Machete Mayhem

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
They call him "Machete". Gee, I wonder why?
"Guys, it's okay! He just wanted his machete back!"
—Professor Lowe's Famous Last Words, Friday the 13th (film)

The machete. The perfect weapon. Unlike a Chainsaw Good, it doesn't need a power source, it never jams, and you can actually swing it like a sword. Unlike a katana, you don't need to pay hundreds of dollars for a decent one and you don't need years of training to effectively wield it. Unlike a kitchen knife, you can actually lop someone's head off. And unlike a scythe, you can actually kill someone with it. That could be why they've become so popular in pretty much any movie where people get hacked to bits.

The original application, like a lot of such implements of destruction, is agricultural; they were used to clear undergrowth. It was a necessary tool for picking sugarcane in the Caribbean early on. Particularly useful for cutting the heads off the non-venomous snakes that were apt to bite cane-pickers. And, you know, actually picking the sugarcane.

See Kukris Are Kool for the machete's Nepalese twin brother. Compare and contrast Chainsaw Good, Knife Nut, and Sinister Scythe.

Examples of Machete Mayhem include:

Comic Books

  • Machete(who oddly enough bears a striking resemblance to Danny Trejo) is a machete-wielding foe of Captain America (comics).
    • Probably coincidence as Machete first appeared in 1985; the same year Danny Trejo made his first movie and years before Spy Kids.
  • Wallace, the main character in the Sin City story Hell And Back, has a machete in the climax.

Film

Literature

  • In S. M. Stirling's Emberverse novels, a modified version of a machete becomes a popular weapon all across post-Change America. The main villains of the second and third trilogy are called CUTters for a reason..
  • Septimus, slave of the Night Lords legion, combines this with a pair of salvaged imperial laspistols to serve as a credible Musketeer. He does a pretty good job of it, given he's fighting alongside ten thousand year old posthuman Super Soldiers.
  • In The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks names the machete as the best edged weapon to use against zombies, due to its size, weight, and availability.

Tabletop Games

  • White Wolf, makers of The World of Darkness gamelines and Scion, seem to like machetes. They're practically the only non-weapon weapon that never carries "Improvised Weapon penalties"... in any gameline. In the latter, they're particularly favored by Scions of the Loa (because they were commonly used in the Haitian Revolution).
  • Even Magic: The Gathering gets in on the action in Zendikar block, with Trusty Machete being the most visible example.
  • Dark Heresy has the Bolo Knife from Malfi, which is the 40K equivalent of a machete. One of the few knives in the game that punches through flak armour.

Video Games

  • In Golden Sun's prologue/tutorial, your weapon is a machete. It's only usable during the prologue, and unobtainable later on.
  • It's the favorite melee weapon of the Sons of Samedi in Saints Row 2
  • Left 4 Dead 2 includes a machete as a melee weapon for clearing away troublesome patches of zombies.
    • Trope is in full effect. The machete is the fastest-swinging bladed melee weapon, with the nightstick as it's blunt counterpart. Both pale in comparison to the Chainsaw Good, but using that tends to have other problems.
  • BioShock (series) 2 has a machete skin for the player's melee weapon in multiplayer.
  • Far Cry and the various expansions and sequel, have the machete as the primary melee weapon.
  • In Dead Rising, Cliff's Weapon of Choice.
  • Dylan from Dino Crisis 2 had a machete as a side weapon at the start of the game and enabled him to hack away at doors that was covered in heavy vegetation.
  • Chris from Resident Evil 5 uses a machete as his default melee weapon. His partner uses a knife.
  • Fallout: New Vegas has machetes that are quite obviously made from broken lawn mower blades. There is also an option to do a Reverse Grip attack in VATS. Coincidentally Danny Trejo, the actor who plays Machete, is also in the game though his character is The Gunslinger. Caesar's Legion uses them extensively, in lieu of the historical gladius, because there's no readily-available stock of period Roman swords in the post-apocalyptic American West.
  • Postal 2 Apocalypse Weekend added three throwable melee weapons to the roster; among them is a machete that worked like a boomerang.
  • In Scarface the World Is Yours, machete wielding mooks are all over the place. At one point survival depends on punching out one of them, taking his blade and hacking up a gunman. Ambushes help.
  • One of Sakon Shima's huge swords in Samurai Warriors 2 is an oversized machete.
  • The first additional weapon you pick up in Indiana Jones and The Emperor's Tomb is a machete. It's okay in combat, but it's main use is clearing thick walls of vines out of your way.
  • Machete users were smattered through City of Heroes, but special mention goes to the Sky Raiders, who explicitly used machetes as part of a martial style that favors fast, maneuverable close-quarters weaponry that included submachine guns and flamethrowers.
  • In Grand Theft Auto Vice City, the machete is one of your options for melee weapon. You're able to both perform a one hit kill and run with it, meaning it's nearly as good as the Katanas Are Just Better.
  • In Manhunt you can get a machete from a slain Wardog. It's one of only three weapons that can be used to decapitate an enemy during an execution, along with the wire and the cleaver. The machete and the cleaver will decapitate an enemy with any level of execution.
  • In yet another title from Rockstar Games, The Warriors, the machete is one of the most powerful weapons in the game. Unfortunately you'll only get to use it three or four times over the course of the main story.
  • Machetes appear as an equippable weapon in Spelunky which asides from having better upside range (and worser range straight ahead) can also get rid of spider webs.
  • In Bastion, the Machete is one of the first alternate weapons you pick up. It's relatively weak at first, but has an incredibly fast attack speed even without upgrades, and can be thrown for a decent amount of damage. Upgrades allow it to damage over time on any strike and throw multiple blades at once, or massively increased Critical Hit damage. The latter upgrades combined with the ludicrous swing speed make it devastating when under the effects of the Werewhisky tonic.
  • Kobra, the bloodthirsty Black Dragon neophyte, wields a machete as his Weapon of Choice in Mortal Kombat Armageddon.
  • In Far Cry 2, the machete is the player character's constant companion.

Web Animation

  • Machetes are used quite often in Madness Combat, most notably in the sixth installment, Antipathy, where Hank has one from the beginning and kills several mooks with it. And it's awesome.

Web Original

Real Life

  • Machetes were used as weapons in a slew of uprisings and rebellions throughout the Third World, especially in Cuba. Check The Other Wiki on guys like Carlos Manuel de Cespedes for example.
  • On a far more depressing note, the Rwandan Genocide was chiefly conducted by men wielding machetes. See Hotel Rwanda for details.
  • The machete on the Angolan flag? It actually stands for agriculture.
  • The usefulness of a cheap heavy knife whether as a weapon or a tool is such that various versions can be found. According to one source this Troper has read (somewhere or other) the original Bowie knife was large enough to be a machete in function. The Saxons of course got their name from the Sax and would call the machete a sax, although amusingly White Anglo Saxon Protestants are more familiar with machetes and would consider a sax an antique. The Fascine Knife for The Engineer to make fascines with (fascines being the eighteenth-century equivalent of sandbags made from bundled twigs) came in a variety of shapes, and its purpose was to cut twigs and tie them together.
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