Mook Horror Show / Live-Action Films

• Pretty much any Steven Seagal film. Case in point, Hard to Kill. Yeah, the bad guys killed his wife and put him in a seven-year coma, but the way Mason Storm stalks and kills them one by one, taunting them the whole time, you can't help but pity them. Especially the one he runs down and publicly executes with a neck-snap in front of all of Chinatown and his own son.
• 28 Days Later, once the character snaps, plays very much like this trope — up to him doing Offscreen Teleportation.
• In Act of Valor, all of the major gunfights the SEALs get in invoke this on the part of the terrorists/cartel soldiers. The parts shown from their perspective as they (try to) fight the SEALs shows them facing deadly squads of elite soldiers who are slipping among their positions in total silence, snipers picking off their men as they try to flee, and deadly-coordinated SEALs cutting down their troops with precise shots.
• A scene in Air Force One stages a shootout in the baggage hold of the eponymous plane; it's entirely from the perspective of the Russian baddies, while the hero, the President, is seen only as a vague silhouette delivering death to the terrified mooks.
• In Apocalypse Now, Willard embraces "the horror" by putting on face paint just like Kurtz, sneaking into the temple and hacking Kurtz to bits.
• At the end of Bangkok Dangerous 2008'' Joe stalks and efficiently kills many gangsters as they grow increasingly jumpy and frantic.
• The opening scene of Tim Burton's Batman (1989) qualifies — but then the trope is inverted in the movie's cathedral climax, with The Joker inviting Batman ("Shall we dance?") to tangle with his stealthy, gongfu-trained assassins. What makes the scenario especially ironic is that Batman has just survived being blown up and is already bleeding and at least partially physically weakened; he does manage to dispatch all three of the mooks — indeed, even killing one of them! — but it isn't easy.
• In Batman Begins, some of Batman's first attacks on criminals are filmed this way. Not to mention their POV of him gliding over the city while they are under the effects of the Fear Toxin. Plus the scene of him interrogating Jonathan Crane, a.k.a. Scarecrow, who at the moment was being Hoist by His Own Petard. This is exemplified by Bruce's statement of intent when he enters the League's headquarters:
  Bruce: I seek the means to fight injustice, to turn fear against those who prey on the fearful.
• In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Batman's first appearance plays out like this, except the POV characters are two Gotham cops rather than Mooks. First, they find the slaves who Batman saved from a human trafficker, refusing to leave their cell because the thing that saved them is still in the building. Then the cops hear the sounds of a fight and the human trafficker's terrified scream. The rookie cop, Officer Rucka, finds the human trafficker handcuffed to a radiator, badly beaten and branded with a Bat symbol. Rucka, already freaking out, suddenly realises that Batman is right behind him, causing him to panic and fire wildly at the Bat while Batman quickly crawls across the ceiling in a very creepy way and disappears.
  • Whilst his later rescue of Martha Kent in the warehouse is more action heavy, it still manages to weave in this aspect. The mercenaries prepare for Batman, guns trained squarely on the door where they think he'll make his entrance, only for Batman to explode up from underneath the floor, pulling at least one guy down through it and start swiftly killing them off one by one. Anatoli, secure in the room holding Martha, quite visibly begins freaking out at hearing the gunfire and screams coming from outside, realising that his men (whom number close to two dozen) are not stopping Batman.
• Bloodshot (2020): Ray confronts Martin Axe in a tunnel by turning out the lights and deliberately crashing a truck containing flour to block off the road. This plays out as the target's bodyguards getting stalked by a Super Strong, super-Healing Implacable Man through a dark area badly lit by flares and the red glow of his nanites, escaped flour in the air and on the ground like snow.
• Commando, especially the toolshed scene.
• A drawn out example in the second "Crocodile" Dundee movie. Once the bad guys follow Mick to Australia, he uses his knowledge of the terrain and the wildlife to take them out one at a time over the course of the second half of the movie.
• The Crow (1994) had a much more elaborate re-creation of the shootout on the street from the comic, set this time up in Top Dollar's penthouse suite above the nightclub he owns. Unlike in the comic, here Eric doesn't actually want to kill anyone except for Skank, one of his fiancée's rapists (all of whom were acting on Top Dollar's orders, but Eric doesn't know this yet) — and was willing to let everyone else live, including Top Dollar and his half-sister, if they would just hand Skank over to him. But Top Dollar's extreme arrogance drives him to immediately order Eric's execution — and the inevitable result is what looks like two dozen henchmen being slaughtered either by gunfire, Top Dollar's stash of antique weapons, or simply being thrown out the window. Ridiculously, they all keep coming at Eric even when it should be clear that they are absolutely no match for him even when all together, yet alone as one or two stubbornly persistent men.
• Dead Man's Shoes follows the victims whenever the main character confronts them.
• In Desperado, the opening scene has El Mariachi's character reintroduced this way as Buscemi narrates over one of these.
• Die Hard: Invoked. After John McClane accidentally kills one mook with a Neck Snap, he takes the opportunity to send the body down in the elevator, delivering a threatening message to Hans and the other terrorists written on the dead man's shirt in red marker: "NOW I HAVE A MACHINE GUN, HO HO HO". While the terrorists panic, John watches and takes notes on the perps from the ceiling above.
• Dredd is basically an extended Mook Horror Show. Dredd and Anderson respond to a murder investigation, bust the perp and it escalates from there. Ma-Ma sends Mooks to kill the two judges. It's not enough. She busts out three massive gatling guns to wipe out an entire floor. All this succeeds in doing is pissing Dredd off. She sends her top enforcer after him. He unceremoniously throws him off a balcony. When Anderson is kidnapped, Dredd lures more Mooks to a convenient spot and literally rains fire on them. Ma-Ma even tries bringing in Dirty Judges and this, thanks to Anderson's escape, only slows Dredd down for approximately two minutes with the net result of supplying him with more ammo. Her last resort of threatening to blow up Peach Trees itself ends in abject failure when Dredd simply shoots her and throws her off the 200th floor. The manner in which many Mooks die is quite brutal. Headshots. Fire headshots. Hi-Ex headshots. Kay puts it best.
  Kay: How the fuck are we gonna stop this guy?
• The retired government assassin turned protection for hire protagonist in The Equalizer films is a master at this. He stalks the Mooks, sets deadly traps often using normal household objects, along with deadly hand combat and weapons skills. Many Mooks and even the Big Bad start panicking once the bodies pile up. Not to mention he often shows up out of nowhere and gives them a chance to do the right thing before he goes Jason on them. He's so good at scaring them that the number one question a Mook ask before he kills them is: 'Who the hell are you?'
• Groupie: The plot involves a young woman ingratiating herself into the lives of a rock band whom she holds responsible for her brother's death. Once she's accepted in as a groupie, she kills each member off until there's one left to face her at the end.
• Hancock:
  • The opening sequence where Hancock breaks into the back of an SUV at the head of a high-speed chase, sits there arguing with the robbers inside for a minute, then when they break his sunglasses, stops the car dead by slamming his feet through the floor into the roadway, then lifting it off and flying it onto the top of a building where he skewers it on a spire and leaves the robbers there.
  • Also, the scene where he intervenes in the Hostage Situation inside a bank. We're shown the events from the bank robbers' POV, with Hancock just flying through the lobby and carrying off the mooks one at a time and the leader of the gang screaming, "What is happening???"
• In Ip Man, the eponymous hero spends the first hour of the film obviously pulling his punches every time he's in a fight; when his first opponent pulls out a sword Ip Man defeats him with a feather duster, in a sparring match against another master later, he either only taps the master instead of hitting forcefully or calls "Hit" (as in, that would have been a hit) when he goes to take advantage of an opening in the martial artist's defense. Then the Japanese soldiers occupying his city kill one of Ip's fellow masters by shooting him when he has no hope of defending himself. A furious Ip Man answers a challenge from a Japanese Karate dojo by walking into the school and demanding to fight 10 of the students at once. This time he's not holding back. He doles out a serious No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to the ten black belts, every punch and kick delivered full force, every move done with lethal efficiency and an ice cold rage. The fight isn't very long, only about a minute and a half from the first blow to the last, but even so it hasn't been going on for long before you see that the black belts who haven't been taken out yet are increasingly scared because they can't even touch him while he dishes out brutal injuries to them. By the time only one is left, that guy looks like he's doing his best to keep from shaking in fear as Ip Man approaches him. This reaction is entirely understandable considering the injuries Ip Man has inflicted include:
  • Throwing a guy to the ground out of midair and stomping on his face
  • Punching a man repeatedly in the face before dislocating his arm
  • Dislocating a leg at the hip
  • Beating down two men separately with Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs
  • Flinging a man around and throwing him so hard he rotates in the air
  • Stomping, kneeing, and elbowing a man in his back
  • Various pressure point attacks, at one point while four of the remaining black belts attempt to attack him at once
  • The most notable one however was when he held the survivor's head between his knees and slugged him presumably in the nose repeatedly
• The James Bond films rarely go here due to the necessity of keeping Bond a positive character. There have been exceptions:
  • After Bond sends a mook on skis careening over a cliff in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the camera stays on the mook as he takes his long, final, fall to his death.
  • The death scream uttered by the unnamed villain whose parachute Bond steals at the start of Moonraker is one of the most disturbing sounds ever heard in cinema.
  • The way Bond kills the bald man (i.e. the expy Blofeld) at the start of For Your Eyes Only could trigger this trope in anyone with claustrophobia (or acrophobia).
  • The worst offender may be GoldenEye in which Bond mows down a dozen Russian soldiers who just happened to be on duty at the wrong place and time. And then he gets a tank…
  • Dr. Kaufman, in Tomorrow Never Dies, is one of the only characters in the Bond film canon to be heard begging for his life before 007 kills him anyway.
  • A very subtle one occurs in Casino Royale (2006). When Bond shoots the corrupt section chief in his office, for a split second a close-up of a photograph on the man's desk is shown — an image showing him with his family.
• John Wick. Bob Chipman described the series as an inverted Slasher Movie franchise where the killer is the hero (even moreso than usual), and throughout the films, John is presented as a dreaded figure in the criminal underworld who we see absolutely earned his terrifying reputation. The young dumbass who convinces him to come out of retirement gets a massive "The Reason You Suck" Speech from his own father, a crime boss who knows how screwed he now is.
• Kick-Ass:
  • Hit-Girl, particularly during her night-vision FPS shootout scene where she's shooting gangsters left and right as they're unable to see her under cover of darkness. Done again in Frank D'Amico's penthouse when she prepares to shoot a cowering mook on the floor, runs out of bullets and runs to the kitchen. The mook stands some distance away and unloads automatic fire on the spot she's hiding in, lowers his gun and looks away in assumed success, and gets a pair of flying kitchen knives in the chest.
  • Big Daddy's more literal "show", the warehouse massacre, witnessed by Chris via a hidden cam is unsurprisingly terrifying from his point of view. Whilst more subdued in his reaction, his father is still clearly shaken by what he sees.
    Frank D'Amico: Who the hell is this guy?!
• Kill Bill: The Bride's battle against the Crazy 88, in which she utterly spanks them (literally, in one case). It's nearly 20 minutes long!
• In The Long Kiss Goodnight, Charlie's rampage through the farmhouse is not seen, only heard, from Mitch's perspective as he's locked in the basement.
• Looper: When Old Joe gets loose in Abe’s hideout, the results play out like a horror movie; he shows Abe’s crew just what a Looper with decades of experience can be like by methodically slaughtering his way through the building, with all of the mooks utterly helpless to stop him.
• Many of these occur in The Lord of the Rings. Several involve Legolas; for example:

  • When he rides down the stairs at Helm's Deep shooting Uruk-hai all over the place
  • When he kills the oliphaunt but must first take out the Haradrim riders controlling it

  • Others include:
    • Aragorn and Gimli driving off the Uruk-Hai from the gate at Helm's Deep. It almost seems as if some of the Uruk-Hai simply fall off the high bridge in terror.
    • The Rohirrim cavalry when they finally arrive at the battle of Minas Tirith; as they come close to the orc army, we see the orcs' expressions go from fierce determination to sheer terror, down to even the uber-tough, cocky general Gothmog. The orcs in front are swept down and trampled instantly in the charge, and from there the Rohirrim just keep charging through, knocking down, slashing and trampling orcs by hundreds and thousands until finally the ones farther back start to flee, only to be also caught in the path of the horses and trampled.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man, Tony's escape from the cave in a huge, unstoppable suit of powered armor is played out a bit like a monster movie, especially the armor's debut; the lights go out, and a nightmarish, hulking metal thing looms behind one of the terrorists. He does it again when he goes back to Afghanistan and kills all the terrorists with his new upgraded armor.
  • The first appearance of the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk is deliberately done in this way.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron opens with soldiers rushing about because they're under attack... by the Avengers.
    Henchman: Herr Strucker, it's the Avengers!
    Strucker: Can we hold them?!
    Henchman: They're the Avengers...
  • Black Panther: The African slavers attacked by Black Panther in the middle of the night. First their vehicles inexplicably stall all at once, then they spot a dog barking at... something in a tree, and one of them is sent flying into a car, hard enough to bend metal. Follow a brutal take-down by a mysterious, black-clad figure with an animalistic look that just shrugs off their bullets and kills them one by one with claws.
  • Avengers: Infinity War: Thor becomes this to the Outriders, Thanos' Elite Mooks invading Wakanda. He unleashes such phenomenal devastation upon them with his axe Stormbreaker that they begin to flee in terror. Given that Thanos is a Bad Boss who would kill them for failure and cowardice, they fear the God of Thunder more than they fear their own master.
  • Captain Marvel:
    • A short one plays out as Fury and Maria are pursued by enemies and Maria runs out of ammo. As the Starforce soldiers close in on them, Goose sprouts a bunch of giant tentacles from her mouth and grabs all the Kree. Cut to a shot from an adjacent hallway, where the waving tentacles pull them out of sight, and screaming and slurping are heard as they get eaten.
    • Once Carol taps into her powers' full potential, she curbstomps an Accuser armada threatening the Earth, tearing through each ship like it's nothing. Not helped by the fact that the fight is partially viewed by the last Accuser standing, Ronan, who wisely turns the remaining Kree around.
  • Avengers: Endgame:
    • Thoroughly broken after losing his wife and children, Clint Barton has a violent fall from grace. When we see him again after the Time Skip, he's abandoned his Hawkeye identity to become the vicious vigilante Ronin, Walking the Earth to tear apart the Earth's surviving criminal population.
    • Spider-Man finally decides to activate the Instant-Kill Mode of his Iron Spider armor, skewering Thanos' monsters left, right and center.
    • Tony Stark swipes the Infinity Stones from Thanos and places them in a Gauntlet of his own. He snaps his fingers just as Thanos had done to wipe out half the universe in ''Infinity War'', and suddenly every opponent on the battlefield, Thanos included, disintegrates into piles of ash in what proves to be Tony's Crowning (and Dying) Moment of Awesome.
• The intro of Ninja Assassin is a textbook example. Except it's not the hero who's acting the part of the monster.
• The opening hit scene of The Professional. Leon knocks off the Fatman's henchmen one by one — point blank headshot, garrote from the ceiling panel, pulled over the stairwell by a necktie, numerous shootings behind sun shades — without anyone (the guards or viewer) ever laying eyes on him. "Those fuckers blocked both the exits," mutters the Fatman, when seeing Tonto hanging by the neck on CCTV. Finally, the Fatman ends up with a knife to his throat, produced by Leon's disembodied arm out of the shadow. Leon then reveals himself and makes the Fatman call the number of the man who's hired Leon to intimidate him into leaving town.
• There is always at lease one scene in every Rambo movies.
  • In the First Blood, the corrupt Sheriff's squad gets mangled one by one though non lethally and when the leader is the last one left, Rambo holds a knife to his throat while saying that he could have killed them all if he wanted to, before warning him not to push it and to let it go, or he will "give him a war he won't believe".
  • In Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo stalks a Russian hit squad looking for him. In this scene we are often seeing through the mooks' eyes and, Rambo is depicted as a fearsome invisible stalker like the Predator.
  • In Rambo III, a group of Russian special forces chased Rambo into a cave. Likewise, we are often treated with the mooks' view as Rambo kills them one by one in the dark. It ends with the helicopter pilot giving out an Oh, Crap! just before Rambo destroys his helicopter with an explosive arrow.
  • In Rambo: Last Blood, Rambo lures Hugo and his men into the tunnels of his ranch, which results in every single mook falling victim to Rambo himself and his booby traps, except for Hugo, who Rambo later kills by ripping his heart out.
• The assassination attempt on Moses in the beginning of Red (2010). A CIA hit squad goes to eliminate a single retiree. They don't catch on to just how dangerous their target actually is until he's killed two of them and they haven't even seen him yet.
• In Resident Evil: Apocalypse the S.T.A.R.S. squad who are targeted by Nemesis who massacres all of them, except for the taxi driver who is spared.
• The second act of Riddick is focused on the mercenaries trying to capture Riddick, with Riddick essentially taking the role of the murderer in a horror film.
  • Also the opening scene of the previous film in the series The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) has the mercenary crew hunting down Riddick. After they chase him into an ice canyon the scene plays out mostly from their perspective, panicking as crew mates disappear one by one, until only the last one is left, and he finds that Riddick has disarmed him already.
• Road House (1989) has Dalton attacking Wesley's mansion, picking off his mooks one by one before battling Wesley himself.
• RoboCop has shades of this. He is effectively bulletproof, slow but nigh-unstoppable, more machine than man, and has perfect aim. Most bad guys try to run while RoboCop walks after them like a typical horror movie villain. His early arrests of Emil and Clarence in RoboCop both emphasize their utter helplessness when face-to-face with him.
• Joey's actions in Rolling Vengeance tends to play out this way. We hardly get any shots of him inside the truck, while his victims flee desperately in terror from him. The truck itself is demonic-looking, completely with flames spewing out its exhaust pipes and a giant drill on the front. This could just have easily been a horror movie if the monster truck was driven by a villain instead.
• In The Rookie, Charlie Sheen's character instantly switches from coward to badass when his partner (Clint Eastwood) is kidnapped. The trope kicks in when he enters a bar in which he previously had the shit beaten out of him. First he breathes fire on the bartender, beats up half the patrons and fires off several rounds from his gun — at this point, the patrons are standing in stunned silence. Then he trashes the place and sets fire to it, at which point they all flee in terror.
• In The Scorpion King, the hero uses a sandstorm to force a bunch of Mooks into a cave, where he kills them one by one.
• Serenity: River's rampage in the Maidenhead bar is definitely one of these.
• Early in The Shadow, some mooks have fitted an old man with cement shoes and are about to drop him into a river when the title character shows up and picks them off unseen, taunting them with wisecracks and his signature laugh as he goes.
• Shin Kamen Rider (2023) has the opening scene in which Takeshi Hongo/Batta Augment 01 saves Ruriko Midorikawa from Kumo Aug and the SHOCKER grunts. It ends up being a Deconstruction of the usual kind of battles in Kamen Rider, with Ludicrous Gibs and liberal splashes of blood emanating from every punch and kick, since Hongo's a physically-superior Super-Soldier with his restraints removed by the mask. Needless to say, he's horrified by what he's done when it's all over.
• The ending of Shooter. Swagger has escaped the Government Conspiracy framing him and succeeded in clearing his good name, but the conspiracy's masterminds have seemingly gotten off scot-free as well, and are meeting up at a secluded hunting lodge to plot the whole thing all over again. Suddenly, one of their mooks drops dead in the middle of the meeting. Then The Dragon catches a bullet to the throat. Then the lights go out, and Swagger really gets to work.
• In Solo (1996), he sneaks back to liberate the village and kills the rebels one by one. There's even an old woman that tells that Solo will kill them all.
• Spider-Man of all people briefly causes this for the man who is believed to be Uncle Ben's killer, sneaking through the shadows in the background before attacking from behind.
• Star Wars:
  • Episode I — The Phantom Menace shows the Trade Federation leaders panicking as the implacable Jedi make their way to the bridge, mowing down any droids they send against them.
  • Episode III — Revenge of the Sith shows dozens of clone troopers experiencing this when Yoda and Obi Wan re-enter the Jedi Temple. The Jedi hardly break stride as they slaughter them all without a scratch.
  • Episode VI — Return of the Jedi:
    • The moment Luke Skywalker and his lightsaber are reunited at the Pit of Carkoon, everything goes downhill fast for Jabba the Hutt's assorted gangsters as they are blasted, sliced, sent flying headlong into the Sarlaac's gaping maw, or all three. Jabba himself is strangled to death in the dark by Princess Leia. It doesn't go much better for the Imperial stormtroopers on Endor's moon once the Ewoks get into the fight as they go from having the "Rebel scum" dead to rights to being massacred by a swarm of waist-high teddy bears and their booby traps.
    • There's also the crew of the Executor after a kamikaze Rebel fighter crashes into their bridge and sends them plummeting into the Death Star II.
• Sucker Punch:
  • When Babydoll kills two of the demon samurai, the third is shown hesitating and trembling. When he finally draws his katana and charges, she kills him in a Single-Stroke Battle.
  • In the WWI sequence, two German soldiers spot Babydoll walking toward them and try desperately to set up and load a massive lewis gun, but fail and are cut down. After he crashes, the German courier tries to ward off Babydoll with his gun, and is shocked when she deflects his bullets while marching toward him.
• Part and parcel of the Taken series. Best example (or worst, for the mook in question) would be the scene in the first film where Mills tortures a guy with electricity, leaving it turned on as he departs.
• Pops up near the end of Waterworld, when the Mariner boards the Smoker vessel. After murdering one of them, a group of Smokers start hunting him throughout the ship. He slowly picks them off in a segment interspersed with scenes of the Morality Pet bragging about how the Mariner will kill them all.
• We Are the Night: The vampires kill a group of Russian gangsters with ease, and the sole survivor later is a paranoid wreck after seeing it.
• Dale from Wrong Turn 2: Dead End seems to have been lifted right from an action movie and put into this horror movie. After escaping capture by the mutant family that has been killing and eating anyone who goes into the woods, he starts killing them off one by one (mostly using explosives). It took getting shot with multiple arrows (which only pissed him off) and having razorwire thrown around his neck to bring him down. The surviving mutants are absolutely horrified to find the splattered remains of their family.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men: First Class: The Soviet soldiers who are suddenly attacked by barbed wire when Erik Lehnsherr (who hadn't turned villain yet) decides to invade the general's residence.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: Wolverine's run through Stryker's goons in lake Alkali. They grow more and more terrified as he continues to butcher his way through them.
  • Two of them in Logan:
    • The first is at Laura's hands. After the fight breaks out at Logan's hideaway, she retreats back into the cover of the building that serves as Logan's house, but she's not running away. As several of Pierce's men pursue her, she works her way through the shadows, picking them off one-by-one in a way that makes it clear that she's not trying to run. She's hunting them.
    • Logan gets in on the act when Xavier has a seizure at the casino. Pierce's Reavers have located the room they're staying in, but are frozen in place when Xavier loses control of his power. Logan arrives, and though in great pain remains mobile. The hapless Reavers can only watch helplessly as he stalks towards them one-by-one, slaughtering them while unable to defend themselves.
• You're Next: The Final Girl Erin is the daughter of a Crazy Survivalist who learned a lot of his survival skills growing up in the Outback. About halfway into the film, she proceeds to turn the tables on the crew of killers attacking the house and start slaughtering them from the shadows one by one.