Examples of The Neidermeyer in live-action film.
- In Adventure in Sahara, Captain Savatt is a martinet who lives to make the life of the men under command hell. His punishments include making one soldier stand watch on the walls of the fort for two days straight; without relief and without food or water. The soldier goes blind and falls from the wall to his death. His cruelty eventually lead the legionnaires to stage a mutiny.
- Lt. Gorman in Aliens certainly qualifies for this, due to his relative inexperience, General Failure at managing the alien attack, rear-echelon tactics and the resulting lack of respect from his troops. However, this is subverted later in the story in that he tries to apologise for being a bad officer, has no trouble submitting command to a more experienced and competent subordinate, and shows great personal bravery, even attempting to save the Marine who despised him the most.
- Corporal Himmelstoss from All Quiet on the Western Front. He bullies Paul Baümer's squad during basic training; in retaliation, they ambush him, put a sack over his head, and beat him bloody. Himmelstoss later is transferred to the front himself, after, depending on the adaptation, "nearly killing a squad of rookies on the muddy field" or maltreating a recruit whose father turned out to have too much influence. He at first performs badly and chickens out of a charge, much to Paul Bäumer's disgust, but when an officer orders him to advance, Himmelstoss charges wildly. His eventual fate varies by adaptation. In the novel, he makes up with his former victims and while acting as substitute company cook sees to it they get good food. In the 1930 film, he is killed when following orders to advance. In the 1979 TV film, he receives an Iron Cross from Kaiser Wilhelm II for his perceived heroics on the battlefield.
- The Trope Namer is the blowhard ROTC commander Douglas C. Neidermeyer from Animal House. The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue reveals that he ended up being shot by his own troops in Vietnam. In the John Landis-directed segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, we even meet the soldiers who shot him.
- Babylon 5: In the Beginning: General Lefcourt approaches Commander John Sheridan to be the first officer to Captain Michael Jankowski. Sheridan refuses, stating that Jankowski is a loose cannon and referencing how so many of his peers think Jankowski an incompetent risk-taker. In a twist, it is revealed that Hague knew this all along and wants Sheridan to take the job since he needs someone competent to keep Jankowski in line. Soon after, Jankowski is present at first contact with the Minbari when they decide to exterminate humanity. Surprisingly, this is not his fault.
- The Black Barons: While none of the officers in the Czechoslovak military have high opinion of the privates, Lieutenant Hamáček stands out at treating them like disposable dirt. When Jasánek injures himself while working at the quarry, he refuses him getting medical aid and instead orders him to wash himself and resume working. When Kefalín says that they were concerned about a human's life, Hamáček rebuffs him saying that there's too many people on Earth anyway. It's no wonder the privates celebrate when the Lieutenant ends up Reassigned to Antarctica.
- Deconstructed in The Bounty by Lt. William Bligh. He's an unpleasant, surly man whose crew regards him with contempt, and he makes a few questionable decisions. He's mostly concerned with accomplishing The Bounty's mission with maximum efficiency, and alienates Fletcher Christian with his seeming disregard for them. However, he's actually quite lenient to his crew by the standards of his time and only starts becoming truly nasty when they become actively insubordinate after circumstances force them to take extended shore leave in Tahiti. He's ultimately mutinied against not because of anything he did personally, but because his crew simply don't want to be sailors any more.
- Lt. Col Brett C. Shelton, his second-in-command Major Ellis and the headmaster Colonel Cochran in Child's Play 3.
- Oberleutnant von Nogay from C.K. dezerterzy. Loudmouthed, abusive, and cruel. When his commanding officer, Major Wagner, chews him out for brutalizing the soldiers, von Nogay goes as far as to threaten him.
- Captain Ramsey in Crimson Tide is an enormous jerk to his entire crew aboard the SSBN under his command. When informed by his XO, Lt. Commander Hunter that crew morale is low and that they might need some words of encouragement from their beloved captain, Ramsey takes the opportunity to chew them all out over the intercom for being lazy and feckless. Later, Ramsey goes into full-blown General Ripper mode when he is convinced that his orders to fire the missiles have not been countermanded, despite a cutoff in communications right when the counter-order is sent. He is even ready to start shooting officers AND NCO’s when most of the crew mutinies to avert a nuclear apocalypse.
- His longtime loyal subordinate Lt. Dougherty isn’t much better. Examples include when he persecutes a poor seaman on the bus taking them to board the Alabama because he didn't address him correctly. He demands the crewman answer an obscure question from an old submarine film and makes him drop and give him 20 pushups when the crewman fails to answer. He’s also the most vicious of the mutineers, and takes clear pleasure in threatening Commander Hunter from sporting a Slasher Smile while pointing his sidearm at him, to trying to grab his arm like he’s a child in which the Commander calmly but furiously slaps his hand away. Not to mention at the end, when the Alabama receives the EAM to terminate launch of all missiles, while everyone else is cheering or breathing a heavy sigh of relief, Dougherty looks more annoyed than anything else and shows absolutely NO REMORSE for his actions.
- C.J. is introduced in such a way in 2004's Dawn of the Dead (2004). He is the leader of the security guards of the mall and would really like the other survivors to get the hell out and bosses them with his (nonexistent) authority. He gains Character Development into a Jerk with a Heart of Gold once things look like they will remain hellish for a long time and everybody is stuck in the mall, culminating with him performing a Heroic Sacrifice to keep the zombies away from the rest of the survivors as they try to make a run for a safe place.
- Day of the Dead (1985): Rhodes is this trope to an almost ridiculous degree. Constantly screaming at everyone around, attempting to take control of every situation by force, ordering his men to kill people for minor offenses... they really should have found someone more mentally stable to be in his position. Granted, his command has really only just started as the film opens, as at least one of the COs above him (Commander Cooper) has just died.
- In The Dirty Dozen, Wladislaw is in prison awaiting execution for shooting his commanding officer, who, according to Wladislaw, was absconding over the hill with all of his unit's medical supplies.
- Down Periscope:
- Rear Admiral Graham, the admiral in charge of the wargame, is only concerned with his career and his idea of what the US Navy should be like. He specifically assigned Lt Cdr. Dodge a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits crew, all of them he personally selected for being rejects from his "perfect Navy" (although one of them is put on the Stingray because he's too good at his job). He pulls rank on the commander of the Orlando and then orders Knox's men around like a bunch of recruits, smugly claiming that "the Admiral has the con". He's also a Straw Hypocrite, as he himself cheats his way through war games in order to improve his standing but feels completely justified in that (even though the whole point of this particular exercise is to explore the potential vulnerability of the Navy to an unorthodox terrorist with an old diesel sub).
- Dodge's assigned executive officer, Lt. Marty Pascal (Rob Schneider), is a maniacally uptight Commander Contrarian who is openly contemptuous of both Dodge, his commanding officer, and the rest of the Stingray's crew and is primarily concerned with how being associated with them will affect his career. While he raises some valid concerns (especially regarding the slovenly cook's poor hygiene), Pascal's obnoxious pedantry for the rules and highly confrontational attitude quickly alienate him from the rest of the crew. When Dodge, sick of Graham modifying the wargame's parameters to hinder him, elects to follow his higher orders and ignore them, Pascal flips out and tries to stage a spontaneous mutiny against Dodge... and when no one will support him, he's promptly given his comeuppance in true pirate fashion: being forced to Walk the Plank overboard into the net of a fishing ship that's agreed to take him back to base.
- Colonel Pitts in The Eagle Has Landed. Piqued at being ordered back to the US (he is considered too inexperienced to participate in D-Day) he launches an attack on the church where the German Fallschirmjager (paratroops) are holed up without doing a proper recon, completely missing the Germans hidden at various points in the village and wiping out his entire platoon; to top it all he gets killed by Joanna Grey while trying to kill her with a grenade; since they were played by Larry Hagman and Jean Marsh respectively this spawned a thousand t-shirts saying "Rose (from Upstairs, Downstairs) Shot J.R! (from Dallas)"
- Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday in Fort Apache (modeled on the real-life George Armstrong Custer) is an arrogant martinet to his own men; out of class snobbishness, obstructs the path of True Love between his daughter and a young lieutenant because the latter is the son of an Irish noncom; sees war as a path to personal glory; provokes a conflict with the Apaches that better diplomacy could have avoided; and, worst of all, gets most of his regiment slaughtered through tactical incompetence and stubborn refusal to listen to Captain Yorke, who knows the Apaches much better. For all of that, Yorke credits him with improving the quality of the regiment through his strict discipline.
- Lt. Monroe, the quartermaster at Navrin Field in Fortress, is an asshole in every possible way. Luckily he's only in charge of the supply depot.
- Captain Jae-oh in the 2011 The Korean War film The Front Line. He doesn't fare better than the officer he replaced by not listening to valuable advice of the more experienced non-coms, threatening subordinates at gunpoint for not listening to orders, and making terrible tactical decisions as a result. He finally crosses the line when he chooses to hold the line as ordered to by the higher-ups, essentially ordering his men to their deaths. It's no wonder he ends up with the exact same fate as the previous captain.
- Two in Hornets' Nest:
- Colonel Jannings, who smugly says that the Della Norte Dam that the Americans want to destroy is impregnable, over the objections of Wehrmacht officer Captain von Hecht. He insists further their "obvious" target is the Grimaldi Tunnel. Surprise, surprise, the dam is in von Hecht's district, while the tunnel is in Jannings'. Although never said outright, Jannings appears to be attempting to discredit the outspoken, anti-Nazi (or at least anti-SS) von Hecht and wrest control from a defanged Wehrmacht by insisting resources and men be sent to him, not von Hecht. We never do get to see what his reaction is when he's told the dam got blown up, sadly.
- Major Taussig, one of Jannings' subordinates. Like his superior, practically everything goes in one ear and out the other, and even when actual evidence comes up, he ignores it if clashes with what he previously believed. Von Hecht ends up growing tired of his stubbornness and lack of foresight, and just plain frags him, 'Nam style.
- The MP sergeant in The Inglorious Bastards. All he has to do is transport the Bastards to a prison, but he has to be an arrogant and abusive jerk about it. When some of the prisoners attempt to escape during a German air raid, the sergeant shoots them in the back. Tellingly, when the prisoners turn the tables on their captors, the sergeant is one of the only ones they kill.
- Major Erich Kaempffer in The Keep. He's a ruthless, narrow-minded bully, even by the standards of the insanely brutal SS Einsatzkommando. When German soldiers begin dying under mysterious circumstances, Kaempffer is sent to handle what the SS believes to be the work of La Résistance. His first act on arriving is to have three people shot for unclear reasons, take over from the more experienced Captain Woermann and generally ignore everything he says. Bizarrely, after being led to believe Glaeken can be useful to him in discovering the identity of the keep's owner(s) when Glaeken resists arrest, kills an SS soldier, and is then shot and seemingly killed himself, Kaempffer not only doesn't care about his dead man but also doesn't seem to realize that the one (as far as he knew) probable link to finding out what he so desperately wanted to know just got shot off of a cliff.
- Kelly's Heroes: Captain Maitland, the idiotic leader of Kelly's unit. He cares more about looting things and buying expensive stuff from Paris than actually leading his platoon, and Big Joe, Kelly, and the rest of the would-be capers absolutely loathe him (the fact he uses his authority to deny them any kind of comforts by quoting that it's against Army regulations and punishable by death while indulging in them himself does not helps]]. It also doesn't help that he's General Colt's nephew, so he can use his position to get away with all of it. General Colt is also a perfectly good example of this trope mixed with Colonel Kilgore — the man is Armchair Military incarnate and yet he assumes that all the Allied forces need for winning is Fighting Spirit.
- Kong: Skull Island: Lieutenant Colonel Packard by the end. While he seems to be A Father to His Men, he has no problem with putting his obsession to kill Kong over the safety of whoever remains in his group. His men in turn are at first loyal to him, but once they realize just how far off the deep end Packard has gone and Slivko is the first one to mutiny, Packard loses all command over them.
- Lt. Ito and Capt. Tanida from Letters from Iwo Jima, though if anything they're mild examples of what the real Imperial Japanese Military was like.
- Col. Owen Devereaux in The Man from Colorado is regarded by his troops as a terrible martinet. (This is actually another manifestation of the Sanity Slippage that is turning him into a Blood Knight.) It is best demonstrated by his arresting Sgt. Jericho Howard for dereliction of duty for drinking instead of being on sentry duty...one the day the war ended!
- Major Payne has Cadet-Sergeant Dotson. A mediocre-at-best troop leader who does nothing but kiss up to the Major in charge, talk down to his fellow cadets, and look out for his own interests. When it becomes clear Payne is not impressed by him and treats him as badly as the others, he quickly begins confiding alongside them to bring Payne down and has no problem whatsoever letting Stone own up to all responsibility for their antics, and when Stone is punished by being made the new Cadet-Sergeant Dotson calls it quits and whines to his dad to get transfered to a new school. He appears in the finale on Stapleton's team, the school that always wins, cheats in the footrace against Stone by kicking him in the ankle hard enough to put Stone out of commission, gets punched in the beezer by Williams for it, and his team ultimately loses when Tiger does an impressive job leading their final parade in lieu of Stone.
- General Thunderbolt Ross from the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one too, only caring about preserving his military career and even viewed with disdain for his disgraceful actions by fellow military members who are also superheroes Captain America, The Falcon and War Machine.
- My Way: Pretty much every single commanding officer Jun-shik follows.
- Colonel Tatsuo forms suicide squads from his garrison and in the face of a hopeless battle against Soviet tanks, refuses to call retreat for the remnant of the Japanese forces.
- A Russian Commissar sends a group of POW conscripts into a kill zone of the German forces, also shooting anyone who tries to retreat.
- At D-Day, a German officer locks Jun-Shik and Tatsuo in a room with two machine guns, forcing them to fight off the American landing.
- In Paths of Glory, General Mireau sends a division on a suicide mission to attack a heavily fortified German position just for the possibility of getting himself a promotion. After the attack fails, he blames the soldiers and orders random soldiers from the division to be executed for cowardice.
- Patton is a brilliant general but an awful person who cares only for his glory, his soldiers be damned. He stretches them to the brink of their sanity and lashes out when they prevent him from achieving greatness he believes he deserves.
- Lieutenant Wolfe in Platoon, the leader of the titular platoon. An incompetent coward who is unable to control his own soldiers, he lets Sergeants Elias and Barnes do as they like (and the only order he gives is to burn down the village). US Army leadership classes have used Wolfe as an example of how a junior officer should not behave.
- Captain Harris in the Police Academy series. Like many other examples on this page, his heart only beats for the thought of a promotion and a chance to fire, or failing that, humiliate the meddlin' upshoots as well as he can. This being a humorous series, he always ends up humiliated himself.
- Soldier: Colonel Mekum is one of these through and through. He is smug about the superiority of his vat-grown genetically-engineered troops meant to replace those of the Adam Project, he yells to Caine-607 when Todd-3465 tears one of his eyes out about how he has become an inefficient soldier who is now worthless except as cannon fodder (Caine later gets a new eye and does not seems to have had obtained any disadvantages because of it), he treats the remaining Adam Project soldiers he brings to the war game as slaves and orders the extermination of a bunch of crash-landed settlers in a Landfill Beyond the Stars for no crime other than them being in a planet officially classified as "uninhabited", his leadership is nothing but Hollywood Tactics that get his men killed, and he orders the deployment of a planet-killing weapon in a panic when the casualties mount.
- Lieutenant Pavlov Dill in Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation was one of these, though he's more incompetent than mean. He's also basically The Political Officer in the unit, which makes his soldiers detest him even more. Dax is quick to call him a coward who hides behind rhetoric. Although, when Sahara confides in him about her psychic visions, he tries to help her as best he can.
- Star Wars has General Armitage Hux. A sneaky man who is not loyal to anyone but himself, he doesn't care about the lives of his subordinates and is barely more competent than his rival, Kylo Ren.
- Captain Stillman from Stripes. An example of his incompetence: he orders a mortar to be fired while it is still being targeted, so there is no idea whatsoever where it will go. It ends up being fired at Sergeant Hulka's squad.
- Lt. Col. Tall (Nick Nolte) in The Thin Red Line. He has veins in his teeth. Partly subverted in that he secretly has a low opinion of himself... and his tactics work.Staros: We had a man, gut shot out, on the slope, sir. It created quite an upset.
Tall: Fine! Fine! Now what about those reinforcements!
Staros: My company alone cannot take that position, sir.
Tall: You're not going to take your men into the jungle to avoid a god damned fight. Now do you hear me, Staros! I want you to attack. I want you to attack right now with every man at your disposal. Now attack, Staros!
Tall: It's never necessary to tell me that you think I'm right. We'll just... assume it.
Staros: We need some water... the men are passing out.
Tall: The only time you should start worrying about a soldier is when they stop bitchin'. - Played with in What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? Captain Lionel Cash has a stick up his butt from the moment he appears onscreen, demanding instant respect and threatening subordinates with demotion at the drop of a hat. He eventually gets better after learning how to unwind, but overnight things pretty much devolve into anarchy without him enforcing the rules, creating huge problems involving an arriving American intelligence officer, so sometimes it seems The Neidermeyer has a point.
