10 James Bond Fates Worse Than Death

James Bond has been through some wince-inducing and frequently elaborate forms of torture over the years - spine-stretching on a massage table, being trapped in a centrifuge, the aforementioned brain-drilling ordeal - but none have been as viscerally brutal as what is enacted upon him by Le Chiffre in the 3rd act of Casino Royale.

Stripping Bond naked and tying him to a chair with the seat cut out (foreboding in itself), Le Chiffre pontificates on the needlessness of over-complicated torture devices, instead focusing on causing more pain than a man can endure. He then produces a length of rope, balled up at the end, and proceeds to go to town on 007's testicles.

Every eye-watering crunch, accompanied by Bond's pain-racked screams, makes for a deeply unpleasant, harrowing scene.

The next we see of Bond, he's in the process of recovering with new love interest Vesper Lynd. The film dutifully brushes over the endless months in which he'll have been walking like John Wayne and sitting on doughnuts to soothe those massively swollen gonads of his.