bullets into the meat grinder, leading to the stooges using it as a makeshift machine gun.
• In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, the big forest battle starts with Optimus whaling on Megatron with a couple of nearby trees.
• The Transporter specializes in these, or indeed anything with Jason Statham in it. The best example is beating up a roomful of Mooks with a fire hose in the second film. Then turning the hose on and leaving it to beat up the mooks by itself. Complete with Unflinching Walk.
• In The Tribe, Sergey makes good use of the desks of the gang members to dispatch them at the end.
• In Two Hands, Les grabs some coins out of a busker's case in order to use a pay phone. When the busker objects, Les snatches his saxophone off him and tosses it to the ground; breaking it. Just as Les is about to call Pando, the busker hits him over the head with the broken saxophone; knocking him out.
• In Undercover Blues, Jeff Blue uses his daughter's stroller to beat up two muggers.
• In United 93, which is based on the Real Life September 11 attacks, one of the passengers uses a fire extinguisher as a bludgeoning tool, whereas the hijackers use a food cart and a fake bomb. The flight attendants also boil water, break several wine bottles, and use every sharp eating utensil they can find in the back cabin.
• Valentine:
  • The Cupid-faced killer not only uses slasher film mainstays like knives and axes, but also a hot iron, broken shower door, and a power drill that gets coupled with a hot tub.
  • Ruthie, one of the killer's victims, briefly uses a pool cue to knock the killer down when he tries to attack her. Unfortunately she doesn't stay to press the advantage and gets killed.
• The Warriors: gang members fight with all manner of improvised weapons and repurposed items. Baseball bats, chains, belts, straight razors, two-by-fours, pipes, and bottles are all featured. In the end, a whole sequence is dedicated to the remaining Warriors preparing for battle with the Rogues by dismantling pipes and wood planks from the building their hiding behind.
• In Who's That Girl, Louden Trott uses a car antenna as a fencing weapon when he duels with the criminal lackey Raoul on top of a car in a parking garage.
• Willy's Wonderland: The Janitor takes out the animatronics using either his fists or any object he can get his hands on to use as a weapon. Special instances include killing Gus with a toilet plunger and beating Willy to death with a burlap sack full of Punch Cola cans.
• Adamantium claws as throwing knives in The Wolverine.
• Wreck-It Ralph: After getting caught by King Candy and the donut cops at the kart bakery, Ralph squirts a tube of icing at them with enough force to knock them down. It doesn't hurt them, but it distracts them long enough for Ralph and Vanellope to make a getaway on the brand-new kart they just made.
• The X-Men Film Series has a few cases with Magneto, whose powers enable him to turn metallic objects into deadly projectiles. X2: X-Men United has him ripping a guard's Blood Iron and fashioning it into a couple of pellets. X-Men: First Class features a Nazi coin being moved through a human head. And X-Men: Apocalypse gives a scene where a single metal locket manages to kill a whole police squad.
• In You Might Be the Killer, Imani and Jamie take shelter from the slasher villain pursuing them in a tool shed. They then spend a while discussing the relative merits and downsides of how the various items within can be used as improvised weapons.
• Zombieland — Jesse Eisenberg's character kills his newly reanimated neighbour with the lid off a toilet cistern.

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