I had a doctor’s appointment the other day, and she said, ‘Mr Devlin, you’re fat’ I said that I wanted a second opinion, and she said, ‘You’re ugly as well.’ My own medical woes aside, it is a fact that for every profession, there is a best, the real top shelf, peerless experts who make their trade look like art.

At the other end of the spectrum you have the worst, the barely qualifies to carry the name of their profession, for example somewhere in the world there is a doctor who is hardly qualified, who has a mortality rate to rival one on one combat with a rabid bear, who is death in a (dirty) white coat, and someone has an appointment with them tomorrow morning.

That cheery thought aside, I thought it would be fun to look at bad movie doctors, not the wilfully evil, ‘Dr Doom’ kind, but the ones whose incompetence and malpractice caused the events of the film.

Dr Davis: Batman (1989).

“As my plastic surgeon always said: If you gotta’ go… GO WITH A SMILE!” -The Joker

Batman’s greatest nemesis, the clown prince of crime, the original mac daddy of supervillains, The Joker has many names, but in the 1989 Tim Burton movie The Joker started out as a mobster called Jack Napier who gets into a fight with The Dark Knight and ends up in a vat of chemicals.

With half of his skin sloughing off, he dragged his melted ass to ‘Dr’ Davis, a back ally plastic surgeon in Gotham City, who when good old Jack showed up, rather than call the cops to arrest the poor son of a bitch, decided to do such a piss poor job of fixing him that he literally made a monster.

If your day job involves hand-sculpting a sociopath a new face that shatters his already fragile grasp on sanity, then it’s probably time to get a new vocation. If the good doctor had just called in the fuzz or even got him to a better surgeon, then the Joker would never have been created, and Gotham would never have been terrorised by an insane clown with appalling dress sense.

Dr Brundle: The Fly. (1986)

“I’m becoming something that never existed before. I’m becoming… Brundlefly. Don’t you think that’s worth a Nobel Prize or two?” -Dr Seth Brundle.

David Cronenberg’s 1986 cult favourite, The Fly, is a reimagining of a classic that builds on the original and adds a ton of body horror. We follow Seth Brundle, a bumbling scientist who stumbles his way through some truly groundbreaking teleportation experiments but comes unstuck when a fly gets into the teleporter with him and merges with him on a genetic level.

A word to anyone who would think of tinkering with their DNA; If you are planning on conducting cutting edge experiments on matter transportation your first live test should not be in a grungy apartment, and perhaps have the foresight to at least not jump from a single animal test to full on human trials on yourself.

Enter Dr Seth Brundle and his massive brain fart that led him to think that it would be a good idea to destroy and rebuild himself on a molecular level, without a (competent) doctor on hand, then as he started to slowly fall apart, essentially just shrugged and got on with his metamorphosis.

A competent scientist would have sought help when he started ‘cronenberging it up.’, As it stands, Seth just let it all happen, and by it, I mean mutating into an awful abomination unto god, vomiting acid over his ex’s new partner and trying to merge with her and her unborn child.

Dr Channard: Hellraiser II (1988)

“As explorers of the mind, must devote our lives and energies to going further to tread the unknown corridors in order to find, ultimately, the final solution. We have to see, we have to know…” -Dr Channard

After the events of the first movie, the final girl, Kirsty, having sent creepy Uncle Frank and her literal wicked stepmother, Julia, back to hell along with the demonic coenobites, wakes up in an institution run by the pompous and verbose Dr Channard.

As well as being an insufferable prick, Channard is also deeply into the occult, even to the point where the edgiest of edgelords would be like ‘Dude, get a new hobby.’ Channard intercepts a piece of evidence, the very mattress that Julia died on and has the brilliant idea of handing a straight razor to a patient with Delusional parasitosis, a horrible affliction where the sufferer sees and feels insects crawling over their skin.

Channard could have easily treated the poor sod with a low dose of antipsychotics but rather than do that he kept him locked in a strait jacket. The inevitable happens, and the patient is absorbed into Julia, who then, without her skin, mind you, seduces him into bringing her more mentally ill patients. The only bit of catharsis comes when Chanard is turned into a coenobite.

If the doctor had just left the creepy murder mattress alone and, you know, tried to make his patients better, then he wouldn’t have opened a gate to hell and ultimately be turned into a BDSM demon.

Dr Silberling: The Uninvited (2009)

“We survive by remembering. But sometimes we survive by forgetting.” -Dr Silbering.

The Uninvited is a Western remake of a South Korean film, A Tale of Two sisters. In it, we meet Anna, a troubled young woman who is just getting out of a psychiatric hospital where she has been for the ten months since her terminally ill mother died in a boathouse fire.

She is discharged with no memory of the event and is welcomed home by her father, her sister, Alex, and her new stepmother… except her sister is dead and is merely a figment of her shattered psyche trying to process the guilt of having caused the deaths of her and her mum. She goes on to brutally murder her new, admittedly creepy as hell, stepmother and a witness who saw that she was responsible for the deaths.

Special attention here should go to her shrink, Dr Silbering, who allowed her to walk out of the booby hatch with the delusion that her flame broiled sister was still among the living, severe schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder and probably a side order of PTSD.

Had her doctor simply said at any point during her sessions when she brought up how glad she would be to see her sister again that she had got all blown up, then the plot of the film would never have happened.

Dr Simms: Nightmare on Elm Street III. (1987)

“I’m not going to take any more of this. How much longer are you going to go on blaming your dreams for your own weaknesses?” – Dr Simms

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you already know who Freddy Kruger is, so I’ll give you the short version, just in case you have been on the dark side of the moon since 1983.

Freddy is a dream demon that likes to kill conventionally attractive teens in their sleep. So they do everything they can to stay awake, and a small group of them end up in a psych ward. That’s where Kristen Parker is sent after what appears to be a suicide attempt, but in reality, was the work of one Mr. F. Kruger Esquire.

The kids on the ward all have one thing in common: they all dream of him. that’s when we are introduced to Nancy, the ‘Final Girl’ from the first movie, who is now a qualified shrink.

Nancy soon puts the pieces of the puzzle together and works out that Kristen can pull people into her own dreams, and with the aid of some new experimental meds and a little guided meditation they have a real shot at beating the pizza faced son of a bitch for good.

The problem is that Doctor Simms is old fashioned, like dark ages medicine old fashioned. She is convinced that the teens are dying in their sleep because of “by-products of guilt. Psychological scars stemming from moral conflicts and overt sexuality.”

So, rather than treat the symptoms of their dreams, she fights against Nancy every step of the way, sedating poor old Kristen so she is powerless to beat Kruger and forcing hands of the kids on the ward, meaning they have to go on a dangerous rescue mission.

Dr Malick: Identity (2003)

“The killer cannot survive.” -Dr Malick

Identity opens on a convicted mass murderer having his case reviewed just before he is due to be executed. The defendant, Malcolm Rivers, apparently went, what is known in legal circles, as bat shit crazy and straight up killed a whole mess of people, new evidence has come to light which Dr Malick hopes will prove that his patient is utterly screwy and therefore not guilty by terms of insanity.

Tied into the narrative is the story of a group of ten strangers who, through a series of coincidences, converge on a cheap roadside hotel, cut off from the rest of the world by a rainstorm. One by one, they are picked off like jellybeans around me, and things go south from there with secrets coming to light (for example, the cop who was ostensibly transporting a prisoner turns out to be a fellow con who killed the officer that was transporting him and is masquerading as him).

They soon start to realise weird connections to each other; all sharing the same date of birth and being named after states. Back with Doctor Malick, we learn that Malcolm has dissociative identity disorder and all of the strangers that are being killed off are alternate personalities of him, one of which is the killer.

Doctor Malick is trying to whittle down the number in the hopes they can get rid of the killer personality. The problem with this is that the killer is…well, a killer. This means that Dr Malick is essentially making him go through a delusional hunger games, pitting each personality against each other and hoping for the best; the personalities are whittled down until, supposedly, just one survives.

However, as Malcolm is enjoying a nice delusion that he is a pretty lady in an orange grove, surprise Motherfucker! The real killer turns out to have been the quiet child who we thought died in an explosion. He kills the ‘final girl’, and then in the real world, Malcolm kills the good doctor and, presumably, the driver of the car.

This whole thing could have been avoided if Dr Malick could have just proved to a jury that Malcolm was insane, I mean, come on, Stevie Wounder could see his batshit insane, or he could have at least not whittled down the personalities without considering the killer might kill the others.

Dr Octavius: Spiderman 2. (2004)

“I couldn’t have miscalculated. It was working, wasn’t it?” – Dr Otto Octavius.

Dr Otto Octavius started out as just your standard run-of-the-mill scientist, trying to create a source of almost limitless power. Okay, so maybe not run-of-the-mill as such.

The chain of events that led to him making his reactor is baffling, to make it he had to create a set of four fully opposable mechanical arms, which he then had to make sentient, except without a special chip they would start to override his own will, now a competent scientist would put the “makes the user evil” switch very, very difficult to break, like maybe put it in a lead lined titanium alloy box, but nope, fragile glass is the way that good ol’ Doc Ock went with.

If he had spent a little more time in research and development, or maybe even programmed the arms not to be evil, then the movie would never have happened. Before he even officially became a super villain, Dr Octavius’ arrogance, hubris and complete abdication of foresight meant that it wasn’t so much a question of if he would become an eight-limbed maniacal cyborg but when.

The Narrator’s Doctor: Fight Club. (1999)

“You wanna see pain? Swing by First Methodist Tuesday nights. See the guys with testicular cancer. That’s pain.” -Unnamed Doctor.

Edward Norton plays an unnamed character who has a tough time sleeping, he does a dull soul-destroying job and secretly yearns for death, he meets the dangerous but sexy Marla and then gets his apartment all blown up, having no one to turn to he reaches out to the charismatic soap maker, Tylor Durden, who he had met a few days ago on a flight.

They bond over drinks, and the narrator and Tyler become roommates. As long as he does one small thing, he wants the narrator to hit him as hard as he can. What follows is a slow spiral down into madness and nihilism. Then comes one of the biggest rug pulls in cinema; there is no Tylor Durden, he was just in the narrator’s head all along.

Let me back up for a moment.

Sleep is a basic function, like eating, drinking and getting rid of what we have eaten or drank. here’s a fun fact for you: if you don’t sleep, you die. Pretty basic, eh? Well, not if you are a Doctor in Fight Club, the 1999 cult classic.

Edward Norton’s protagonist (I refuse to call him Jack, but that’s a whole other article.). is on the brink of a sleep deprived psychotic break when he finally goes to see his doctor, after listening to a patient in obvious distress, who badly needs his help, he says to suck it up and try some herbal sleep aids.

The narrator’s lack of decent sleep, and really quite catastrophic mental issues, directly led to the emergence of the Tylor Durden personality, which in turn led to the titular fight clubs springing up and then project mayhem and a whole lot of explosions and acts of domestic terrorism… but I’m not supposed to talk about that.

So, there you have it, my friends, some very good reasons to always doubt in the back of your mind next time someone asks you to turn your head to the side and cough. What’s your favourite example of medical incompetence on film? Sound off in the comments. And remember, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, especially if you aim for the head.