The Razzies should include another category in their dishonourable awards ceremony – The Worst Screen Hairdo! It would target those performers who played characters with a seriously laudable case of cinematic mane.
Yes, like it or lump it, no one can avoid an occasional bad hair day once in a while, but when it's an actor's and it's plastered on screen, it's quite frankly irreversible, unless of course someone comes up with a little CGI jiggery-pokery to cover up the split ends.
But who would want to destroy the retrospective fun we can have here? So without further a do, let us present to you hecklerspray's Top 10 Worst Cinematic Hairdos…
10. Mark Hamill in Star Wars (1977)
In addition to the hairy pasties modelled by Leia, hideous 70s side-burns of Han Solo, hair-piece donned by Obi-Wan, 'walking-carpet' that is Chewbacca, and the 'out-of-bed-messy-look' that Luke Skywalker's hero favours here, there should be enough damaging evidence to justify a Death Star attack on the intergalactic hairdressers involved. At least Darth Vader had the sense to remain hidden under a mask, until his baldy scalp made an appearance in The Empire Strikes Back.
9. Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man (1973)
Not so much aimed at the 'boarding on a David Dickinson' mullet and sideburns that Lee sports for the majority of the film, but the courageously game 'Cher style' elongated black wig he throws on during the climatic carnival parade – frighteningly ghoulish and rip-roaring hilarious in equal measure!
8. Melanie Griffith & Joan Cusack in Working Girl (1988)
What was it with BIG hair in the 80s? Not content with the shoulder pads, power suits, hideous fake tans and clown-friendly makeup, women had to additionally don environmentally unfriendly hairstyles that must have required a dozen cans of hairspray to sculpt. Luckily, Griffith trims off her tyrannical tresses early on, but supporting sidekick Joan Cusack's equally dire mane is an unfortunate lasting reminder.
7. Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men (2007)
OK, so it does somehow lend an appropriately eerie and surreal resonance to Cormac McCarthy's emotionless psychopathic creation, but it's still appalling, deserving special mention here because it eerily recalls Richard 'Jaws' Kiel's real life hairstyle at a recent Bond convention.
6. Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
If you thought Gerard Butler's 'Jeff Goldblum in The Fly' trim was bad enough in Dracula 2000 think again! Oldman's Count sports a beehive that pushes the boundaries in aesthetic respectability in addition to overshadowing even Bet Lynch's towering structure.
5. John Travolta in Battlefield Earth (2000)
Travolta's trite stab at a producer credit was nothing compared to the hulk of shit of a hairstyle he and (to a marginally lesser degree) his co-stars had to flaunt in this infamously bad sci-fi travesty. The result: like splicing together the bed-hair of a Klingon and adding mounds of tagliatelle but with extra nasal hair definition for startlingly effect.
4. Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (1986)
Rivalling the Deirdre Barlow perm, Weaver flaunts a hair incarnation that is even worse than her disastrous alternative longer locks in the original Alien film. However, this is still a worthy contender for worst intergalactic trim. Wisely, she completely shaved it all off for Alien 3, but perhaps she could have fared better with the aliens has it been intact, as those fleeting xenomorphic creatures were probably scarred shitless when originally confronted with that killer perm creation.
3. Natalie Portman in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
At least you find out the horrendous hairstyle origin is in the dodgy family genes. Princess Leia sticking two-ringed hairy donuts on the side of her head was nothing compared to what her young mother used to do when she was in power in the good old days: swanking around like a peacock flaunting an audacious array of incomprehensible hairstyles that are screaming out for a Nicky Clarke.
2. Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now (1973)
The male perm was perhaps all the rage back in the 70s, but now, 35 years on, Sutherland's locks look more like something even a bird would hesitate to nest in. When it makes its first appearance it's almost as shockingly jarring as that climatic killer red dwarf attack, and is arguably the only thing that ages this otherwise flawless horror classic.
1. Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Hanks recently defended his comedic hair-do in this Ron Howard mystery thriller by likening it to U2 frontman Bono's trim. But, we're afraid that's a sorry miscalculation, rather like most of the other details that are maddening astray in the adaptation of Dan Brown's bestseller. In fact, it's difficult to take any of Hanks' murmurings in the film seriously when you're convinced his character, Robert Langdon, is stuck in a 80s hair-time warp, which appears harder to fathom than a Rubik cube.
[story by Oliver Pfeiffer]
m1a1 says
I can’t believe Yahoo Serious didn’t get a guernsey for Young Einstein- or am I the only one in the world who remembers him?