Insane Scenes That Didn't Make The Final Cut

Scenes are cut from practically every movie, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes a sequence just doesn't mesh well with the tone of the rest of the film, or it isn't important enough to the story to remain. But other times, scenes are cut because, well, they are completely bonkers — sometimes in the exact wrong way:

One of the joys of X-Men: First Class is watching the young Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr — the future Professor X and Magneto — pal around together, rounding up mutants for their Division X project to counter the plans of the nefarious Sebastian Shaw. Although not all their potential recruits are ... super enthusiastic, they're able to put together a pretty impressive roster that includes the first cinematic iterations of Havok and Banshee, and they also manage to pick up future Magneto henchwoman Tempest in a seedy strip club.

In a brief deleted scene, Xavier convinces Tempest of his psionic abilities by making Lehnsherr — who, keep in mind, will one day become one of the most sinister and powerful Marvel villains of all time — appear to be wearing a dress, stockings and wig. While it does seem like something Xavier might do, the filmmakers apparently thought better of dolling up the future threat to all humankind in front of one of his soon-to-be underlings, which seems like a wise decision. Tempest's ability to take Lehnsherr seriously for the rest of the film would have constituted a major plot hole.

Following Goblet of Fire's Stephen King-esque conclusion, Order of the Phoenix begins to settle firmly into the darker tone that would dominate the rest of the series. It introduces Dolores Umbridge, perhaps the series' most hated villain other than You-Know-Who, as she's appointed to the perpetually vacant post of Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. She interrupts Dumbledore to recite a phony, vaguely threatening speech that has almost all in attendance looking mightily uncomfortable ... except for flighty Divination professor Sybil Trelawney, played by Emma Thompson.

An alternate take of Umbridge's speech gives Trelawney's full range of eccentricities a solid two minutes on display. Only occasionally appearing to pay attention or react to Umbridge, she plays with her food like a distracted toddler, eventually managing to shove some awkwardly into her mouth as if she's never used a spoon before, while a colleague seated nearby tries desperately not to pay attention. She finishes by dumping her tray into her lap and washing her hands in her beverage as Umbridge winds up. It's a masterful bit of improv comedy from Thompson, but admittedly would have distracted just a little from the scene's tense tone.

Despite its unfortunate title, the 2014 sleeper hit Unfriended was one of the more well-received horror films of that year. It rather ingeniously updated the found footage genre by presenting the entire film as a series of online interactions on its main character's laptop, with a twisty and weird plot that lends itself well to the premise. The film's lurking online villain uses incriminating information to try to turn a group of friends against each other, and eventually goads them into games that turn violent and deadly.

The second character to die, Ken, gets it in traditional shocking jump-scare fashion in the theatrical cut, as his frozen video feed unfreezes at selectively gory moments. An alternate version, however, which starts two minutes into the above video, has a much creepier buildup — Ken sends walls of text to main character Blaire reading "I GOT HIM" over and over again. As Blaire tries to get him to make sense, her sent messages start reading something other than what she's typing. She places a video call to Ken, leading to an alternate cut of his death. Perhaps the filmmakers thought this slightly longer version screwed with the pacing of an incredibly tightly cut film, but it sure would have ramped up the creepy factor.

The long-awaited sequel to the original Star Wars trilogy, The Force Awakens was about as well-received as a movie bearing that description could ever hope to be. Fans were thrilled at the return of Han Solo and Princess Leia to the series, and the fact that it generally just felt more like a Star Wars film than anything they'd gotten since 1983 didn't hurt.

During the "Cantina II" scene on Jakku before our heroes flee aboard the Millennium Falcon, there's a quick deleted scene in which Rey is confronted by junker boss Unkar Plutt, whose character animation looks notably unfinished. He disarms her and is about to haul her away when he's interrupted by Chewbacca. Plutt is in the middle of telling the angry Wookiee how unafraid of him he is when Chewie stomps on his foot to hold him in place, rips his arm right the hell off, and flings it across the room.

It may have been meant to play like a companion piece to Obi-Wan Kenobi's famous "disarming" of a bully during the original Cantina scene, but it would have played more like "Chewbacca's finally gone over the edge," which is likely why it was cut. Still, Han warned us this might happen.

2016's The Legend of Tarzan was not exactly a film that audiences were clamoring for. It did underwhelming box office in North America, and its worldwide take wasn't enough to justify the sequels that all films with $180 million budgets are expected to generate. We're not likely to see another Tarzan movie again, at least until the inevitable re-reboot in ten years or so.

One bizarre cut scene may have at least gotten the film a bit more attention. Director David Yates, who is also responsible for four Harry Potter films, told Variety that a scene was filmed in which the film's villain, a Belgian soldier played by Christoph Waltz, leans down and kisses an unconscious Tarzan on the lips. Jane who?

Said Yates, "It was this really odd, odd moment when Christoph kisses him ... and we loved it at the time. But early test audiences were perplexed by it, and in the end it just felt too clever and overworked." Perhaps, but it also would have shown us at least one thing that four dozen other Tarzan movies thus far have not.

Director Paul W.S. Anderson has carved out a career for himself that only a mother could love. Mostly known for the Resident Evil series, he's also responsible for Mortal Kombat, Alien vs. Predator, and several other films that seemingly nobody else wanted to direct. Early in his career, however, he managed a minor sci-fi/horror classic with Event Horizon, the story of a rescue starship which intercepts a vessel that has truly gone where no man has gone before, or would ever want to.

The film's villain, William Weir, played by the great character actor Sam Neill, becomes possessed by the evil presence on the doomed ship, which forced the previous crew to basically mutilate themselves to death in a sequence that is only shown in extremely brief flashback. In a couple of deleted scenes, we see Weir — having flayed himself alive — crawling around like Spider-Man on the ship's interior as crew members flee. There's an extended version of the infamous "visions of Hell" sequence, in which Weir shows the rescue ship's captain just what happened to the Event Horizon's crew. It should be noted that this clip is not for the squeamish. It might even make the totally non-squeamish gag a little.

Speaking of things that aren't for the squeamish, David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of The Fly featured some of the most astonishing and revolting practical effects in all of horror. The story of a scientist whose teleportation experiment merges him with a common housefly, Cronenberg's version takes a slightly different approach from the 1958 original. Rather than simply emerging from the teleporter with the head and arm of a fly, Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundle appears fine at first ... but undergoes a slow, relentless, absolutely horrifying transformation that ends with one of Cronenberg's greatest and most disgusting setpieces.

Once again, it must be noted that the scene we're discussing here was considered too disturbing for the film described above, so click at your own risk. In it, Brundle, well into his metamorphosis and becoming increasingly mentally unstable, throws a monkey and a cat together into the teleporter and fires it up, just to see what will happen. The result is ridiculously unsettling, and was cut after test audiences abruptly stopped sympathizing with Brundle at that very point.

The groundbreaking 1988 live action/animated mashup Who Framed Roger Rabbit? brought about renewed interest in classic animation, and may have even helped set the stage for the success of the following year's The Little Mermaid and Disney's classic '90s output. Unlike those films, Rabbit had more than its share of nightmare fuel moments, like the one cut sequence from earlier in the film that may have gone a bit too far with the body horror.

After protagonist Eddie Valiant is captured by some of Doom's Toon henchmen, he's returned to the streets of L.A. with a nightmarish, cartoon pig head stuck on top of his own. He takes care of the problem by pouring turpentine over his head in the shower, melting it away and watching its remnants plop to the floor of the shower and wash down the drain, conscious and staring up at Valiant the whole time.

Amazingly, the scene was cut not for being too grotesque, but for pacing reasons. Director Robert Zemeckis said in an interview that he loved the sequence, and regretted having to cut it — particularly because the pig-head-goop going down the shower drain had been their first finished shot of the film. Our souls can only thank them that they didn't respond to that wrapped scene by challenging themselves to go even creepier.

Few could have predicted in 1984 that the low-budget sci-fi/action flick The Terminator, starring a sentient slab of granite named Arnold Schwarzenegger and directed by an unknown youngster named James Cameron, would loom so large over pop culture. And yet it almost didn't — the first film established the mind-bending time travel mechanics of the plot in a lean and efficient manner, but was almost derailed by a side plot involving Sarah Connor's discovery of the location of Cyberdyne Systems and the creator of Skynet- a side plot which, you may notice, was saved for the second film, when they could do it better.

In this deleted scene, Sarah attempts to convince Reese to break mission and go after Cyberdyne — when Reese disagrees, she runs away, forcing him to run her down, tackle her, and pull a gun on her. Since the entire reason for his existence is to protect her, this is patently ridiculous, and Sarah recognizes it as the ultimate empty threat. Michael Biehn as Reese does an admirable job trying to frame it as a reflex, but it just seems tone-deaf and out of character for Sarah's protector.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is considered by most fans to be an extended false start, ending with the death of Gwen Stacy in an event that was obviously supposed to set Spidey up with some internal conflicts and motivations in a third film that, thankfully, was never to be.

Amazingly, the film could've turned out worse. The Blu-Ray extras revealed that the film originally ended with a bizarre, and completely nonsensical, reversal of decades of comic book canon. As Peter stands in mourning at Gwen's grave, his father, Richard Parker — the father who has been dead for years in every other Spider-Man story ever told, in any medium — appears out of nowhere to console him. This gives Andrew Garfield the opportunity to break into some ill-advised histrionics in a stereotypical "where have you been all these years?!?" scene, before reconciling for a plodding, dour conversation that offers no explanation for Richard's absence beyond "I had to keep you safe," and which serves absolutely no narrative purpose.

Perhaps they should've kept this scene after all — dumb as it was, it would've been a fitting capper for a series that similarly went on too long and went nowhere.