The Seventh Annual Mutant Awards: 2004

No one wants to be an extra. I mean, sure, there is a huge portion of the population of California that carry SAG cards and head out every week to star in the background of whatever film or television program they can as “guy with white hat #2” or “girl eating Caesar salad behind Julia Roberts.” Good for them. I’ve been a crowd extra and stuff before, and maybe you have, too. Sometimes you don’t even know until you turn on the news and you’re like “whoa, that’s me!”

But as positive as “extra” be in other contexts (extra credit rules and can save your butt if you slack off all semester until the last couple weeks, for example), when it comes to movies and life, being an extra is a drag. You’re not the star. You don’t interact with the star. Your job is to be in the background, buying hot dogs or reading a book or dancing to the music, and to be as completely inconspicuous as possible. For the most part, an extra is excelling when he or she is visual pocket lint: meant to be there for some reason (because it looks natural) but not to serve any further purpose, and if it was picked out of your pocket (or off the screen, to push the metaphor) and tossed covertly in the gutter (avoid that littering ticket!) no one would really notice. Being an extra is sort of complicated, but not really. Much ado about nothing, in the grand scheme of things.

Ah, but sometimes extras get a chance to shine. Maybe they’re part of a mob scene, like that ridiculous part of Bruce Almighty, or they’re covered in weird white plastic armor and told to run around a “death star” like it’s about to “explode” even though they intuitively know “in 20 years they’ll all be replaced digitally with wookies in togas.” I don’t even know what I’m saying at this point. Which shows you how disposable extras are, and how tough it is to fill space about them. Stupid extras.

Extras take up room and take away valuable screen space from the people we go to the movies to look at, like Avril Lavigne or Pierce Brosnan or whoever. So it’s a lot of fun, vicarious and otherwise, to see a bunch of useless extras get what’s coming to them in a variety of vicious ways. At least, it’s fun for me. If you’ve read this far, I bet it’s fun for you, too.

The MRFH staff tossed out the best film scenes they could think of where a whole bunch of extras get butchered, blown up, shot, sprayed comically with water, eaten, or just plain destroyed. Either due to poor memories or the fact that old films treated their extras with a bit more respect, the films that got the spotlight for this category were all relatively recent. Of course, Hollywood can always be counted on to be constantly devising new methods of destroying hordes of extras, so it make sense that recent films feature some of the most memorable wasting of those nameless buggers.

An army of guards get trashed in Hero (9.3%), and it’s cool because there are samurai swords and arrows involved. Zombies make for easy targets in the 2004 remake Dawn of the Dead (9.3%), while the noted greatness of Lord of the Rings makes an expected play for yet another trophy by offering a scene in The Fellowship of the Ring (19.5%) where Aragorn trashes a lot of Uruk Hai. The otherworldly carnage left by Martian invaders in Mars Attacks! (15.8%) was good enough to place third, but it just couldn’t overcome those pesky Uruk Hai. Sorry, Tim Burton.

However, the loyal MRFH readers clearly voted their consciences, and displayed their true cult roots in doing so. Because nothing before or since tops the gloriously bloody destruction of deadly yet hapless zombies in Dead Alive, which garnered 25.4% of the votes. And whether it gets you barfing or cheering, you’ll never forget the first time you watched Lionel burst onto the zombie-infested scene with a lawnmower attached to his chest and took care of business. Zombies never went down faster, Peter Jackson never had to defend his proclivity for destroying extras again (arguably leading to his LOTR gig), and none of us would ever look at tomato soup without gagging forever more.

FINAL TALLY:
• 25.4% - Dead Alive: Lionel plowing through zombies with a lawnmower strapped to his chest.
• 19.5% - Fellowship of the Ring: Aragorn (mainly) at the end beating up more than 20 New Zealand stuntmen as the Uruk Hai over and over again.
• 15.8% - Mars Attacks: Wholesale slaughter of Earthians by the Martians.
• 11.6% - Braveheart: The hard charging English cavalry became kebabs on the pointed sticks of the Scots.
• 9.3% [tie] - Hero: Broken Sword and Flying Snow making their way through his majesty's royally wiped out legion of guards.
• 9.3% [tie] - Dawn of the Dead: Shooting all of the zombie celebrities from the rooftops.
• 8.2% - Titanic: Hundreds of CGI people dying in really surprising ways, considering how slowly a boat that size actually sinks. 
• 0.8% - Blair Witch 2: The poor tourists get it in a flurry of bloody quick cuts. 

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