10 Awesome Movie Villains That Had Totally Lame Deaths

"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." HG Wells' 1898 sci-fi game changer has shaped the literary and cinematic universe for 122 years and continues to be one of the greatest, most prophetic novels ever written.

The book has been adapted for television, radio (Orson Wells' version famously nearly started riots as it was broadcast in the style of real world events), stage and cinema over the years, most recently in Steven Spielberg's 2005 blockbuster of the same name.

As the inhabitants of planet Earth react to the terror of a race of towering mechanical tripods that emerge from the ground, dock worker Ray Ferrier desperately attempts to save his family from the onslaught as humans are disintegrated in their millions.

The action of the story, as in most adaptations, cleverly focuses on this small family unit as they only stumble continuously from one obstacle to the next, with an ending that whilst in keeping with Wells' original plot, has always seemed a bit of an anticlimax.

The alien invaders are brought down by the simplest of things - microbes. The tripods are unable to deal with Earth's many and varied diseases and they die as rapidly as they arrived. Perhaps marauding alien invaders would do well to do some research next time, they'll just end up on another list of lame movie deaths.