Over the years, there have been plenty of dumb deaths that we’ve witnessed on the big screen. Just about every horror/slasher movie I’ve ever seen has had at least one death in it that was stupid, or pretty close to it. Maybe it’s the circumstances of the deaths that is idiotic. Or maybe it’s the choice the character made that led to their death that’s the issue. Either way, the death is just flat out dumb.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been plenty of stupid deaths on television too (Charlie’s death on Lost springs to mind), but for this post, I’m sticking with only movie deaths.

I can come up with a number of candidates for what I would consider the dumbest death in film history. There’s two I can think of just from the Star Wars movies: Han accidentally knocking Boba Fett into the Sarlacc pit and Darth Maul stupidly watching Obi-Wan fly over his head before being cut in half (yes, I know that thanks to later shows both of these characters somehow survived these deaths, but as far as I’m concerned they should’ve stayed dead). How about any of the deaths in Final Destination? Most of them were pretty absurd, especially the kid who somehow managed to strangle himself in the bathtub with a wire that had no reason being in the bathtub in the first place. Speaking of strangulation, there’s also the scene in The Butterfly Effect (I’m not sure if it was the theatrical release or the director’s cut) at the very end where Ashton Kutcher’s character goes back to when he was in the womb and kills himself by wrapping his umbilical cord around his neck so that he’d never be born to hurt his friends.

It would be easy to make an argument for any of these to be the dumbest death in film history, but I’m going to stick with the death that gave me the idea for this post in the first place. It takes place in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Any of you who have seen the movie probably know which scene I’m talking about.

The group of humans on the island have a couple of Tyrannosaurs walk into their camp in the middle of the night. They panic and run. A group of them run into a cave behind a waterfall (which I now question how they knew the cave was there in the first place). The dinosaur is too big to fit in the cave, so they’re safe for the moment, right?

Wrong.

One of them, a dinosaur expert, has a snake slither into his shirt. Does he grab it and get it out? Does he ask one of the others to help him? No. Instead of doing anything even remotely resembling smart, this guy freaks out and runs right into the mouth of the tyrannosaur.

Don’t get me wrong. I get being scared of snakes. I’m not exactly fond of them myself. However, if given the choice between having a snake down my shirt or being eaten by a very large carnivorous dinosaur, I’m going to take my chances with the snake. You don’t have to be a dinosaur expert to know that you can kill a foot long snake with your bare hands, but have almost zero chance of surviving against a 20,000 lb. tyrannosaur.

What about you, dear readers? Is there a movie death that you find to be incredibly dumb? Is it dumber than any of those I’ve mentioned?