The 8 Greatest Makeshift Movie Weapons

The stalwarts of most action heroes' go-to movie weapons-automatic rifles, flamethrowers, lightsabers-might look good onscreen, but they can be unreliable. Guns run out of bullets, flamethrowers can explode suddenly, and lightsabers go through more batteries than a college sorority house.

This means that, in the very likely event that, at one point or another, you're going to engage in a climactic fight to the death with your nemesis, chances are good that you'll have to get creative. Using common household objects as implements of death shows your adversary a level resourcefulness, cunning and sheer ingenuity they'll have to respect, even as they're trying to kill you. You've got to be the sort of person who looks at a weed whacker and has a light bulb pop up over your head, and is able to then grab that light bulb and use it to kill someone.

So to prepare for your inevitable date with an army of rivals who for some reason will stop at nothing to kill you, here are the 8 greatest homemade weapons in movie history.

In the Peter Benchley novel, Quint stabs the shark with a harpoon and kills him, but his foot gets tangled in one of the barrels, drags him under and drowns him. Since Steven Spielberg was presumably wholly unaware that the original ending was a not-so-subtle nod to Moby Dick, or that a book called Moby Dick was ever written, he decided to end the film adaptation with a big explosion instead:

In the final moments of the movie it's down to just Chief Brody and the shark. He stuffs an oxygen tank in the Great White's massive mouth, crawls up the crow's nest as the Orca sinks, calls the shark a son of a bitch and BOOM! Lucky for Brody, Jaws the killer shark is no more. Unlucky for the audience, Jaws the unstoppable film franchise is followed by three more sequels that made audiences want to blow up their neighborhood Cineplex.

How It Is Useful Against Your Enemies

Thanks to a recent episode of Mythbusters and a behind-the-scenes feature included with the Jaws Special Edition DVD in which Spielberg makes Richard Dreyfuss hold an oxygen tank in his mouth while Spielberg shoots at it, we now know that puncturing an oxygen tank does nothing to turn your enemies into shark chum. The shark will have a pretty wicked little head rush while it eats you though, so there's that.

After being shot and left for dead, The Bride (Uma Thurman) is more thirsty for revenge than a Kennedy is for beer, and she begins her search by venturing to a quaint Pasadena family home. When Vivica A. Fox (A.K.A. "Copperhead") opens the door, a brutal fight ensues that is equal parts QVC and UFC:

Copperhead lunges with a kitchen knife that you can almost hear Susan Sommers hawking, and the Bride fends it off with a frying pan in a move straight out of the Julia Child Guide to Kicking Ass.

How It Is Useful Against Your Enemies

A frying pan is big and heavy, it's got an ergonomic handle perfect for swinging, and makes a very satisfying "thud" when it connects with your enemy's skull. There's also something about a frying pan that just screams "Clobber someone with me, you know you want to!" It's probably buried deep in our brains from all those Looney Tunes shorts we watched as kids, though we're hoping that isn't true because it'll just give Jack Thompson another excuse to talk.