Kick the Dog/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


"Is this your ball? Do you want it back?"
  • Pixar films often feature these kinds of moments with their villains, often in ways that hurt characters other than the protagonists beforehand, to give the audience an idea who the protagonists are dealing with. Even for the more despicable of villains, a Kick the Dog moment is often involved long before a Moral Event Horizon.
    • In the Toy Story series...
      • Toy Story has Sid steal a doll from his little sister, just to remove the head and replace it with a toy pterodactyl head before giving it back to her, because he finds her frightened scream funny. This makes clear that he is not just sadistic towards the toys he thought were insentient, but that he has a very mean-spirited nature.
      • Toy Story 2 has the prospector closing and locking the air vent after Woody says he wants to leave. Earlier on, the "how long will it last" speech seems reasonable enough, but resorting to locking someone in for not being convinced is clearly unjustified, and in turn makes much clearer whose perspective we're encouraged to listen to.
      • Toy Story 3 has SEVERAL on Lotso's part, from reprogramming Buzz for expressing solidarity with his friends, to having said reprogrammed Buzz throw his former friends in their cells, to throwing Woody's hat onto the prison floor to make it seem like Woody was tortured or killed, (or both) to the flashback in which it is revealed that Lotso told Big Baby they were all replaced by their owner when only Lotso was replaced, and then there is Lotso hitting Big Baby, (who apart from being a baby was his most loyal minion) and last but not least his Moral Event Horizon; leaving the main toys to burn in the incinerator, including Buzz and Woody who had both just risked their lives to save him.
        • It really shows just how low he's fallen when, as the other toys are wanting to find him and beat the stuffing out of him, Woody says that he's not worth it with complete sincerity.
  • The Lord of the Rings has a few:
    • In The Fellowship of the Ring the Ringwraiths decide to chop off a hobbit watchman's head and drop a door on the gatekeeper in Bree. Oh, and they try to kill off all the hobbits while they're in bed.
    • In The Return Of The King they don't so much kick the dog as much as throw the heads of the dog's friends at him.
  • In Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Rear Window, just when it looks like Lars Thorwald didn't actually kill his wife, another neighbor's dog gets killed. Three guesses as to who strangled the unfortunate canine? Oddly enough, Thorwald was seen petting the dog and gently shooing it away in an earlier scene.
    • Evil, but not gratuitous - the dog had discovered the corpse of Thorwald's wife in the garden.
  • Another Alfred Hitchcock's example: in Strangers on a Train, Magnificent Bastard Bruno Anthony uses his cigarette to casually puncture a little boy's balloon. Just for the pleasure of being a total dick.
    • There's a likely homage in Wes Craven's original The Last House on the Left, wherein we see David Hess as Krug do the exact same before his band of socially and sexually deviant weirdos get down to the more serious business at hand.
  • Despicable Me has a character-establishing moment at the beginning where the protagonist comforts a child who has dropped an ice-cream cone by... giving him a balloon, after twisting it into some kind of four-legged animal. Protagonist then produces a pin and pops said balloon, and walks off contentedly. Cut to a shocked child with bits of balloon stuck to his face. Yes, he's despicable. His jerkness is further established in the car he drives, an ugly polluting rocket shaped monstrosity; in the fact that he bumps other cars out of the way to park, and when he goes in to the cafe to get a coffee he freezes all the other customers with his freeze ray and goes to the front of the line to get his coffee.
    • At least he tips well.
  • A dumb racist in Terminator Salvation self-righteously screams at a frightened Chinese woman to "Speak English!!" on the prisoner transport. He deservingly dies for his arrogance later, shot to bloody little pieces by a T600.
  • In the 2007 Transformers film, Megatron gets to Kick The Human: while he and Prime recover from a fall during their climactic battle, Megatron casually flicks a fleeing passerby in disgust. It's made somewhat funny that this passerby was in fact the director, Michael Bay.
  • Villains in B action movies routinely do unspeakable things like this to family, friends, and property of the hero to set him on the path to violent revenge. One of the most flagrant abuses of the trope was in the Chuck Norris film Lone Wolf McQuade. The villain (David Carradine) goes through all the usual atrocities, including killing or maiming the hero's entire family, until—with the most dramatic music of the movie welling up—he kills McQuade's border collie and leaves him lying in the dirt. At that point, Norris's wooden features almost show real emotion as he sets his jaw and goes forth seeking vengeance.
  • In Pan's Labyrinth, Captain Vidal is woken up so he can deal with some possible rebels; an old man and his teenage son. They insist that they were hunting rabbits, but he beats the kid's face in with a bottle before even letting him finish his sentence, then shoots them both. He reaches into their pack, and pulls out... a pair of rabbits. He snarls at his men that they should search these assholes before bothering him with them, and goes back to bed. Later, he asks the cooks to make him something from the rabbits. "Perhaps a stew." Nice guy.
  • The Jet Li movie Kiss of the Dragon has a scene where the main bad guy forcibly injects the female lead, a woman he had tricked into prostitution, with her "fix" of heroin and sends her back to work on the street after she begs him to let her daughter go so that she can get out of the business. Apart from the earlier nasty things he did (such as framing Li for killing the diplomat), this scene marks him as a huge bastard worthy of the very nasty death that Li gave him.
  • In Scarface, Sosa's evil is made clear by his lack of qualms about the children that will be caught in a hit's collateral damage.
  • For the first 45 minutes of The Princess Bride, it appears that Prince Humperdinck, if somewhat a hunting-loving milquetoast that Buttercup doesn't love, is more aloof and uncaring than out-and-out evil...until he tortures Westley to death (well, mostly) on Count Rugen's crazy sucking machine, and lies to Buttercup to make her think Westley abandoned her.
    • The book is much more to the point on the subject - the first time we see Humperdinck, he's in his Zoo of Death, where he keeps wild animals for the express purpose of killing them when he's bored.
  • And who can forget the destruction of Alderaan by The Empire's Death Star in A New Hope? This one's heinous enough to be Moral Event Horizon material, considering that it was an entire planet and that Tarkin did it as a You Said You Would Let Them Go on Leia, who he had moments before given a Sadistic Choice.
    • In episode VI, Jabba the Hutt feeds Oola, a defiant Twi'lek slave dancer, to his pet rancor. While it does set up for Luke's battle with the beast later on it has little point other then to show how cruel he is.
      • Plus, it means we don't feel so bad when Bib Fortuna puts poison in the sithspawn's drink (reducing his life expectancy to days), and then Leia garrotes him (reducing his life expectancy to minutes, if not seconds).
  • In Ernest Goes to Jail, Ernest's Evil Twin throws Ernest's small dog into the garbage can to stop it from barking. The dog was physically uninjured, but it apparently had no way of getting out before the real Ernest came along and rescued it, a day or so later.
  • Done by a corrupt cop in American Gangster—he shoots the dog.
  • This happens in many, many Bollywood films, such as the Captain beating his servant in Lagaan.
  • In One Crazy Summer, Aquila Beckersted gloats over his victory over the protagonists and punctuates his villainy by literally kicking a little girl's dog and putting it in an animal hospital.
  • In the not-quite-zombies zombie movie Severed: Forest of the Dead, one of the characters, fearful of the violent (and slightly unbalanced) lumberjacks in the well-defended camp, leaves in the dead of night...and leaves the gate open behind him. He's been kind of a whiny jerk and a pansy up to that point, but that action (leaving the sleeping camp vulnerable to the zombies) ensures his Karmic Death not too long afterward.
  • In Batman Begins, just to make good and sure that the audience is set against Detective Flass, a corrupt cop, he cheats a street vendor out of his money before Batman interrogates him.
  • Early in Dog Soldiers, Captain Ryan, a Special Forces commander, ironically fulfils this trope by literally shooting a dog. Not that kind of Shoot the Dog, just killing it for no real reason.
    • Later on in the movie, he attempts to shoot another dog to get it to stop barking, but he is thwarted when another character vomits on his head.
  • Don't forget Glenn Close's character from Fatal Attraction, in full psycho Yandere mode, killing and cooking the pet rabbit of the protagonist's daughter.
    • And she kidnaps the little girl a few days later. Although she returns her unharmed, it seems likely that she wanted to terrify Dan with the notion that she *could* have harmed the child if she wanted to.
  • In the 1970s Blaxploitation film Shaft, the title character grabs one of the Big Bad's Mooks and uses him as a human shield to try and escape. The villain shoots and kills his own henchman. He lets Shaft live only because he has to report back to his employer Bumpy that the Big Bad hasn't killed Bumpy's daughter, that he has taken hostage.
  • Snakes on a Plane has a businessman who grabs another passenger's pet chihuahua and throws it to the snakes in an attempt to buy himself some time. Everyone in the audience likely cheers when, a few seconds later, a snake eats him.
    • I don't know, it was a chihuahua.
  • The Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: "Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings... and call off Christmas!"
  • American Psycho had a very literal example. When the dog of the homeless man Patrick Bateman has just shot to death starts barking, Bateman coolly stomps it to death, shutting it up. Later, he is at an ATM when a kitten starts rubbing against his leg. He picks it up, the scene playing like an unlikely Pet the Dog (or kitty) moment... until the ATM screen reads "FEED ME A STRAY CAT," and Bateman (almost) obliges.
    • The book has Patrick being cruel to many more animals—and then there's that unfilmable scene with the starved rat, a Habitrail tube, and one of his female victims...
  • Back to The Future Part II: There's a scene in 1955 where Biff gets a hold of a ball belonging to a bunch of kids, and while listening to them plead to have it back, mocks them and then throws it onto a second story balcony. Not that it wasn't already obvious that Biff was a Jerkass, but it was over the top.
  • In Assault on Precinct 13, one of the gang members shoots an ice cream truck driver, and then a little girl who went back to complain that the man gave her the wrong flavor of ice cream.
  • In the movie U-571, the captain of the Nazi U-boat orders his men to slaughter survivors from an Allied cargo ship over his crew's protests.
  • In order to make the Serial Killer protagonist of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street sympathetic, Christopher Bond and Stephen Sondheim pitted him against Judge Turpin, who is pretty much a dog-kicking machine throughout the play. Among his nastier Kick the Dog moments are: having Benjamin Barker, the man who would become Sweeney, transported to Botany Bay for life just so he could get at his wife Lucy, who he wanted for himself (and then raping her at a masked ball that he has the Beadle lure her to, in a crossing of the Moral Event Horizon), the sentencing of an eight-year-old boy to death by hanging, the entire Wife Husbandry plan he has for his teenage ward Johanna, and subsequently throwing her into a madhouse after learning she wants to marry the sailor Anthony Hope instead of him.
    • The Beadle, in addition to helping the Judge carry out his Moral Event Horizon, also gets some Kick the Dog moments of his own. In the film, he savagely whips Anthony with his cane after he is thrown out on Judge Turpin's orders for "gandering" at Johanna. And in the play, he's even crueler—he snaps the neck of the poor little bird that was Anthony's gift to Johanna before threatening him with the same if he ever steps foot on their street again.
  • The Joker in the first Tim Burton Batman had a number of examples of this, such as terrorizing Vicki Vale, disposing of his last girlfriend Alicia offscreen so he could be with her, and gassing a museum and a parade full of innocent people (though the last one was foiled by the Batman), but the worst was probably cold-bloodedly executing his unquestioningly loyal Battle Butler Bob after asking him for his gun following said foiling.
    • Because Batman stole his balloons.
      • Can you really blame the Joker for being angry at his minions' incompetence? Why didn't somebody tell the Joker that Batman had one of those...things?
    • One of the two muggers from the first sequence gets one when he turns his gun on the little boy of a tourist family the two are in the middle of robbing: "Hey lady, do the kid a favor: don't scream." The partner of the mugger in question even brings it up after telling him about "the bat," shortly before both of them get their asses kicked.
  • In Advent Children, Kadaj kicked the dog when he convinced Rufus he needed to tell the truth by tossing Tseng and Elena's bloodstained ID cards at his feet. It would have been a much more gruesome moment if... well...
    • In Advent Children Complete, we get to see a glimpse of how Tseng and Elena got their asses handed to them.
  • In The Incredible Hulk, Blonsky arrives at Bruce's apartment with his tranquilizer gun only to find he's already run for it; he shoots Bruce's dog instead (complete with comedy yelp noise).
    • In the DVD commentary, the director actually says that there's no better way to establish a villain than by having him shoot a dog.
  • Another example with a literal dog occurs in Red Dog: the caretaker's wife shoots Red Dog in an attempt to kill him, but not in a Shoot the Dog kind of way.
  • In The Monster Squad, Dracula all but cements the fact that he is an utter bastard right near the end of the movie when he confronts Phoebe, a little girl who is five years old and has the amulet that he wants to destroy so that the creatures of the night can rule the world, with these words: "Give me the amulet, you bitch!" If calling a five-year-old a bitch isn't Kicking The Dog, we don't know what is.
    • This scene was so bad that Duncan Regehr (Dracula) actually refused to do the scene in more than one take, and little Ashley Bank (Phoebe) was genuinely terrified when she saw his "evil" contact lenses.
    • Also, there was the scene where Drac blew up the treehouse belonging to the title group with a stick of dynamite. The kids weren't there, but Drac seemed to think they were, judging by his cold "Meeting adjourned" just before the kaboom.
  • Agents Johnson and Johnson in the first Die Hard have an exchange in which they determine that their plan to stop the terrorists (which was actually a vital part of Hans Gruber's Evil Plan) could end up with 25% of the hostages dead, but they dismiss it as being an acceptable casualty. Presumably this is to obliterate any sympathy one might have for the fact that they get blown up by Gruber five minutes later.
    • But that poor helicopter pilot...
  • As far as Kane Hodder was concerned, kicking dogs is too evil even for Jason Voorhees: "Jason can pull people's limbs off and beat them to death with their own arms, things like that, but he's not gonna be kicking any dog. You know, you gotta draw the line somewhere."
    • He does kick a poor boombox in Jason Takes Manhattan, though.
    • The trope gets played straight in Jason Takes Manhattan. The main characters get mugged, and when Final Girl's dog starts barking at the the thugs, the lead mugger, with no hesitation whatsoever, tries shooting it.
    • Michael Myers from the Halloween series apparently doesn't share the same sentiment, having killed several dogs over the course of his many rampages. And eating one of them, apparently. "He got hungry..."
  • Star Trek: Nemesis: Shinzon's Mind Rape of Troi, seemingly put in the film only to point out that he's a villain to the audience members who hadn't caught on to the fact yet.
  • Early in the first Terminator, the titular character had to run over some children's toys to establish that he is evil. Never mind that he'd already killed (at least) two people in exceptionally ruthless fashion.
    • Let's also count the moment in T2, where the T-1000 actually kills John's dog.
  • Invoked in Spider-Man 3: Thoman Hayden Church, who played the Sandman, asked the director if he could be shown punching a police dog while fleeing from the cops, so it would be clear that he wasn't an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain. (It was only a puppet, but it gets the point across well enough.)
  • Used almost to the point of gratuity in No Country for Old Men; Chigurh arbitrarily murders random innocents several times, based solely on whim and the outcome of a coin toss. He even takes a potshot at a pigeon he passes while crossing a bridge. Ironically (the irony being that he's the most terrifyingly competent and relentless assassin in film history), he misses. Utterly lampshaded early on by Deputy Wendell, who, upon surveying the scene of the drug dealers' massacre in the desert, remarks: "Aw, they even shot the dog." As if the pile of dead bodies and truckload of heroin weren't big enough clues that these are bad people.
  • Juno from The Descent gets a few of these, such as cowardly leaving her friend who she accidentally stabbed to die slowly and painfully. It is also revealed that she was having an affair with the main character's deceased husband. This was before she becomes a fairly heroic uber-Badass.
  • Hunter "Raoul Duke" Thompson has one of these in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when he suggests selling Lucy into prostitution. Although it's really hard to tell whether or not he was serious or sober.
    • There's one even earlier in the movie when he throws a tip onto the patio floor of the restaurant he's in, forcing the midget employee to get on hands and knees to collect it.
    • Ironically, the Lucy suggestion is less a Dog Kick in the movie, where Johnny Depp plays it so over-the-top as to make clear to the audience (if not the extremely drug addled Dr. Gonzo) he's not seriously suggesting this, but rather forcing Gonzo to realize what a Complete Monster he'd have to become to keep Lucy around. In the book, this is much more ambiguous. On the other hand, HST objected to the tip-tossing, as he felt that such motiveless and pointless cruelty was out of character for Duke, at least while he was (comparatively) sober.
  • The one-eyed "bible salesman" in O Brother, Where Art Thou? beats two of the protagonist senseless with a branch to steal whatever it was that they were keeping in that shoe box they were guarding so closely. When he finds out it's a frog (which they thought was a cursed friend), he squeezes the thing dead on his palm, and violently throws it against a tree, making one of the heroes cry. He later gets what's coming for him when a burning cross drops on him.
  • In The Invasion, it's not clear what would be so bad about the new world order that's taking shape, until it's made clear that anyone not affected by the change would be executed, rather than simply kept out of positions of influence and allowed to live out their lives
  • Not actually an example, but we have to mention that it literally happens in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, after the title character accidentally throws a burrito at a Badass Biker. In retribution, the biker destroys something that Ron Burgundy loves: his puppy Baxter. Baxter returns at the end, wet but unharmed.
    • More specifically, he punts the dog off an overpass.
      • "THE MAN PUNTED BAXTERRRR!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH AAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!"
  • The 1950s version of Show Boat whittles Pete's role down to one of these scenes, taking a slave's necklace on the grounds that she probably stole it, then actually performing his role and mucking things up before being fired.
  • In The Spirit, the Octopus (the Spirit's nemesis) dons a Nazi uniform and gleefully melts a white fluffy kitten, seemingly just for kicks.
  • In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Judge Doom demonstrates The Dip by melting a tiny, adorable shoe toon in it.
  • In Superman II, a boy in a small town taken over by the Phantom Zone criminals makes a break for it on horseback for help. Seeing this disobedience, General Zod almost casually signals Non to stop him, which is done by taking a police car flasher light and throwing it hard and accurately enough to apparently kill both kid and horse with one blow. When a woman wails he was just a boy, Ursa purrs sadistically, "And he will never become a man."
  • In Super Mario Bros, Koopa kicks his pet dinosaur Yoshi.
  • In Birth - when her fiancée beats up (ish) the kid. Though this isn't just a pointless act, I think it still sets up the fiancée for a fall.
  • In the Toho film King Kong Escapes, the villain Doctor Who shoots the old man on Kong's island when he comes to take the ape, just responding to his warnings not to take the ape with "Yes. Kong's mine now." before killing him.
  • In the classic John Ford western The Searchers, John Wayne is frequently compared to the antagonist—a Comanche chief named Scar—but is differentiated in that while Wayne pets the dog before Indians raid his family's home early in the film, when we later see Scar at his camp before the cavalry raids them, Scar throws a rock off screen at a yapping dog, and we hear a pathetic whimper a second later.
  • In The Meteor Man, the Big Bad doesn't kick the dog, he throws a dumpster on the dog! The dog got better.
  • The Mask of Zorro does this with resident baddie Captain Harrison Love. For the first fourth or so of the picture, Captain Love seems less like an evil villain and more like a lawman who is only an antagonist because the hero of the movie is an outlaw. Well, we can't have that sort of thing in our summer blockbusters. In order to avoid actually having to deal with moral complexity, we're treated to an Anvilicious scene where Zorro is conversing with the Captain and he randomly takes Zorro's brother's head out of his desk drawer, where it had been "marinating" in something presumably alcoholic, and Captain Love nonchalantly drinks a cupful of it. Drawn straight from the jar. To drive the point home, he tells our hero that he keeps the heads of everyone he kills, because he just loves killing people so very much.
  • If you weren't convinced yet that Jane is a little off her rocker in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane by the time Blanche's pet bird goes missing, you'll be quite assured to know Jane's mental status when she kills the bird and puts it on a dinner plate to horrify her disabled sister.
  • This trope is kind of spoofed in Blazing Saddles when baddie Mongo punches a horse.
  • Occurs in Live and Let Die when Kananga slaps Solitaire in the face after she sleeps with Bond.
  • In The Wizard of Oz it was clear from the first second the Wicked Witch of the West appeared that she was ... well, wicked, particularly when she threatened Dorothy's poor dog in the Trope Namer for And Your Little Dog, Too. However, for most of the movie she's more of a Designated Villain, since all she wants is to get her sister's shoes back. When she really gets solidified as evil comes at one of three points:
    • When she orders one of her Mooks to drown Toto anyway, even after Dorothy agreed to do whatever the Witch said, a Kick the Dog moment that involved an actual dog. Or ...
    • When she locks Dorothy in the room with the evil hourglass (the one that would kill her once it ran out) and the crystal ball, makes Aunt Em appear in the latter, and then sadistically mocks her once she's completely broken down. Or...
    • When she finally has Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion cornered, she tells Dorothy she will be Forced to Watch. She gloats: "The last to go will see the first three go before her." Even the most generous Alternate Character Interpretation can't make that anything but pure sadism.
  • In The Butterfly Effect, Evan's enemy Tommy burns his dog alive after seeing Evan kiss Kayleigh, Tommy's sister when they're 13 years old. It's an even more impacting scene than when Tommy's violence is first established by beating a boy in the movie theater with the metal queue pole, and then smiling at Evan as security drags him out.
    • The movie throws us a curve ball at the same time, by giving Tommy a Freudian Excuse.
  • The Young Victoria: After violently manhandling Princess Victoria, Sir John Conroy actually kicks her dog, Dash, as she storms from the room.
  • Three Ninjas: High Noon At Mega Mountain, where male lead villain Lothar shows that he's a big unsympathetic jerk. First, on his way back to central control, he steals a kid's ice-cream, with the kid crying after that. Later on, fifteen-year-old Rocky, the oldest of the heroes, tries to save his girlfriend from becoming roller-coaster roadkill. With a sword, Lothar engages into battle with the unarmed Rocky, to the point that they climb up the roller coaster tracks.
  • A number of examples from the Warden in The Shawshank Redemption. "Give him another month to think about it."
    • Heywood did this earlier in the movie, as he taunted an emotionally-overwhelmed prisoner by reeling him in with what starts out sounding reassuring, only to go on to something that is practically the opposite of reassuring.

"Don't you listen to these nitwits, you hear me? This place ain't so bad. Tell you what, I'll introduce you around, make you feel right at home. I know a couple of big old bull queers that'd just love to make your acquaintance. Especially that big, white, mushy butt of yours."

      • That emotionally-overwhelmed prisoner then broke down in tears, and Heywood laughed at this out loud. For what it's worth, Heywood actually turns out NOT to be a Complete Monster, but given what he did, who could blame viewers for expecting him to be?
  • X-Men: Last Stand - While Ian McKellen's Magneto may have been a complex Anti-Villain with sympathetic goals, his slide toward the Moral Event Horizon is punctuated with increasingly cruel kick-the-dog moments. In particular is when Mystique is hit with a "cure dart" and turns suddenly into a beautiful, stricken, and supremely vulnerable human woman. And then he promptly abandons her without a second thought. Not to mention the fact that she had just saved him.
    • He also gets major dog-kicking points in the scene where his forces fight against the government. He uses Chess Motifs, telling his protege, Pyro for them to wait until the pawns (his other followers) exhaust themselves. In this moment, like the above scene, Magneto violates his own standards of decency, since if nothing else, he supposedly cares about mutants.
  • At the beginning of Sky Blue, Locke orders a decaying rig to be jettisoned. When one of the Diggers protests that they need time to evacuate, Locke shoots him and threatens to kill the other if he doesn't comply, thus resulting in the deaths of numerous other Diggers. He also kicks several more dogs hard at the end, but telling would be spoileriffic.
  • Subverted in Local Hero due to Values Dissonance. After Mac has adopted a rabbit he accidentally hit with his car and takes it to the village, the villagers cook and eat it. They turn out to be good people anyway.
  • Used in a very interesting way in Cold Turkey. A town is trying to give up smoking for 30 days, so we know they aren't really "bad" people, just highly frustrated. That said, someway into the movie, a man literally kicks a dog and it hilariously goes flying.
  • Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in Dune when he pulls the heart plug from one of his slaves and then does something too gruesome to describe here.
  • In Nacho Libre, the wrestler who had originally won the battle royal for the opportunity to fight Ramses, Silencio, is fighting against a child beggar over a loaf of bread.
  • Near the end of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Lucius Malfoy literally kicks the Dobby.
  • In the musical film version of Little Shop of Horrors, Audrey II, after a blatantly evil phone call, reaches into the change slot of a pay phone to see of there are any coins. And That's Terrible.
  • Done literally in the Charlie Chaplin silent short Sunnyside when the villain kicks a dog belonging to a young boy. The antagonist repeatedly kicks Charlie himself in the rear throughout the entire film as well.
  • Early on in Metropolis, Joh Fredersen fires one of his overworked assistants for failing to report an accident at the Moloch Machine, effectively dooming him to working in the deplorable conditions underground.
  • Done literally in the film Hitler: the Rise of Evil to make absolutely certain that the viewer would understand that Hitler is not to be liked at all.
    • It's kind of amusing when it's been said that he loved dogs.
  • The protagonist in Drag Me to Hell sacrifices her kitten in an attempt at placating the demon set upon her by a Gypsy Curse. It doesn't work when all is said and done.
  • Inglourious Basterds: Zoller, the subject of Goebbels' propaganda film, is portrayed through most of the movie as a kind, generous, patriotic, somewhat lovesick suitor. The guy is even a film buff. And in one of his last scenes, he shudders at watching Goebbels' glorification of his bloody war heroism. In his last scene, he takes joy in accidentally hurting Shoshanna after she turned him down one more time, barks commands and threats at her and generally gives off a rape vibe. This is the scene that makes it OK to kill him.
  • In Disney Animated Canon's Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, when the Queen is on her way out to poison Snow White, she passes a skeleton reaching for a jug of water just outside his dungeon cell. "Thirsty?" she mocks; "then have a drink!" and throws the jug at the skull, destroying it.
  • In Return to Oz, the Nome King enjoys a long sequence of kick the dog moments as he becomes steadily more human: to begin with, he reveals that his supposedly innocent contest is actually a death trap for Dorothy's friends, and forces Dorothy and the others to keep playing by threatening to incinerate them; then he sends the childlike Jack Pumpkinhead to participate, clearly enjoying Jack's terror; finally, he reveals that he now owns the Ruby Slippers and mockingly congratulates Dorothy for letting them fall into his hands.
  • In the (remarkably boring) 2000 horror thriller The Calling, one of the signs that the sweet US girl's cute little son is evil incarnate is that he kicks away his dog. In case that other hints like not missing his mom one bit, trying to psychically murder a little girl for hogging the swing and impaling a guinea pig didn't work.
  • In Shooter, the protagonist sniper reveals that he would have just hid in the wilderness if only the bad guys hadn't shot his dog first.
  • In the French film Forbidden Games (Jeux Interdits) it's not enough that the Nazis kill Paulette's parents. They have to kill her dog, too!
  • The 2009 Japanese film Goemon probably has one of the most evil examples of this thus far. Saizo tries to assassinate the (mostly corrupt) ruler of Japan, Hideyoshi. Naturally, he fails, and is captured. After Goemon breaks him out, Hideyoshi and his men attack Saizo's home, kill his wife, and abduct his baby son. Being told that his son's life will be spared if he turns himself in, he gladly allows himself to be boiled alive in a giant vat of oil, in front of the entire city. Hideyoshi kicks him into the oil, and this is where the moment comes: when Hideyoshi throws his baby son into the vat 10 seconds later, alive. Literally every other character, be it good, evil, or in between, were disgusted by this act at best. At best.
  • In Secret Window, one of the first ways in which the protagonist's stalker demonstrates his overall high level of dangerous creepiness is by killing the protagonist's dog...by stabbing him with a screwdriver. Of course, it turns out it was actually the protagonist himself who did all that, but the point stands.
  • In Charlie Wilson's War, the title character tells his assistant about his first foray into politics: When he was a kid, he had a dog that always dug up a neighbor's flowerbeds. The neighbor solved the problem by feeding it dog food with broken glass mixed in. The neighbor was running for city council, so Charlie (after burning up his flowerbeds) went to the poor black neighborhoods in town, where most of the people had never bothered voting in a local election, told them that this candidate had purposely killed his dog, and offered them a ride to the polls. It was enough to lose him the election.
  • In the Troma film The Toxic Avenger, the antagonists take dog-kicking to the extreme with their hobby of running people over in their car for fun and taking pictures of the gore that ensues. The most gruesome/hilarious example is provided in the scene where the main characters run over a small child riding his bicycle after taunting him and, upon realizing he is not fully dead, reverse the car over his head. Furthermore, the attractive females of the crew of villains seem to get sexually aroused by the carnage, so...you know. All pretty much standard fare for a Troma film.
  • In Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy Krueger refers to a black girl as "dark meat." Not only is he a dream-invading serial child-murdering pedophile, he's also a casual racist.
  • In Demolition Man, Wesley Snipes plays a criminal who is not only a maniacal killer/terrorist but also a compulsive casual racist who cannot look at a Chinese suit of armour without giggling and saying "ching chong ching chong".
  • In Time Bandits Evil himself shows us how it is done, by not just kicking, but incinerating, Benson the dog.
  • A movie called "What Just Happened," which has a Show Within a Show that everyone hates because the dog gets shot at the end. It shows the jaded audience, desensitized to all forms of human-on-human violence, bored in a movie theater. The antagonist shoots the protagonist and the audience couldn't care less. And then the antagonist shoots the protagonist's dog and everyone is mortified and scarred for life.
  • Villain-on-villain kicking: In Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, The Knave of Hearts tries to kill The Red Queen after she all but confesses her love for him.
    • Also, the Red Queen having a talking frog decapitated just for stealing her food.
      • Oh, she didn't just behead him. She instructed one of her footmen to go to the frog's home and collect his children, for the sole purpose of eating them. "I love tadpoles on toast."
  • In Seven Years in Tibet, a Chinese general kicks a sand mandala.
  • In Godzilla, rowdy college students try to drown a dog that never harmed them. Until Mothra drowns them and traps them in her own silk.
  • In The Lost World: Jurassic Park one of the hunters zaps a little chicken-size dinosaur with a cattle prod.
  • A quick, literal example occurs in Edward Scissorhands. As she walks out to offer Edward some lemonade (and flirt with him), Joyce continuously tells her excited dog to stop yipping. And finally kicks it to make it stop cramping her style.
  • In Iron Man 2, Justin Hammer pulls off two separate dog kicks. First, when Vanko asks Hammer to retrieve his beloved cockatoo from his former home in Russia, and Hammer tries to fob off a random pet store cockatoo on him—as if any devoted pet owner wouldn't recognize their own. The second incident occurs shortly thereafter, when Hammer is displeased with Vanko's apparent lack of progress on Hammer's line of battle suits; he has one of his thugs stuff the poor bird in a bag and take it away along with many of Vanko's other comforts.
  • In the French cult movie La Cité de la Peur, a random cat gets kicked twice by the hammer and sickle wielding serial-killer. This is also a Running Joke, since Les Nuls, who produced the movie, are well known for their hatred towards cats (Le Chat Machine and CCC, anyone?)
  • In Hot Rod, the romantic rival pulls the rarer "run over a racoon" variant, then chuckles to himself and comments that he can't wait to tell his bro who will love it.
  • In the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in China 2, the White Lotus Sect burns a dog because it's a foreign breed.
  • The first villainous thing we see Pinhead do in Hellraiser Bloodline is feed a little white dove to the Chatter Beast.
  • The villain in Urban Legend randomly microwaved a dog.
  • Orson Welles' The Stranger provides a literal example of this trope.
  • In The Wild Bunch, Angel, the only Mexican in the title band, has been handed over to Mapache after he uses one of the crates of guns meant for the General to arm his people and give them a chance against the General due to being ratted out by the mother of his former girlfriend, whom Angel had gunned down in a fit of jealousy upon finding her with Mapache. When the other members visit Mapache's village, they come across a sickening scene in which Angel is being tortured by being dragged along the ground from a rope tied to the fender of Mapache's new car to the joyous laughter of the villagers. Pike and Dutch are both utterly appalled by this despicable act:

Pike: God I hate to see that!
Dutch: No more than I do.

  • Dogville. Sweet dear Lord, Dogville. The whole movie would have to be recited to number the times. The movie vividly demonstrates the dangers of Dog Kicking. Ironically, an actual dog doesn't suffer at all.
  • The moment in The Golden Compass when Mrs. Coulter hits her daemon.
  • In Con Air designated Jerkass Malloy has two of these in one scene, where he speeds up in his ridiculously expensive car (which of course, despite not being an act of maliciousness or cruelty or the like automatically makes him a Jerkass) and parks, you guessed it, in the handicap parking space.
  • In Raiders of the Lost Ark, having finally lost track of Indy after an extended truck chase, Colonel Dietrich throws a melon at an off-screen dog. The dog gives up its barking with a yelp. Nazis, eh?
  • Occurs in the film Godzilla vs. Destoroyah when Destoroyah not only kills Junior right in front of Godzilla, but then grabs the heartbroken Godzilla by the throat and proceeds to drag him around while laughing.
  • Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey - The Robot Bill and Ted: "Aim for the cat, dude! Aim for the cat!"
  • The entire scene at Balmoral Castle in The King's Speech was this for Edward. First he showed how lightly he takes his duties as king, more interested in pleasing his girlfriend. Then he was apathetic to Hitler's march through Europe before he finally topped it off with mocking his brother Albert's speech impairment.
  • The eponymous Villain Protagonist of Aguirre, the Wrath of God yells at a horse so hard that it collapses. Also, infamously tosses a squirrel monkey.
  • The very first scene of As Good as It Gets shows Jack Nicholson's character putting a small dog into a laundry chute because it peed on the floor.
  • Inverted Trope in Point Break: During a chase scene Bodhi (the bad guy) throws a dog at Johnny (the hero) to slow him down. Johnny kicks the dog out of his way.
  • A cattle thief named Stiff-Hat Bailey does a literal one of these in the 1939 movie Renegade Trail, one of the Hopalong Cassidy series, much to the fury of the dog's young owner.
  • Subverted Trope in John Carpenter's The Thing. When the dog actually turns out to be a shapeshifting Eldritch Abomination, it’s probably okay to kick it.
    • No, it isn't; doing that would give it a chance to assimilate the kicker. It's okay to torch it, though.
  • In Hondo, Apache warrior Silva kills the title character's dog out of spite. Suffice to say that killing John Wayne's canine companion is not a good idea.
  • The Egyptian film Hassan and Naima has a textbook case. In the first scene with the villain he starts by harasses the protagonist for going to her cousin's wedding in an explicitly sexist way. When she storms off, he kicks a tiny dog, sending him rolling five feet or so, then insults a beggar. Because he's a jerk.
  • In an example of Kick Them While They Are Down (at least emotionally), Loki visited the recently-depowered Thor who'd just realized that he was truly powerless after failing to lift Mjölnir and lied to him, telling him that Odin was dead because of the stress brought on by the war that Thor instigated and that their mother, Frigga, never wanted to see Thor again. The kicker was that Thor actually thanked Loki!
  • In The Avengers, Loki does it again—this time he rips out some poor guy's eye (and appears to enjoy it) for the sole purpose of stealing iridium. Loki is arguably more unhinged in this movie, and it shows; most of his actions are meant to cause as much mayhem and distress as possible. For example, did he really have to be so mean to Natasha with the "can you wipe out that much red?" speech? No, but he did it anyway.
  • In the 2001 Tim Burton remake of Planet of the Apes, the evil General Thade knocks the chimp Pericles against a wall, breaking his leg; thus cowed, Pericles then crawls back into the relative safety of his cage (much like a kicked dog might do).
  • The soldiers in 28 Days Later. Not only are they going to repeatedly rape a woman and teenage girl, but they have Jim and the only soldier who tried to stop them taken out into the woods to be shot. Not only that, but one of the men who is to execute them affixes a bayonet to his rifle because he wants the sergeant to suffer. Fortunately, the other soldier shoots the sergeant before he's stabbed.
  • Done literally in Single White Female, to establish how much of a Yandere Hedy is for Allie. When the puppy Hedy brought home eats some of Allie's food, Hedy kicks the puppy across the floor, mainly because she's upset that Allie isn't there to eat it.
  • The Ferryman features a literal Kick the Dog moment. Well, actually it's more a of a Snap The Dog's Spine And Toss It Overboard moment. The movie gets worse from there.
  • St Trinian's (2007) has the Minister of Education kick the dog. Straight into a lawn mower.
  • In Hollow Man using his invisibility to his advantage Sebastian rapes a woman. When he discovers that Linda is sleeping with Matt, he becomes enraged and kills an invisible dog barking at him, and it is shown in infrared.
  • In Underworld Rise of the Lycans, Viktor captures Lucian and sentences him to 30 lashes for betraying his trust. During the lashing scene, when even one lash is brutal enough to Lucian, after 21 of them Viktor remains stiff-necked about how much he wants Lucian to suffer: "By my count, that's 21. Continue." He even forbids his own daughter to intervene on pain of severe punishment.
  • RoboCop: Clarence Boddicker and his gang get one of these near the beginning of the movie, and it's a doozy—the sheer brutality with which they murder the protagonist before he is rebuilt is enough to catapult these bastards straight across the Moral Event Horizon.
  • After Eduardo was kicked out of the company in The Social Network, Sean decides to rub salt to the wounds by handing Eduardo his paltry check. Even Mark felt that was going too far.
  • The 1995 film version of Richard III (the WWII-esque one) has Richard talking to Tyrell while the latter is feeding apples to the military unit's mascot (appropriately, a boar). He hands an apple to Richard, who throws it at the boar hard enough to make it squeal.
  • The 2008 indie drama The Poker House has a pretty brutal one delivered to Jennifer Lawrence's character after she is raped.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In The Movie, when we're first introduced to the Vampire Big Bad Lothos (and see his face), he ends a conversation with his henchman by announcing he wants a snack, picks up a kitten, and walks off. Evil.
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