The Top 12 Coolest Movie Knives (#12 – 9)

The Top 12 Coolest Movie Knives: #12-#9

Not that long ago I did a mega list of the Top 25 Coolest Movie Guns and someone in the comments said that I should do a coolest movie knives (and movie swords” list next. It was a great idea and I sort of penciled it in as something I will/could do later on. I really didn’t know what “later on” meant, though. Should I wait a few weeks? A few months? Should I wait until 2022? Last week, for no other reason beyond it seemed like the right time, I decided that now is the time for a “coolest movie knives” list. So I started thinking about movie knives. Which ones are the coolest? Which ones are the most memorable?

I came up with 12. Now, over the next three weeks, I will be counting down the Top 12 Coolest Movie Knives. There will be four picks a week with no honorable mentions. I didn’t want this to be a mega list like the guns one. I really wanted to boil it down to the twelve best. So that’s what I did. What made the list?

And now, The Top 12 Coolest Movie Knives: #12-#9:

The Top 12 Coolest Movie Knives: #12-#9

12- Bob Scott’s Knife- Spartan: The fascinating thing about Bob Scott’s knife in David Mamet’s excellent Spartan is that it’s really the only thing that Scott, brilliantly played by Val Kilmer, brings with him on any mission he’s called in on. Scott, a self-described “worker bee” until he becomes obsessed with finding out what really happened to the U.S. President’s daughter, never seems to have any need for anything else. Clothes? Provided. A gun? Radio equipment? It will be issued to him. He always has his knife with him, though, a knife that he claims he got off an “East German fella” on some unnamed mission. A good luck charm of some sort? Maybe. It ends up betraying him a bit towards the end of the movie, when he discovers that it’s been tampered with. Despite this, Scott does make good use of it at the end, slashing a bad guy’s throat in one deft move and then slamming it down into a crate so it sticks up. He leaves it there as a kind of signal to the universe that he has to move on because everything he believed and worked for is over now. The knife, in “real life,” as far as I can tell, is called a Severtech and it’s expensive.

11- Alexander’s Knife- A Good Man: The blade weapon that Seagal’s Alexander character uses throughout A Good Man may actually be considered a short sword, but I think it’s cooler to look at it as a big knife instead. Why? Because Alexander uses it in flashbacks to when he was a badass Special Forces operator it’s ridiculous as a kind of sword. I mean, what sort of Special Forces operator uses a goddamn sword on a mission in a movie? No one. A big ass knife, though? That kind of thing happens all of the time, and the A Good Man knife fits in with that. Alexander’s use of the knife is truly epic towards the end of the movie, when he fights a bad guy in one of Seagal’s better fight scenes in his direct-to-video movie career (his fights are always better when it looks like he actually participated in filming them as opposed to those movies where it’s obvious they had to use extensive stunt doubles to cover Seagal’s scenes). Alexander fucking destroys that guy. It’s too bad that Alexander never used that blade again in another movie (Seagal has played multiple characters named “Alexander” in one form or another). I’d watch a movie where, for 90 minutes, it’s just Seagal and that knife killing bad guys.

10- Jack Burton’s Knife- Big Trouble in Little China: Ol’ Jack Burton keeps his knife hidden in his boot. I assume he has it on him at all times because, as a professional trucker, he may need it to protect himself/defend himself in case he encounters any trouble while on the road. He doesn’t seem to be very adept with it, though, at least not in a “I know how to knife fight” kind of way. He only uses it to kill bad guys twice, and both times are the result of a momentary fluke. He kills one of Lo Pan’s ceremonial guards by pushing the knife out of its sheath inside his boot in the middle of the big fight during Lo Pan’s wedding. If he hadn’t thought of doing that Burton likely would have been sliced in half by the guard’s sword. And when Burton uses the knife to kill Lo Pan notice how he originally threw it at Lo Pan and missed. Lo Pan then picked up the knife and threw it at Burton only for Burton to catch it in mid-air and throwing it back at Lo Pan, calling back to the “attempted bottle cutting” scene at the beginning of the movie and the classic line “It’s all in the reflexes.” Yeah, sure, Jack. Sure. This knife, from what I read online, is a Gerber and is hard to track down (the real knife, I mean, I’m sure there are prop knives companies that make fake ones for movie nerds and whatnot).

9- Matt Cordell’s Nightstick Knife- Maniac Cop 2: A knife hidden inside a cop’s night stick is a cool idea for a hidden weapon because, really, who the hell would suspect that a cop would have a knife inside their night stick? Matt Cordell, as played in all three Maniac Cop movies by the now late but always great Robert Z’Dar, certainly used the night stick more in the first Maniac Cop movie, using it to kill loads of people, but I’ve always thought that the night stick knife used in Maniac Cop 2 was more impressive and scarier. The blade looks much bigger in the sequel, which always makes it scarier. And the big reveal of the knife, when Cordell is out “patrolling” and swinging his night stick while Brice Campbell’s Jack Forrest is checking out the newsstand, still freaks me out to this very day. I know that Cordell has it, I know that he’s going to pull it out and use it to kill Forrest, and yet when Cordell reveals it I get goosebumps. A classic movie weapon.

**

Next issue: Multiple Machetes and Kitchen Knives!

**

Thanks for reading. Agree? Disagree? Sign up with disqus and comment. You know you want to, so just go do it.

Please “like” The Gratuitous B-Movie Column on Facebook!

Oh, and B-movies rule. Always remember that.