"Listen to me Anthony. I got your head in a fuckin' vise. I'll squash your head like a fuckin' grapefruit if you don't give me a name!"
- The film wastes no time showing just how dangerous Nicky is immediately by showing him go apeshit on someone with a pen little over 14 minutes into the movie. That this is seen through a haze of cigarette smoke, making it surreal almost, doesn't help.
- Near the beginning, when Nicky asks if he could move out to Las Vegas, he mentions with noticeable worry that "even the cops ain't afraid to bury people in the desert". That Nicky is afraid of something is rather frightening.
- It is extremely difficult to watch the vise scene, where Nicky puts a man's head in a vise to extract information, having already (off screen) stabbed him in the testicles with icepicks. More unsettlingly, it's implied that Nicky is indicated to be uncomfortable with the measures he has to take to extract information. It's even all but stated Nicky was only going to these lengths because one of Remo's bars was hit and one of the victims was a waitress with no connection to the mob who was working on her day off. Martin Scorsese reportedly said the vise scene was his "sacrificial" scene, which he would consent to take out if he was threatened with an NC-17 rating. They complained about some other scenes, but not that one, so it stayed in.Nicky: Don't make me have to do this, please. Don't make me be a bad guy, come on.
- Nicky's assassination of Anna Scott where she has just won a court case against her former real estate partner. Imagine just calmly sitting down to breakfast and you get suddenly grabbed by the head, and before you can fully react, three bullets to the head quickly end your life. The only thing that lessens the horrifying moment, from the audience's perspective, is Nicky tenderly laying her corpse back into the chair and moving her head so the blood from her mouth drips onto her blouse before leaving.
- Ace's near-death in a car bombing. The minute he turns the key in the ignition, his dashboard starts sparking and smoking, and his car goes up before he can do more than give an Oh, Crap! expression. He only survived because of a quirk in his car's design — a metal plate under the driver's seat — that the assailant didn't know about. His life only being saved by luck somehow makes the whole thing even more terrifying.
- Nicky Forced to Watch his brother being beaten to near death by baseball bats by people he thought were his friends, then having the same done to him, (there is even a split second of his head getting gashed open by a bat once Frankie moves on to him), and then getting buried. Alive.
- All of the executions to tie up all loose ends. One disgusting one is John Nance murdered in Costa Rica by kneeling and a hitman shooting into the top of his head. Another guy, while getting into his car, gets his throat cut and a plastic bag put over his head, making it unclear whether he died from blood loss or from drowning in his own blood. Then there's a split second of him getting stabbed in the head.
- In 2008, it was revealed that Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, the man upon whom Rothstein was based, was an FBI informant. Which makes this scene more horrifying: they were killing everybody except the man who was ratting them out.
- The tense desert confrontation between Sam and Nicky.note Ace: (voiceover) Normally, my prospects of coming back alive from a meeting with Nicky were 99 out of 100. But this time, when I heard him say "a couple of hundred yards down the road", I gave myself 50-50.
- Andy Stone gets assassinated, despite being vouched for by almost all the Mafia bosses as a loyal subordinate and one even mentioning he's a Marine, simply for not being Italian. And then there's how he's assassinated: walking to his car when two hitmen casually walk behind him and shoot him repeatedly.
- The movie makes a convincing argument about why you shouldn't even try to cheat at a casino. One poor bastard is found giving secret signals to his friend about how much to bet. His reward? Getting zapped with a hidden cattle prod and hauled into a room where they threaten to cut off his fingers with a table saw. He gets his hand smashed by a hammer instead when he tells them that he deals with his right hand.Ace: Now you're gonna have to learn with your left hand.
- She might have deserved it, but Ginger's death is legitimately frightening: in a shitty motel in LA somewhere, she stumbles out of her hotel room and crawls across exposed brick in a poorly lit hallway (so poorly lit that the dark is legit pitch black, that she literally fades in and out between light and dark) before collapsing and dying. You'd be forgiven for thinking you suddenly were watching a David Lynch movie with the way it's shot, and how "House of the Rising Sun" begins to distort. Worse, she died from a "hot dose". What's a hot dose? A mix of the drug one is addicted to, and battery acid. And making things worse, Ace reveals in his voiceover that he wanted a second autopsy, not because he loved her or even cared for her, but because he was so confident that she was whacked, he wanted to make sure he wouldn't be.
