Dad. He is just the goddamn worse. It’s like, why do we even have this guy?
We’ve all seen characters in film and television that make us think “I wish that guy was my dad instead of my insufferable garbage fire of a father.” For you maybe it’s Robin Williams or David Attenborough. For me, the bar is much lower.
I’ve seen a lot of slasher movies and I would trade my dad for the killer in pretty much all of them. Here’s the top 50 deranged killers I would rather have to call one Sunday every June instead of my old man.
50. Harry Powell “Night of the Hunter”
He’s manipulative. He’s opportunistic. He’s a psychopathic charlatan and a hypocrite. Powell is a lot like my dad honestly, and only outranks him because he has tattoos.
49. Henry “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”
At least if Henry was your dad it would all be over fast.
48. Ed Cooper “The Mutilator”
He hates his son because he accidentally killed his mother. At least he has a good reason for being crazy and hating his kid. The beef with my dad goes back to a television remote I broke in 1989. I was 4.
47. Horace Pinker “Shocker”
Pretty crappy to his son throughout the movie, but my own dad has scarred me more with a lot less electricity superpowers.
46. Jack Torrence “The Shining”
It took months of cold mountain isolation, alcohol withdrawal, and paranormal influence to get Jack to cave to his murderous impulses. For my dad, it took a screen door closing too loudly.
45. Bill “Intruder”
He would literally kill just to keep his grocery store open. Anyone that dedicated to workaholism is hiding from a pretty dysfunctional home life. Still, he’s a provider.
44. Alan Santini “Opera”
He’ll try to make you watch him kill people for sexual gratification, but he’ll never try to make you watch the New York Mets.
43. Billy “Silent Night Deadly Night”
Okay, he kills people, but hey, he dresses up as Santa for Christmas! When we asked Dad to do it he said “only pedos do that.”
42. Jerry Blake “The Stepfather”
If there is a creature on this earth capable of being worse than a father can be, it’s a stepfather, but at least Jerry has the decency to sever ties with his secret past family before hitching up with yours. My dad took way too many “business trips” for a guy living off a disability scam.
41. Cropsy “The Burning”
Growing up my dad was pretty much constantly on the verge of murdering us all with a pair of hedge trimmers, and he damn sure wasn’t going to take us on a fun day at the lake first.
40. Leatherface
Leatherface is misunderstood. We all think of him as this wild skin wearing maniac, but the guy wears an apron. He has a methodical process. He’s a craftsman. He’s probably just looking to take someone under his wing and show them the ropes.
39. Billy Lenz “Black Christmas”
What’s scarier than the calls coming from inside the house? How about the calls not coming at all for huge lengths of time? Dad, did you really need 6 months and all the rent money to go get a 6 pack from the corner store?
38. Norman Bates “Psycho”
Psycho 4 ends with Norman burning down the motel and declaring himself free and ready to settle down and start a family. He does have a track record of relapse, but there was never Psycho 5 so maybe he made it.
37. Frank Zito “Maniac”
He’s slow to warm up, but once he murders you, scalps you, and uses your scalp and clothes to decorate a mannequin, he’s your best friend.
36. Freddy Kruger
There’s no nightmare Freddy Krueger could throw my way scarier than that one I keep having about running into my dad at a race track and he’s not wearing any shoes. I dunno I can’t really describe it but it’s terrifying.
35. Mark Lewis “Peeping Tom”
I would fully accept my dad’s serial killing if he at least had an appreciation for the arts.
34. Irving Wallace “StageFright”
My dad realistically would probably not lock himself in a theater to stalk and kill a troupe of young actors, but he would also never wear an owl mask for fun so, you know, give/take.
33. The Candyman “Candyman”
He has a descendant in the third one and he takes an interest in her life. It’s primarily an interest in convincing her to kill in his name, but it’s an interest.
32. The Blissfield Butcher “Freaky”
Having lived life as a woman for 24 hours must have given him at least a higher level of insight than the man who explained to me that all dogs are boys and all cats are girls.
31. John Kramer “Saw”
His methods are unorthodox and dangerous with a pretty low success rate, but at the end of the day, he wants you to learn a valuable life lesson, not get him another beer.
30. Conrad Straker “The Funhouse”
The scene where he yells at his mutant son for overpaying the hooker because he could have gotten him a cheaper hooker contains more familial warmth than any memory I have.
Through the years we’ve seen Lucy take on a number of roles. She’s a Harvard-educated doctor. She’s a pilot. She’s a gourmet chef. Why does her identity change so often? Her real name is Maxine Cornocova, and she’s on the FBI’s most-wanted list for casino fraud.
When Angelica was hard up for cash she sold everything she owned to make ends meet. When that wasn’t enough she had to choose between her prized persian cat, or her kneecaps. Fluffy was sold to a good home, but she never recovered from the betrayal.
You don’t suddenly fall in love with and move to America for Charles Finster without becoming persona non grata at every casino in Europe first.
From an early age Kimi was always a fearless sort who tended to lep before she looked. She’s lost it all on black more often than the average person has moved.
It turns out bingo can get pretty high stakes.
We’re of course referring to all of the actors in the Reptar suit. They all gamble and none of their lives are going great.
Ever wonder what brought Minka here from the old country to begin with? That’s right, gambling debts.
One look at an in-the-box Cynthia doll vs. Angelica’s and you can see this doll is no stranger to hard living.
The stresses of single fatherhood coupled with his innate timidness alway made Charles feel like he wasn’t the main character in his own life. Then, one night at a charity event, he discovered that he had a knack for poker. Winning made him feel big, like a real somebody. He has wasted tens of thousands of dollars chasing that high.
Susie’s singing talents took her all the way to Vegas where her lounge singing would bring her close to fame. Unfortunately her favorite song became the siren call of the slot machines. Before long she was hooked, staying up all hours of the night chasing jackpots and blowing off gigs.
We all know Betty is an avid sports fan. A little too avid. The telltale black eye her husband Howard gets every year when her team get eliminated from the playoffs implies there’s some serious money on the line.
Charlotte’s access to Mega Corp’s books helped her cover her massive gambling losses betting on women’s tennis matches for many years, but eventually the feds caught up with her.
Warn down from years of trying to out-maneuver Charlotte on the corporate ladder, Jonathan sought solace in the one thing that gave him a sense of control—blackjack.
Being a timid person in a relationship with a big personality like Betty can be stressful, so every few months to blow off steam Howard drives to the bad part of town and drops in on a back alley dice game to feel alive. He is usually robbed and beaten, but that’s become a part of it for him.
Didi’s favorite child psychologist sure has a lot of products under his belt. Books, videos, his own pay per minute hotline. With all of that money coming in it’s shocking that he still burns through it faster than he can make it. Lipschitz sufferers from a condition known as “Greyhound fever,” and it’s caused him to see the backside of a bookies hand on more than one occasion.
We don’t care if several members of Guns N’ Roses eventually defended a song on this LP after the fact, saying that it was misunderstood, racist and homophobic verbiage is NEVER ok, so this album HAD to be ranked last, and we don’t care if it has one of their ten best singles, “Patience.” Because we don’t have any “patience” (see what we did there?) for bigotry. There is a reason they left that song off future releases. Anyway, onto the fun stuff, which is unfortunately tainted with “Used to Love Her,” which is also offensive in a non-funny way, but way less so than “One in a Million,” “G N’ R Lies” is an album so wild that it includes the band’s initials in its name and that’s all we have to say about that.
Even though Guns N’ Roses’ fifth studio album “The Spaghetti Incident?” features a question mark in its title, unlike “G N’ R Lies,” there are few things questionable about this fun cover song LP except for its hidden Charles Manson song track, “Look at Your Game, Girl.” We’re quite curious as to what Quentin Tarantino, fan of both spaghetti westerns and writer/director of the underrated film “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” featuring both a fictionalized and truthful account of Manson and the late-Sharon Tate, thinks about this record which features GNR interpretations of songs by The Skyliners and Johann Sebastian Bach’s son, Albie, who surprisingly is not related to the singer of Skid Row, Sebastian Bach Mozart Rachmaninoff Ludwig Ludacris Beethoven. You likely got this CD in a bargain bin, or through Columbia House’s penny priced mail-order music club, but it’s worth at least one thousand times that!
We most certainly know that much about this album’s creation, costs, long-ass history, and often polarizing lore have been publicly and privately maligned since the mid-to-late nineties, and we are not making any predictable low-hanging fruit jokes about the delay. If the entire world only knew how good “Chinese Democracy” is, there would be far better and informed witticisms, and far more streams/sales for this record. Thankfully the band, even though most of its members had nothing to do with this LP, still plays songs from it live, and even the I.R.S., and not Irwin R. Schyster, father of the late, great Bray Wyatt, likely needs to audit newfound royalties from this studio album, which is Guns N’ Roses’ last as of now. In closing, special shoutouts are warranted for Bumblefoot, Buckethead, and Buckcherry for their outstanding musically dense work here!
“Use Your Illusion II” is a fantastic, yet slightly worse sequel to its prequel “Use Your Illusion I,” but sadly just isn’t on the level of “Sister Act: Back in the Habit,” in that the Whoopi Goldberg, Lauryn Hill, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Carrot Top film had no filler whatsoever. None. As you know or now know, Guns N’ Roses is forever marred with controversy, so the overly vulgar, if that’s a thing, song, if it could be called that, as it is more of a diss track, “Get in the Ring” could’ve been nixed along with several others here. One wonders if this LP and “Use Your Illusion I” were both reduced by more than a few songs to just one LP simply called “Use Your Illusion About Numbers That Aren’t Written In Roman Numeral Form” if said record would’ve been ranked at number one here! Don’t cry, alternates!
“Use Your Illusion II” may have a better opening song in “Civil War” than “Use Your Illusion I”’s “Right Next Door to Hell,” but I’s closer “Coma” is easily the best final album track in Guns N’ Roses’ catalog, and if we’re being honest, is in their top ten tracks. Said inclusion alone is enough to make I > II, but “November Rain” put this album in an even higher regard. Speaking of said song, and we don’t care if it’s uncool to say this, “November Rain” is the best GNR single, music video, song, and sonnet of the band’s career and don’t damn us for saying such. Like we alluded to before, there is some filler over the course of I and II, but in a form of the perfect crime, the former just had less spoiled/bad apples. Live. And. Let. Die. Don’t cry, originals!
Guns N’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction” is one of the best rock albums from the 20th century, and has an insanely insane amount of mega-mega-mega-hit after hit after hit singles, and killer-killer-killer-death after death after death deep cuts, thus making it one of the best debut LPs ever… By far! Because of such, we are listing no “skip it” tracks here, but will personally shout out the OGNR five-piece: W. Axl Rose on lead vocals/whines, Slash on lead guitar/hat, Izzy Stradlin, who eventually quit the group four years later, on rhythm guitar/anger, Duff “Rose” McKagan on bass guitar/being tall, and Steven Adler on drums/other things, who was ousted in 1990. In closing, this album said a huge F.U. to other ‘80s peers who spent way more time utilizing hairspray than rocking out.