7 Best Movie Weapons of 2007

The cinema of 2007 may eventually be remembered as an endless parade of crappy sequels and depressing Oscar bait featuring beautiful actresses crying over their missing spouses (broken up, occasionally, by outstanding Judd Apatow–produced films, like Superbad). But even if Hollywood has truly run out of ideas for movies, it’s not yet run out of ideas for things to kill people with within those movies. Tomorrow, No Country for Old Men opens, and in it Javier Bardem plays an unfortunately coiffed assassin who slays his victims with a captive bolt pistol, an awesomely terrifying device more commonly used to slaughter cattle. But it’s only one of a few awe-inspiring cinematic killing implements from 2007 that one day may be as iconic as the lightsaber. After the jump, Vulture’s list of the Seven Best Movie Weapons of 2007.

7. Flying police cruiser, Live Free or Die Hard

Let’s face it, rocket launchers are expensive and bazookas can be laughably inaccurate (to say the least!), so when you absolutely need to blow up a helicopter, there’s really only one practical way to do it — drive a flaming police car into a toll booth in such a way that it flies through the air and hits the helicopter, obviously.

6. Electric ping-pong vests, Balls of Fury

In the movie, Christopher Walken plays Feng, a sadistic criminal mastermind who inflicts great pain on captive ping-pong players with electrified vests that shock them whenever they fail to return a serve. It may be the one thing more torturous than having to sit through Balls of Fury (see trailer above).

5. Reinforced Chevy Nova, Death Proof

It’s doubtful that any amount of reinforced steel could make a car assembled in Detroit crash-safe, so the supposedly “death-proof� Chevy Nova that Stuntman Mike uses to mow down young women in Quentin Tarantino’s portion of Grindhouse may actually be the single most ridiculous, unrealistic killing implement on this list. Still, it is pretty awesome.

4. Viggo Mortensen’s penis, Eastern Promises

In Eastern Promises’ infamous bathhouse fight scene, Viggo’s member isn’t technically itself a weapon — in fact, it stays flaccid for the entire duration of the mêlée — but as a naked Mortensen (playing Russian mobster Nikolai Luzhin) crosses knives with a pair of Chechen hit men, it proves to be a deadly distraction for his opponents. Well, it distracted us anyway.

3. Prosthetic machine-gun leg, Planet Terror

When it comes to movie violence, enormous machine guns are de rigueur, but in his half of Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez found a way to make an old standby new again by attaching one to the truncated leg of former go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan). It’s triggered at her will and never seems to run out of ammo.

2. Towel, The Bourne Ultimatum

Ordinary citizens use towels every day to dry their hands and keep pot smoke inside their dorm rooms, but to rogue superspy Jason Bourne, terrycloth is a deadly weapon and should be treated as such. Watch here as he impressively uses a bath towel to disarm and strangle a CIA assassin.

1. Cattle gun, No Country for Old Men

Anton Chigurh (a ruthlessly detached Javier Bardem) may look like the unfortunate product of an Erik Estrada–Ringo Starr hookup, but he makes up for it with his preferred weaponry, a cattle stun-gun that is used to displace the brain matter of pretty much anyone who crosses his path. It actually gave us nightmares.