Ten Badass Characters Who Traded Their Limbs for Weapons (NSFW)

 

So screw your introduction. Let's jump right in, and talk badass weapon limbs!

 

 

 

 

We begin with the man who is quite frankly responsible for making weapon limbs so damn cool: S-Mart's finest employee and demon killer extraordinaire, Mr. Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell). It was in Evil Dead 2 that Ash's hand became possessed by evil forces that are anything but groovy, forcing him to take the extreme measure of removing his own hand with a chainsaw to prevent the demonic invasion from spreading any further. Towards the end of the film, Ash affixes that very same chainsaw to his bloody wrist stump, turning a disability into horror cinema's most effective and utterly badass weapon. Now that, my friends, is groovy. While perhaps the coolest, Ash wasn't the first horror character to use a weapon as a makeshift limb...

 

 

 

As far as I'm aware, 1966's Chamber of Horrors was the very first movie to feature a character with a weapon for a limb. Described by many as an inferior House of Wax knockoff, the oddball film stars Patrick O'Neal as Jason Cravatte, a sick and sadistic mofo with a penchant for marrying women... dead women, that is. After a failed execution attempt leaves Cravatte with only one hand, he sets out on a bloody journey for revenge, his missing right hand turned into a veritable Swiss Army knife of terror. Throughout the film, Cravatte affixes everything from a hook to a butcher's knife to his stump, happily inducting those who wronged him into his own personal chamber of horrors.

 

 

 

James Woods plays TV producer Max Renn in one of David Cronenberg's more out there and beloved films, as a man whose life quickly becomes consumed by a TV signal that assaults his senses with all sorts of horrific snuff film inspired imagery. By the time the final act rolls around, Renn has gone from sleazy producer to stone cold killer, with a vaginal looking wound spread across his belly and a gun organically fused with his right hand. But this is not just any gun, oh no: Renn's hand becomes what fans refer to as "the Cancer Gun", a fleshy weapon that fires cancerous tumors rather than mere bullets. You so crazy, Cronenberg. Oh, and long live the New Flesh.

 

 

 

My favorite of all the pint-sized terrors from the Puppet Master films is Blade, one of only a few puppets that has thus far appeared in every single film in the franchise, leading me to believe he's also the favorite of creator Charles Band. So badass is the Joan Rivers-looking Blade that he essentially becomes the leader of the other puppets, the Nazi soul inside of him serving to make him one evil little bastard. Blade's name is of course derived from the fact that he has a sharp blade in the place of one of his doll hands, a deadly hook taking the place of the other. One puppet that's not to be messed with, that's for damn sure!

 

 

 

A film that wouldn't be out of place in the Underrated Sequels feature I've recently started writing here on FEARnet, Child's Play 2 has one of my favorite final acts in horror sequel history: the last 20 minutes take place at the Good Guys toy factory, as Andy Barclay and his foster sister Kyle find themselves in a fight to the death with the Good Guy gone bad. When Chucky's hand gets stuck under a heavy gate at the factory, he's forced to brutally tear it from the rest of his body, shortly thereafter taking a page out of Blade's playbook and pressing his trusty knife into the wound. Now you really don't want to fuck with the Chuck!

 

 

 

Though he'll happily tear your soul apart if you say his name five times into a mirror, Daniel "Candyman" Robitaille was far from a killer before he became an urban legend. The son of a slave, Robitaille was a painter who was tortured and killed by a lynch mob after impregnating a white woman. Before he was smeared with honey and stung to death by bees, Robitaille's painting hand was cut off, replaced with a hook. In death, Robitaille became the vengeful Candyman, his hook hand becoming the ultimate weapon of revenge. Let that be a lesson, lynch mobbers: if you're going to cut someone's hand off, don't replace it with a goddamn sharp weapon!

 

 

 

Leave it to Robert Rodriguez to take the concept of a weapon limb and make it not only completely badass, but for the very first time also quite sexy. In Rodriguez' Grindhouse segment Planet Terror, he went ahead and substituted the super-sexy Rose McGowan's right leg with a massive machine gun, forever cementing the character of Cherry Darling in the annals of ass-kicking female characters. After Cherry's leg is torn off by bloodthirsty mutant zombies, her ex-boyfriend El Wray first sticks a wooden table leg into the wound, allowing Cherry to walk, and then swaps out the table leg for a machine gun, transforming her into a zombie-killing machine. Sexy and dangerous... what's not to love?

 

 

 

Batshit crazy Japanese filmmaker Noboru Iguchi was no doubt inspired by Planet Terror when he made Machine Girl one year later, outfitting his badass female revenge seeker with a machine gun arm rather than a leg. After her brother is killed by a ninja/yakuza gang, Ami goes after his killers and finds herself quickly overpowered, her left arm hacked clean off her body. Thankfully, Ami not only survives, but soon finds herself in the care of two garage mechanics who support her plight for revenge. Knowing she can't go out there and fight the gang with one arm, they build her a high-powered, multi-barrel machine gun arm, evening the odds... and then some!

 

 

 

In 2010, Ving Rhames played Deputy Fallon in Alexandre Aja's incredibly fun 3D remake of Piranha, a character who apparently died before the end credits rolled. Always a badass, Rhames was last seen taking the fight to the piranha, slicing a whole shitload of them up with a boat propeller before being torn apart by the neverending assault of their vicious teeth. At least, that's what we thought we saw. In one of the only humorous aspects of the inferior sequel Piranha 3DD, Rhames returns as Deputy Fallon... and to steal the tagline from another killer-fish sequel, this time it's personal. Turns out Fallon's legs were completely chewed off by the piranha, but he survived the attack. In the sequel, Rhames' legs are quite hilariously replaced by two titanium rods... with shotguns affixed to them. Out-badass'ing all the other badasses on this list, Rhames is to my knowledge the only movie character to have two limbs replaced by weapons, rather than just one. Because nobody is ever allowed to be as badass as Ving... and I mean nobody.

 

 

 

Season 1 of The Walking Dead left us thinking that Merle Dixon was dead, his hot-headed actions leaving him handcuffed and stranded on a roof, a zombie Happy Meal just waiting to be devoured. In a desperate attempt to escape, Merle cuts his own hand off with a hacksaw, but we and the characters in the show are left to assume that he still became zombie food, despite the brave attempt. That is, until Season 3 rolled around, when we find out that Daryl's brother is still very much alive... and more badass and dangerous than ever. Merle is quite literally The Governor's right-hand man, the stump where his right hand used to be now fitted with a homemade device with a blade on the end of it. Sadly, even with a blade for a hand, Merle doesn't survive the season, turned into a walker and killed off by his own brother in one of the more emotional scenes in the show's history.

 

 

 

Finally, though we've already fulfilled the quota for this list, I wouldn't be able to sleep tonight unless I mentioned Tokyo Gore Police, which was directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura, the man who did the makeup effects for the aforementioned Machine Girl. One of the absolute craziest and most ridiculous movies I've ever seen, Tokyo Gore Police features all sorts of creatures that at least somewhat fit in line with the topic of conversation here today, including a girl whose entire lower body is comprised of the jaws of an alligator, and this dude, who has a giant penis-cannon between his legs. Unless we're talking about Andre The Giant, I'm not sure a penis counts as a limb, but again, I just couldn't not include the Penis Cannon... because the Penis Cannon needs to be brought up, whenever one has the chance.

 

Who's your favorite weapon-limbed character?  Leave a comment and let us know!