James Bond's 10 Campest Movie Moments

Although the most recent James Bond movies have been dark, grounded, and gritty, the 007 franchise has a long history of delivering delightfully campy moments. Even in the most realistic Bond movies, there’s a healthy dose of campness. Daniel Craig’s Bond films were deadly serious for the most part, but they still had 007 cracking jokes after taking lives. Bond goes on international spy missions with goofy gadgets, falls in love as he pursues an eccentric megalomaniac bent on world domination, and delivers quippy one-liners before saving the day — these movies can’t afford to take themselves totally seriously.

There have been a lot of hilarious Bond parodies, but in its campiest moments, the Bond series has veered into self-parody. There’s a chase sequence in Moonraker in which a pigeon does a double take. In the big finale of Die Another Day, 007 surfs on a tsunami. In Octopussy, Bond disguises himself as a clown. Tongue-in-cheek humor is a staple of the Bond franchise. From the moon buggy escape in Diamonds Are Forever to the corkscrew car jump underscored by a slide whistle in The Man with the Golden Gun, the Bond movies are jam-packed with wonderfully campy scenes.

10 Mr. Big Pops Like A Balloon

Live And Let Die (1973)

In the original novel that Live and Let Die is loosely based on, the villainous Mr. Big is killed by sharks and barracudas. But in the movie adaptation, the filmmakers decided to give the character a much sillier death. In the climactic sequence of the film, Mr. Big is forced to swallow a pellet full of compressed gas. His entire body then inflates like a balloon until it pops.

They couldn’t have made this death scene more absurd if they tried. It’s the goofiest Bond villain death by far; it throws any semblance of realism out the window. Sequences like Bond running across the backs of alligators had already established the wacky, comedic approach of Roger Moore’s Bond movies in his first outing, but blowing up Mr. Big like a balloon at the climax solidified it.

9 Bond Drops Blofeld Down A Chimney

For Your Eyes Only (1981)

The cold open of For Your Eyes Only ties all three Bond continuities together. It shows Moore’s 007 grieving at his wife Tracy’s grave, confirming that he’s the same Bond from George Lazenby’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and it shows Blofeld coming back for revenge, confirming that the rivalry from Sean Connery’s movies carried over into Moore’s tenure.

After more than a decade of build-up, Bond’s rivalry with his arch-nemesis culminated in a slapstick gag.

But the way the film portrays Moore’s relationship with Blofeld is far campier than anything that happened in the Connery movies. After one of Blofeld’s agents captures Bond in a helicopter, Bond takes control of the chopper and comes for Blofeld himself.

He picks up Blofeld by his wheelchair and drops him down a chimney stack. After more than a decade of build-up, Bond’s rivalry with his arch-nemesis culminated in a slapstick gag. To really hammer home the lunacy, there are some cartoonish sound effects tossed in there.

8 The Moon Buggy Escape

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

Connery’s last official outing as 007, Diamonds Are Forever, also features his most ridiculous escape. In the film’s second act, Bond sneaks into a remote research laboratory where a satellite is being built by a laser refraction specialist. While he’s having a look around the lab, Bond is caught. He escapes by hopping on a moon buggy and driving it at a hilariously low speed.

This sequence is so unbelievably wacky that it has to have been conceived as a comedic scene, not a serious action set-piece. As Bond is chased across a fake lunar surface, where a couple of fake astronauts are re-enacting the Moon landing, the astronauts stay committed to the bit, walking in low-gravity slow-motion. There are some really creative vehicle choices in Bond’s chase scenes, but the moon buggy is by far the most inspired.

7 The Cello Case Chase

The Living Daylights (1987)

When Timothy Dalton took over the role of Bond from Moore, the series did a tonal 180. The Moore movies were criticized for becoming too silly, so Dalton’s movies took a darker, grittier, more serious approach. Dalton’s Bond is arguably the most faithful portrayal of Bond as Ian Fleming wrote him in the books: a cold, calculating killer. But Dalton’s first Bond film, The Living Daylights, still has one Moore-esque moment of comic absurdity.

Bond’s love interest in The Living Daylights is Czechoslovak cellist Kara Milovy. When he and Kara find themselves in a jam, engaged in a chase with bad guys on the side of a mountain, Bond comes up with a novel way to escape. They both get inside Kara’s cello case and ride it down the mountain to safety. This is about as campy as Dalton’s Bond got.

6 Jaws Finds Love

Moonraker (1979)

Jaws is one of the few Bond movie henchmen to come back for a second go-around. The metal-toothed goon proved to be so popular as Karl Stromberg’s hulking henchman in The Spy Who Loved Me that he was brought back as Hugo Drax’s hulking henchman in the next film, Moonraker.

And he didn’t just come back as a secondary villain; in Moonraker, Jaws got his own romantic subplot with a short, bespectacled woman with pigtails named Dolly, played by Blanche Ravalec. After the cable-car sequence, Dolly helps Jaws out of the wreckage.

As their eyes meet, the overture from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet plays on the soundtrack — and their romance only gets camper and camper from there. Jaws’ love story is even more ludicrous, over-the-top, and self-effacing than the mishmash romcom spoof of Date Movie.

5 The Horse Jump

Never Say Never Again (1983)

More than a decade after his last official Eon-produced Bond movie, Connery was able to reprise the role of 007 in a remake of one of his earlier Bond films — Never Say Never Again, based on Thunderball — due to a legal loophole. It’s a great Bond movie for the most part, but its horse jump sequence is so notorious that it’s been recut over the years.

There are a couple of particularly asinine shots that always get cut from British prints of the film, but the full, unedited sequence is still featured on the American home media release. When Bond jumps off the roof of a castle on horseback, he and the horse fall hundreds of feet into the ocean below. And, miraculously, both he and the horse are fine. The whole sequence is so over-the-top that even Moore wouldn’t have done it.

4 Bond Dresses As A Clown

Octopussy (1983)

Throughout Moore’s tenure in the role, the Bond movies devolved into full-blown self-parody. That self-parodying style reached its peak in Octopussy when 007 dressed up as a clown to disguise himself at a circus. People were already saying Moore had turned Bond into a clown, so he donned some makeup and literally turned him into a clown. It doesn’t get much campier than putting a deadly international secret agent in clown makeup.

Bond had a good reason to dress up as a clown. He donned the disguise in an attempt to hide from the police while he was trying to locate the bomb that they didn’t want him to find. But there are a bunch of different disguises that 007 could’ve worn. The clown disguise fits perfectly with the tongue-in-cheek comic approach of the Moore films.

3 The Slide-Whistle Corkscrew Car Jump

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)

The Man with the Golden Gun features one of the greatest car stunts ever captured on film, and it’s ruined by one of the goofiest sound effects ever recorded. During a high-octane car chase, Bond comes across a broken bridge. Instead of putting his foot on the brake, he keeps it on the gas and drives off the broken bridge. The car does a perfect corkscrew in the air and lands effortlessly on the other side.

It’s one of the most impressive stunts in the entire Bond franchise, pulled off flawlessly. But the awesomeness of the stunt is let down by the zaniness of the sound design. As the car spins through the air, a slide whistle plays on the soundtrack. What could’ve been a mind-blowing 007 car chase instead plays like a Looney Tunes cartoon.

2 Bond Surfs On A Tidal Wave

Die Another Day (2002)

Pierce Brosnan’s tenure as 007 ended not with a bang, but with a whimper when he starred in Die Another Day. It has a great cold open and Halle Berry gives an iconic performance as Jinx, but its plot is derivative, its race-swapping villain is ludicrous, it’s jam-packed with distracting product placement, and its action scenes are riddled with primitive CGI. Speaking of its CGI-riddled action scenes, it culminates in one of the Bond series’ campiest set-pieces.

In Brosnan’s final action sequence in the role of 007, Bond wind-surfs on a tsunami. He wryly smiles through one of the most needlessly extravagant scenes in the franchise. The only way this scene could get campier is if a Bond-ified version of “California Girls” played on the soundtrack like the snowboarding sequence in A View to a Kill.

1 The Gondola Chase

Moonraker (1979)

Moore was the campest Bond actor and his movies are full of camp moments, but the campest moment from his tenure is the gondola chase from Moonraker (and it’s not even close). While Bond is engaged in a chase through the canals of Venice on a gondola, the bad guy makes it onto the street. Rather than giving up, Bond drives the gondola onto the street and reveals it’s actually a hovercraft — and a nearby pigeon is so shocked that it does a double take.

This sequence is a masterpiece of camp filmmaking; it would’ve made John Waters proud. It takes a real commitment to campness to loop footage of a pigeon to make it look like it’s doing a double take and leave it in the final cut. The James Bond franchise has some really camp moments, but it never got camper than this.

James Bond

Created by: Ian Fleming, Albert R. Broccoli
First Film: Dr. No
Latest Film: No Time to Die
Upcoming Films: James Bond 26

Cast: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig
TV Show(s): Fleming: The Man Who Would be Bond

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