4. Giraffe Decapitation - The Hangover Part III
There's an unfortunate bent of mean-spiritedness cutting through The Hangover Part III, a film that doesn't so much aim for laughs as it does cruelty and frantic action. An opening scene features Alan (Zack Galafianakis) driving a car that is towing a box containing a giraffe. Of course, as anyone who has watched the trailer knows, the giraffe's neck is not going to fit under the low highway bridges, and so, the giraffe is promptly decapitated in grisly fashion, its head catapulted across the highway into the windshield of another car. It's shocking that Todd Phillips took things so far, because there's a point where it just isn't very funny; it's trying to shock for shock's sake, and along with the various acts of animal and human abuse throughout the film, becomes tiresome very quickly.