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The Hangover and the Most Insane Vegas-Movie Moments

As a movie setting, Las Vegas gives a filmmaker license to do whatever the hell he wants. Which means that the “Vegas movie” has birthed a legion of wacky, outlandish, and mind-bogglingly over-the-top moments. The Hangover, the subgenre’s latest proud inductee (out today), does not disappoint: Missing teeth! Tigers! Mike Tyson air drumming to “Something in the Air” “In the Air Tonight”! (And that’s all before you get to the credits.) Here are ten of our other favorite insane Vegas-movie moments.

The kind of thing that could have been reverse engineered from a Texts From Last Night post: A British guy manages to pick up two bridesmaids by pretending to be Irish (of course), gets high with them in their hotel room, and then has Tantric sex (that Taye Diggs taught him) while the room catches on fire thanks to abandoned burning tissues accidentally lit during previously mentioned weed-smoking by one of the bridesmaids, who had stuffed them in her nostrils in order to better capture the inhaled smoke. (Watch the whole movie here; this scene comes 44 minutes in.)
Johnny Depp plays Raoul Duke (Hunter S. Thompson, loosely fictionalized), probably the only guy who can make a bad drug trip look like fun. High on some combination of mescaline, acid, coke, amyls, and beer, Duke finds himself in a hotel bar where the patrons are quickly transmogrifying into slobbering, ill-intentioned dinosaurs: “I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo. And somebody was giving booze to these goddamned things. It won’t be long now … before they tear us to shreds.”
The greatest insane Vegas-movie moment comes, of course, from the unbelievably campy Showgirls. Things start out promisingly (naked chick in a pool), then immediately pick up (Kyle MacLachlan’s butt), then go over-the-top (complicated-looking underwater fellatio). And it’s on to the big ending: Jesse Spano, mid-coitus, in violent, bizarre convulsions (of joy?) that must be seen to be believed, but that could never, ever be explained. The tags on the video (“water orgasm super action worth”) really tell the tale. Decidedly NSFW.
The Hangover and the Most Insane Vegas-Movie Moments