Chopper
Story By: Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale
Teleplay By: Steve Fisher and David Chase
Directed By: Bruce Kessler
"The teenage years: sixteen candles, fervent passions, aimless joy rides, and the forbidden taste of beer. A time the world allows for sowing one’s wild oats. But for some individuals I came to know, in the summer of their discontent, it had been the time when they had sown the seeds of their own destruction."
A construction site accidentally releases the headless ghost of a biker, and the ghost proceeds to kill the biker gang that had caused his death.
Tropes:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Baker’s sword.
- Asshole Victim: Henry "Studs" Spake, who remained a biker, is heavily implied to be a Neo-Nazi, and runs tour buses off the road for fun. When Baker decapitates him, it comes as a relief that this asshole got his comeuppance.
- The Cameo: Jim Backus as a motorcycle dealer.
- Death By Genre Savvy: Spake of all people was the only one of the Jokers to figure out that the only way to stop Baker was to reunite his head with is body. When he tries to do it again, Baker decapitates him.
- Food Porn: Vincenzo, suffering from an ulcer and only able to eat bland food, watches as Kolchak, Miss Emily, and Updyke gorge themselves on pizza and hot dogs. Eventually, he gives up and orders a sandwich, which he secretly eats in his office.
- Gory Discretion Shot: Baker’s murders are all offscreen, though Joe getting sliced with Baker’s sword is shown.
- Headless Horseman: Baker is a modernized variant who rides on a motorcycle rather than a horse and wields a BFS.
- Jerkass: Captain Jonas and "Spuds" Spake.
- Off with His Head!: How Baker died, and how he kills the Jokers and anyone who gets in his way.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The security guard of the warehouse where Baker’s corpse is being stored hears Kolchak sneaking around and, having previously seen Baker decapitate Spake in the warehouse, he figures Baker is back, quits, and runs out of the warehouse.
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Special Effect Failure: Baker's shoulders are about two feet too high. - Those Wacky Nazis: Spake is implied to be a Neo-Nazi.
- Tyrant Takes the Helm: The first thing Jonas does upon being promoted to Captain is proclaim that things will be different from now on, and from then on he spends his time flagrantly violating police procedure and any laws to do with freedom of the press for the sake of screwing over Kolchak For the Evulz. This gets him demoted to traffic duty.
"There’s an old simple axiom about the dead: don't disturb them, not for any reason at all. Well, I decided to overlook that and so I was almost beheaded by a phantom sword. Vincenzo refused to even discuss publishing my story. He didn’t even look at the pictures, but the headless rider is at rest now. All the bones are together in one place, in one coffin. As for those members of the Jokers' motorcycle club, I mean those that are left of course, well, maybe they’ve suffered enough. Three of them died violently and the others will carry the nightmare of the headless rider with them to their silent graves. And incidentally, so will Captain Jonas, formerly of Homicide, now Sgt. Jonas of Traffic Control. You see, he’s in charge of towing away parked cars."
