Made Of Plasticine / Live-Action Films

• This one is extremely prevalent in the horror genre (hence the term Splatter Horror), in Zombie Stories in particular. See the Final Destination series for good examples of the 'accidental' variety.
  • Dawn of the Dead (1978) has several scenes, particularly during the early scenes in the apartment building, where zombies bite off chunks of flesh that come off as easily as if they were made of silly putty. A memorable moment is when one very unluckly (and very dumb) biker gets Devoured by the Horde while attached to a machine that reads a person's blood pressure, leaving one of his arms still hooked up to the device.
  • Day of the Dead (1985): Remember poor Captain Rhodes? Very easily ripped apart by a mob of zombies living and screaming.
  • In Return of the Living Dead the zombies bite through skulls like the skin of an apple.
• War films aiming to up the ante on Saving Private Ryan, which mostly did a very good job of accurately depicting the horrific effects of modern weaponry on the poor sods at its receiving end.
  • At one point, a 20mm anti-aircraft gun is turned on a squad of American soldiers overrunning a Tiger. After a salvo, one guy was instantly decapitated and the rest were mutilated so badly that the Germans finishing them off seemed like a Mercy Kill. Another guy trying to attach a sticky bomb to a tank is blown to Pink Mist when the improvised bomb explodes in his face.
• While The Punisher (2004) was comparatively understated, the next film, Punisher: War Zone plays this very, very straight. Frank at one point even punches a man through the face, shattering it like a clay pot filled with raspberry jam. The violence plays out like a live-action version of Happy Tree Friends.
• A mook is killed by the hero in Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) when he's bench pressed up into a hanging icicle, which impales his skull.
• Laughably gratuitous Platoon B-ripoff, Deadly Prey has Mike Danton, at one point, kill an enemy mook by stabbing him through the heart with a twig.
• Kung Pow! Enter the Fist does a Lampshade Hanging on this concept. Near the beginning, the hero punches a foot-wide hole through a man — and the Narrator is so stunned that he can't talk about anything else:
  Narrator: I mean, CRAP MAN. Look at that! That's, like, his stomach-plug, on the ground back there, you don't see that every day!... I mean, tha- that doesn't really even seem possible if you think about it. I mean with body organs and cartilage and bones and- I mean I'm no doctor, but it was like one clean chunk!
  • The movie itself subverts this at the end: there's a confirmed fake trailer for a sequel, which features the man who had his stomach punched out spinning the stomach plug around on a chain.
• The martial arts movie Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is infamous for indulging in this. Aside from a famous clip of a man smashing another man's head between his palms (used on The Daily Show during the Kilborn years), one scene shows a disemboweled man trying to strangle the hero with his intestines.
  • The original manga went even further with this, including such gruesome spots as the titular character uppercutting a man, causing his fist to go up through the bottom of his opponent's jaw, through his mouth, or another time when he cut open an absurdly large opponent's stomach with a slash of his hand. And those are only the tamer examples. There's a reason that each issue is called "Violence #" instead of Chapter #...
  • The man faces more obese bastards than Kenshiro can shake his fist at (one even helps him after displaying some sense). In fact, he does something kind of similar to another of these dudes, but instead of treating his arm like a needle of sorts, he horizontally chops him in two starting with the stomach... Yeesh. On the other hand, the two OVA episodes are generally seen as less violent (the first episode merely has the first guy punched in one of the pectorals).
  • The intestines scene is based on an old Japanese legend, in which a fighter, facing his nemesis in combat, suffers a mortal wound to the abdomen. Rather than let his enemy escape, he then follows one of the basic precepts of bushido, that one should have the conviction of purpose to be able to commit a final action even after being decapitated, and proceeds to strangle his nemesis to death with his own intestines, dying in the process.
• It's somewhat alarming how easily Arthur hacks apart the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But then again, "It's Excalibur... Sort of. Well, it would have been if we had the budget."
  • Monty Python uses this trope a lot, including Mr. Creosote^note who, in a partial exception, has visible ribs and other internal bits after he bursts in The Meaning of Life, the Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days sketch, and more than one instance in Flying Circus where people explode for no reason. Case in point:
    Mother: Oh, she was my best friend!
    Minister for Overseas Development: Mother, don't be so sentimental. Things explode every day.
    Mother: Yes, I suppose so.
• Uma Thurman certainly played out her share of this in Kill Bill. Refer to her semi-satirical "your limbs belong to me" speech after completely tearing apart the Crazy 88. In addition, Yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii calmly cuts a fellow boss's head off in one stroke for insulting her Chinese-American/Japanese heritage.
• In Shoot 'Em Up, the main character kills a mook with a carrot. In one of the first scenes, he puts a carrot in a bad guy's mouth and punches it through the back of his head. Extra plasticity.
• Averted in 30 Days of Night, where multiple messy chops are needed to sever heads. Unlike Highlander.
• Highlander may have a viable explanation. They've been training and fighting to be able to do just that for hundreds of years, and often have very exceptional weapons that they've collected or been given.
• In Cloverfield a woman appears to bloat up like a balloon and then explode due to some form of toxic, poisonous, or infectious bite.
• Parodied in Top Secret!, a guard falls off a building, lands on the ground on his back, and shatters like a clay statue.
• Any Sonny Chiba grindhouse film made in the United States. One notable example: The Bodyguard, in which Chiba's character grabs a man's hand as it busts through a door, and cleanly breaks it off in two fluid snapping motions.
• Played straight and parodied in Shaun of the Dead. Broken records can easily penetrate zombies' faces, and pool cues are viable, reusable bludgeoning weapons. However, after the zombies spend most of the film being highly ineffectual, they completely tear apart a person with their bare hands and consume him entirely, minus a severed head that gets passed into the crowd and a leg that his friend was clinging. (She proceeds to brandish the leg as a bludgeoning weapon and charges into the horde. And, according to the DVD special features, survives by climbing up a tree and munching on the leg for sustenance.
• Played with, subverted, and lampshaded in Hot Fuzz: No one who saw it will ever forget Tim Messenger's sendoff, although, from the weight and height of the murder device, the result is not too unrealistic. More often, strangely, the film tends to play this the other way- one might expect an old woman, having received a flying kick to the head, to suffer worse than a broken nose. And of course, lampshaded repeatedly (along with numerous other action film tropes) through the character of Danny: "Is it true there is a place in a man's head that if you shoot it, it will blow up?"
• The World's End has a rare example of Mecha-Mooks being made of plasticine: the "Blanks" are made of a brittle plastic-like material that shatters when struck with a good punch or blunt object, and their limbs are held together with joints similar to cheap action figures that easily pop off with enough force.
• In The Happening, a man's arms are torn off by lions as if they were attached to his body by velcro. He doesn't even get pulled off his feet.
• Wes Craven's Deadly Friend has robot strength capable of demolishing a person's head with a basketball.
• One memorable scene from The Machine Girl involves a man exploding after being hit with a shuriken barrage. One can only wonder what his blood pressure must have been like.
• Final Destination series:
  • Final Destination 2:
    • A falling pane of glass causes an unlucky victim to fold like an accordion.
    • A subversion later on, where a woman is decapitated in an elevator... but it's far from a clean cut.
    • Or the flying tire which causes one of our heroes' head to disintegrate into Pink Mist. Because apparently a broken neck and/or skull fracture isn't visceral enough for The Grim Reaper.
  • Final Destination 4: There's a guy who gets strained through a metal grid fence, with one chunk falling out to show that he was apparently boneless (since it's a plug of solid flesh where his ribcage should have been).
• In the first Underworld (2003) movie, during the climax, Selene slices clean through Viktor's skull and brain with a sword. Viktor apparently doesn't even feel or notice it to the point that he thinks she missed. Until the top of his head slides off.
• In Dead Man, Cole Wilson smashes a fresh corpse's head into a pancake merely by stepping on it.
• In Hancock, Ray Embry has little trouble cleanly slicing off a man's hand using a fireman's axe. Not that the moment isn't played for laughs.
• Pterodactyl:
  • One of the characters is snapped up by the titular reptile in a fell swoop, leaving behind his strangely-detachable legs.
  • Later on, a teenage girl is snatched by the shoulders...and tears in half at the waist. Apparently, the human body is simply too fragile to handle its own weight.
  • One of the flying reptiles decapitates a man with ITS WING. Apparently, not only are Pteranodons made of iron, they are razor sharp as well.
• Diary of the Dead is full of this trope, having people casually impaling people several times in a row with a blunt IV stand. Also, the vertical slice through a skull with seemingly no effort on the character doing it. Not forgetting the elderly man that managed to shove a scythe through both his own head and that of a zombie with minimum effort.
• Some have hung a lampshade on this, most notably in From Dusk Till Dawn when Sex Machine talks about vampire bodies being "pushier and mooshier" than humans, despite their superior strength.
• Paul Verhoeven used to be very fond of this trope:
  • RoboCop (1987):
    • Among other things, Emil drives into a toxic waste vat, which dissolves the guy so badly that when he climbs out and is struck by a car, he falls apart into a splatter of goo like a blister pricked by a hot needle. (Fridge Logic: how was he still standing?)
  • Starship Troopers (1997): Oh Lordy... despite wearing what's presumably military-grade armor, it seems your average mobile infantry grunt can be decapitated or impaled by even casual contact with a bug.
• Sci-Fi channel direct-to-video feature Dead Men Walking. Zombie outbreak in prison. If zombies grab you, one of two things will happen. Your limbs will be pulled off like taffy or your chest will be torn open in the same exact way as the fifty victims before you. If your death is meant to be slow, big marshmallow chunks will be taken out of your neck.
• The Hitcher remake. It's a fair bet that if you chained someone to two different trucks, then set off in two different directions, something bad would happen. It would not, however, look like that. Averted in the original, as we simply don't see the gruesome results.
• In Cabin Fever, a young woman is completely torn apart by an average sized Alsatian; this happens off screen and a few seconds after the attack, when the hero reaches the scene, the largest visible intact part of the girl is her bitten off foot still in its sandal. Granted, the flesh-eating-virus premise almost justifies this trope, but not to that extreme.
• Turkish Star Wars takes this trope to the extreme. The protagonist doesn't have any problem karate-chopping limbs off enemies and sometimes even karate-chopping them in half. Both horizontally and vertically.
• UHF:
  • In the opening scene, someone pulls a gun on Weird Al, who turns around and uses a whip to knock the man's arm off, though it was the WRONG arm. Al is also completely flattened by a boulder later on, and anyone shot with a regular bullet in his Rambo dream blows to chunks.
  • And in the Conan the Librarian segment, a man is not only sliced in half lengthwise with casual ease, but his insides are also just red spongy stuff with no sign of bone or organs.
• In Feast, a baby monster no bigger than a spaniel runs past a woman, striking her on the leg in passing, and its claws shear through her shin so cleanly that neither she nor the amputated limb fall over. Moments later, it peels the skin from a man's face in a single swipe, like pulling off a band-aid.
• Strangely enough, it's Uwe Boll who takes this to its logical conclusion in BloodRayne - any battle scene without a main character is of mooks swinging at red sponges in clothing with plastic swords.
• Rambo IV loves this. Rambo's machine gun shreds bodies to pieces and makes them explode into geysers of blood if there's a head shot. Kinda justified though, since he's using an M2 Browning, which has been used to take down snipers by chopping down the trees they're hiding in (albeit when chained with three others). Rambo ripping the throat out of a rapist with his bare hands, however, firmly qualifies.
• Undead is a comedy in the mold of Braindead. Best scene is when a zombie girl punches an old lady in the face, and its fist goes clear through her head! The fist emerges through the back of the old woman's skull, holding a big chunk of brain to boot.
• Subverted in My Blue Heaven; Steve Martin's character tells the court about a Real Life mob execution procedure, where they shoot you in that opening in your skull right behind your ear with a low-caliber gun, and the bullet bounces around inside your head, "eating up your brain like Pac-Man", with no cleanup.
• Played straight and then lampshaded in Peter Jackson's no-budget indy gorefest Bad Taste. Two characters, when trying to silence a struggling enemy, not only rip off his head but also extract his entire spine. A member of the group notes, "Gee, they come to bits easy!"
• Dead Snow: Very present in this Norwegian zombie film.
  • At one point a zombie plunges its fingers into a man's eye sockets and pulls outward, which results in the man's head splitting in half vertically. Apparently, human skulls come apart like clam shells.
  • The protagonist who apparently brushed against a broken branch — with enough force to tear through his jacket, shirt, and torso, and then sufficiently anchor in his intestines and drag about fifteen feet of it out when he kept running.
• The Saw series — at least after the first two films. The human body is apparently nothing but flesh-colored play-dough filled with blood-bags and a skeleton of Styrofoam.
• Predators - A predator defeats a man, who then lies face-down on the ground. The predator reaches into the guy's back, grabs his spine, and pulls, managing to rip the whole spine out, with the skull attached to the spine, as if pulling a spoon from dishwater.
• A similar thing happens in Species, attributed to Sil's monstrous strength (although giving no reason why attachment between the victim's spine and the rest of their body is apparently so fragile).
• Hellraiser:
  • The human body is often presented this way, especially the skin, which is treated like a garment, especially in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, where Pinhead plants a hook in a girl's forehead and pulls on said hook, which yanks the girl's entire skin from her body like a sheet from a mattress.
  • Pinhead's pins. In Hellbound: Hellraiser II, these are shown to be fairly long nails that are driven into the skull. In real life, they are, basically, half-nails glued to Doug Bradley's face, and therefore move around a lot more than nails actually would if they were sticking into the bone, creating the sensation that Pinhead's head is just a big water balloon, an elastic casing filled with goo.
• Heartbreakingly averted in King of the Ants, in which a character is hired for an assassination, despite having no business even attempting such a thing. His heart really isn't in the task, and to make it worse, his target does not die easily.
• Practically every victim in the Halloween series is this.
  • With particular mention to the victims who are decapitated in one clean cut, and Nora from Halloween: Resurrection who loses so much blood after being stabbed, multiple characters slip on it towards the end of the film.
  • Averted in the first film, instead having (almost) Bloodless Carnage.
• In The Thing (1982), we see the team doctor trying to resurrect an unconscious team member via defibrillation. As he attempts to strike the patient's chest with the defibrillator, the patient's stomach opens up and grabs hold of the doctor's arms with a massive set of teeth, tearing his arms off. Now sure, this would probably be legitimate, alien strength and all...if the arms hadn't torn off a few inches above the teeth grip.
• Suicide Club does this with the opening scene, but when you're running over 54 girls with a train in a low-budget movie, you can't afford to have them turn into anything but a bloody paste.
• Played straight and averted in Fright Night (2011), as Evil Ed's arm gets cut off by Peter Vincent's panic room door, but Charley's axe-swing fails to decapitate him.
  "Bone is a motherfucker, eh, Charley?"
• The "Play-Doh effect" of early zombie films is probably the earliest modern example of the trope. Thanks to technological restraints, bodily dismemberment often looked fairly unrealistic, with the zombies tearing through completely healthy human bodies with ease.
• The wuxia The Sword of Swords have the blinded Handicapped Badass hero killing mooks about to sneak up on him... by flinging dinner plates into their faces. Said plates embeds into their flesh and through the skull, for some reason.
• At the beginning of Orson Welles' classic Touch of Evil, the murder whose investigation forms the basis for the plot is committed with a bomb. Afterwards, one character remarks of the victim, whose remains aren't shown, as he looks down into the camera: "Once he ran this town. Now you could strain him through a sieve."
• The Hatchet series has a bizarre mix of this trope and its opposite, Made of Iron; bodies come apart like wet kleenex, but the victims endure this somehow without passing out from shock before they die, likely to heighten just how damn SADISTIC the films are.
• Friday the 13th: This trope is in effect throughout the series with both the killers and the victims. Certain shining examples include...
  • Part 6 Jason punches through a man's chest and out his back, holding the man's heart.
  • Part 8 Jason punches a guy in the face with a fist, which acts to decapitate him cleanly at the neck as if he just encountered a guillotine.
  • Part 9 Jason punches a young woman through the torso with a dull fencepost, under the ribcage, making it this trope. The post is then pulled upward and out of her shoulder, ripping her in half when it should have simply lifted her up.
• In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Dracula's death both averts it and plays it painfully straight. The heroes try to stab him in the heart with a bowie knife and decapitate him with a kukri (which is accurate to the book, which did not kill him with a wooden stake,) but neither penetrates cleanly, leaving him only wounded with a cut throat and a knife stuck in his chest. Mina Harker eventually strikes the deathblow by pushing the knife further into his heart (absolutely fine, he was lying down, not struggling, and she put her full weight behind it,) but then pulling the knife out of him with no apparent effort, and then cutting his head off with it with one blow. Given that she is a woman with no extreme strength or training, and the bowie knife was nowhere near the size of a meat cleaver, much less a proper sword, the decapitation looks completely ridiculous.
• You might as well be if you're unfortunate enough to cross paths with the werewolves in The Wolfman (2010).
• All over the place in I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle, but especially in the scene where a tea lady gets crushed between her tea trolley and a wall by the demon-possessed motorcycle, and the trolley cleanly bisects her.
• Ex Machina: The gynoid is actually designed to be more fragile than an actual human to avoid the possibility of her overpowering her creator and escaping.
  • Ava takes a blow that would break an arm for a human but completely removes hers.
  • Played for horror with Jade, banging on the door to her cell until her arms disintegrate. Though the recording is sped up, it only took a few minutes.
• In X-Men: First Class, Magneto slowly moves a coin all the way through a man's head without even the slightest bit of resistance. It slips right in and out the back, with barely even any blood, as if the guy was a human slot machine. Considering the victim was standing in the middle of the room with nothing holding him in place but Mind Control, poking him in the forehead with a blunt object should've just pushed him back and made him fall over.
• In Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror, a tagger trips while drinking from a large bottle of booze, lands face-first on the bottle's open spout, and it punches through his skull without cracking or tipping over. Its blunt, unbroken spout, mind you, after an ordinary stumble that shouldn't have done worse than bloodied his nose.
• The zombies in Dance of the Dead are remarkably easy to tear apart, even with one's bare hands. Of course, that could just be due to Coach Keel being a One-Man Army.
• In Death Spa, the haunted spa kills its patrons in various physically impossible ways. Stand-out examples include a man somehow suffering a rupture while using a butterfly press, and a woman having her head blown to pieces by an exploding mirror.
• In Eat (2014), Novella is capable of ripping chunks of flesh from her own body with grotesque ease, including excarnating her big toe in one large chunk of meat. At the end, she is even able to cut out her own heart with a carving knife and her bare hands (though it might be a Dying Dream).
• In District 9, the Prawn-made BFGs have horrendous effects on human targets, which is why everyone wants a piece of our protagonist Wikus as these weapons have DNA locking mechanisms so only Prawns can use them. Justified because Prawns are Insectoid Aliens with tough exoskeletons - a 9mm bullet might as well be a spitwad unless it hits at very close, muzzle-touching range. So of course their weapons shred Puny Earthlings into fine paste.

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