Village of the Damned (1995)
Everybody in Smalltown, USA blacks out for a few hours and when they wake up all the women are pregnant. They all give birth simultaneously while Kirstie Alley and Superman supervise. Something is not quite right with all of these bundles of joy. It turns out they are telepathic, telekinetic jerks from outer space. The first instance of their powers being used for evil, or maybe just for punishment-based conditioning, is seen above.
A loving mother gives her little girl soup that is too darn hot. Having apparently not read the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the little space brat not only throws her soup to the floor after presumably being scalded but decides to teach mom a lesson. Using her evil-eye alien powers, she forces her mother's hand into the boiling water. Now I know this doesn't sound funny, but it is. Imagine if it happened to Larry or Shemp. It's funny.
And in this scene Karen Kahn gives 100%. She's assessing the situation, knowing her hand is about to be dunked in that cauldron of bubbling hell, which by the way she should never have served to any kid in the first place (I'm not saying she had it coming but I think there are laws against serving a toddler food that has more steam coming off it than the pipe sticking out of Bennet's chest at the end of Commando). And then, when her arm is plunged in up to the elbow, she lets out the kind of wail reserved for these special kind of moments. I place it somewhere in the category of the monster realizing his thumb is on fire in Young Frankenstein and when Roger Rabbit drinks liquor.
Once her hand has reached a rapid boil her friend pulls her away from the stove, possibly to cool her by a window like a Depression-era pie. But her hand isn't cooked all the way through yet so she lunges forth for another handful of scalding broth. I think that's my favorite part. The kid's eyes have stopped glowing at this point so I like to assume that this extra lunge is somehow the mother's free will and has nothing to do with the telepathic menace in the high chair. She may have just enjoyed burning her hand that much.
It doesn't end there. Life will not be a picnic of luke warm soups for this mother/daughter duo. In the finest instances of "I like Dad better than you" this alien in OshKosh uses her mind powers to have her mom take a walk right off a cliff. There's a chance mom did it herself, still sore about all that hot soup business, but I think it's safe to assume there was some malevolent mind-trickery at work.
These aliens are getting too big for their britches. Their egos swell as they take out Luke Skywalker and their cocky struts grow more strident when they kill the guy who plays a drunk in everything from They Live to Back to the Future to Wishmaster. Don't they realize they killed Superman's wife? Their hubris will be their downfall. Never underestimate Superman. Especially after you've killed his wife.
PS: Christopher Reeve sounds a lot like Kermit the Frog in the end of that clip when he's yelling "BARBARA!" I like that.
