There are a few nasty, cruel kills that have disturbed me. Spoilers...

Breaking Bad - Jesse is punished for an escape attempt - he is made to watch as the villains go to his girlfriend's house, sneak up behind her, and shoot her in the back with a silencer (orphaning her 5 year-old kid who has already suffered poisoning because of knowing Jesse). Really sick.

Cliffhanger - Renny Harlin showed he meant business in Die Hard 2 when he crashed a full passenger jet (with obligatory shots of children and an old woman soon to perish), in Cliffhanger he gets more personal - carefully setting up loveable comic relief characters for the villains to kill and maim. They machine-gun two teenagers in the back, killing one and sending the other to hospital with an unknown fate, then they top it all by holding down Hal (Michael Rooker) until his friend Frank, a kindly old man who flies a rescue helicopter, touches down to save them. They release Hal and laugh at him as he runs to help his friend, who they promptly rip apart with a machine gun in agonising slow motion. The gentle old man hits the ground quivering and asking 'why?' with his last breaths. It's all a bit sadistic for a throwaway action romp.

Funny Games - an earlier post detailed this one, it's utterly horrific. The villainous boys in white terrify and humiliate a child in front of his parents until he shíts himself, then they blow his head off. The film is a deliberate attempt to provoke the audience by daring them to switch off the film, and punishing them for not doing so. Whatever, it's fúcking horrible and I wish I could unwatch it.

Goodfellas - Scorsese loves giving his audience a heart attack with sudden bursts of violence, but when vulnerable people get on the wrong end of Joe Pesci it leaves a lingering trauma. A teenager called Spider gets Pesci's drinks order wrong for which he is made to 'dance' as Pesci shoots the floor around him, eventually blowing a chunk out of the young boys foot. Maimed for life, the boy returns days later with his foot in plaster. Pesci insults him again until the kid, upset, reacts with 'go fúck yourself Tommy'. After a long pause, Pesci unloads an entire clip into the kid's chest. A stomach churning combination of cruelty, humiliation, and taking a young life.

War Of The Worlds - Spielberg doesn't sadistically rub your nose in cruelty like the above examples but he does shock you in the middle of a PG/PG-13 'family' adventure by brutally killing innocent people. Jurassic Park's lawyer got it bad, and the heroic Eddie from The Lost World is rewarded for saving Goldblum and friends by being tossed in the air and ripped in half by two massive T-Rexes. But for sheer numbers the winner is his 2005 alien invasion nightmare. Viewers expecting a jingoistic joyride like Independence Day were punished for their optimistic expectations when they realised they were watching a holocaust film in which millions of innocent people are ruthlessly exterminated by heat rays, have their blood drained by giant alien spiked proboscises while they're still alive, and get minced alive into blood showers. Screaming old women locked in alien cages, waiting their turn to be ground into compost is an image that still haunts me. Thanks, Steve.