I saw someone today who reminded me of that zombie in Dawn of The Dead who gets the top of his head sliced off by the helicopter blades and it got me to thinking how dangerous that stunt was. I mean that guy had to have some brass balls or he was just an idiot, look what happened with Twilight Zone The Movie.

What dangerous life-risking stunts can you recall?

I don't believe a real helicopter blade was actually used during the shooting of that particular scene. No special effect like that would be left to chance..especially one involving a real human actor/extra. It's just the magic of movies.

Though I could be wrong.

If you recall in TZTM the copter was used for camera coverage and one of the
FX incendiary devices actually disabled it, thus the accidental decapitation of Vic Morrow and the children.

He was nowhere near the blade, they just yanked the top of his head off with a rope...

I see... that makes more sense. Looks dangerous as hell though. a little ridiculous too with that Herman Munster prosthetic.

Anyway thanks for talking slowly to help the jack-ass understand. Hee-haw hee haw.

Call me crazy but I thought that shot from Dawn was a clay animation.

For me the most dangerous stunt is from Kurosawa's Ran where a guy gets bumped by a charging horse and has to play dead while the rest of calvary gallops over or around him (in a single shot). It is unbelievable!

Also there's a similar thread here

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That's fuckin' nuts.

"Here comes that guy again!"

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"The Evil Dead" takes the cake as far as I'm concerned.

First of all, they used no blanks. Every time the shotgun is fired they're using live ammunition.

On top of that, there's the shot where Ash is trying to bring himself to dismember his girlfriend Linda with a chainsaw. Bruce Campbell holds the chainsaw only an inch or two from her skin and revs it and everything and like the guns used it's no prop, it's a fully-functional chainsaw operating at full blast inches away from an actress's bare skin.

They even talk about all the dangerous stuff they did in general on the commentary tracks, in books like "The Evil Dead Companion" and Josh Becker's "Evil Dead Journal". They were a bunch of inexperienced kids.

Mission Impossible 2 always delighted me. Of course, with a guy like Tom Cruise, everything was probably very controlled. But you get the rocking climbing sequence in the begining. And then the knife-to-the-eye at the end.

Deathproof? Not sure exactly how dangerous the shoot was. But it looked pretty tuff.

The thing I always noticed about the MI2 rock-climbing scenes was you could always tell were the safety gear was. There is a scene where he is holding on, but his shorts are hitched up like he had the harness on and they just erased the ropes. But you still had his belt reaching up!
Saying that, I still wouldn't have done it!

Yeah, there was stuff in Stallone's CLIFFHANGER that was pretty risky too...but the movie looks great because of it.

I'm watching "DAWN 78" now and in the commentary Savini says that they yanked the top of the head off, pumped blood through tubes going up his pants leg, and the blades were animated in later.

he also describes and has drawn illustrations of the scene in his book 'Grand Illusions'

Nothing beats half the stuff Jackie Chan does.

I can't believe no one has mentioned Twilight Zone: The Movie...The Vietnam helicopter scene where Vic Morrow and the 2 children actually died had to be the most dangerous stunt ever, how they could even allow the actors to do that scene was un-believable...Didn't John Landis almost go to jail because of this stunt?

Already mentioned in first two posts.

I know this is rather graphic and unpleasant but I recently read somewhere that Vic Morrow was decapitated by the blades of the helicopter, not crushed as many heard and read about the incident. ('Entertainment Tonight' played the accident footage ad nauseum.)

I read that the film editors were quite upset on seeing some of the dailies of the key 'crash' sequence because they had no idea that the footage was of 'dummies' and not actual stunt people.

I clicked on the thread thinking it would've been about the stunt Savini does as a biker that crashes through a wall of glass. He said he almost broke his neck on that, but you can't even notice the danger when viewing the sequence.

Holy Shit! I didn't know about that, but now that I think about that chainsaw scene... !
Just !!!
Between him and Steve Irwin, I didn't know who was going to bite the dust first.

Yeah, Vic and one of the kids were decapitated, the other child was crushed.

Why is this not on DVD yet?? I love this movie (Stick).

I thought of Buster Keaton swinging across the waterfall in Our Hospitality or having a 3-ton wall drop around him in Steamboat Bill.

I know a lot of stuntmen were killed in the silent movie days.