Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The sound of getting your ass beaten: five great fight songs

Posted by Nick Spacek on Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 10:21 AM

hit_girl.jpg

Thanks to a complete lack of anything to do last night, I finally got around to watching Kick-Ass. Living the exciting life that we do as rock-star journalists, knee-deep in bitches and money, sometimes we get caught up giving back rubs to supermodels and don't have a chance to watch movies until they've been out a while. (It's just the price one pays for being internationally respected by the public and lusted after by men and women alike.)

Anyhow, while watching the movie, I was filled with childish glee as I watch Hit Girl slash and gut an apartment full of drug dealers, soundtracked by the Dickies' cover of the Banana Splits theme. It was like getting dosed with Pixie Stix and watching Saturday-morning cartoons all over again. Here are some other fantastic scenes of excessive violence made even better by well-chosen musical accompaniment.

Obvs, the Kick-Ass scene, for the aforementioned reasons.

Despite all the soundtrack repurposing that Tarantino's done in his films over the years, no one's ever done it better than Ben Stiller did. When he used the Star Trek "Amok Time" episode as a template for the fight scene in Cable Guy, it inspired an entirely new generation of dorks and idiots to walk around squawking DA NA NA NANANANA NANANANA NAH. The piece of music, by the by, is called "The Ritual," and it was composed by Gerald Fried.

Can it be considered a fight when it's just one guy fucking up a whole bunch of Nazis? Such is the case when Tarantino used the theme to the 1972 blaxploitation picture, Slaughter, to introduce Hugo Stiglitz in Inglorious Basterds. Stiglitz is so badass that, in the whole of the Basterds, he's the only one to get introduced with his own title card and theme.

I'm including the gasoline fight from Zoolander because it allows me to type Wham! and, well ... hell, it's a fight, and people die. It's in a comedy, and by no stretch of the imagination would anyone ever consider this a "fight scene" per se, but look at that! Models! Spraying each other with gasoline! "Jitterbug" as the soundtrack! How can you not appreciate that?

sherlock_holmes_boxing.jpg

Sadly, I couldn't find an embeddable version of the boxing match from Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. The use of the Clancy Brothers' take on the Irish jig "The Rocky Road to Dublin"  gives the fight a sense of levity and fun, despite the fact that it's two gents beating the snot out of each other in a bare-knuckled fight. You can watch it on YouTube, though.

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