They say revenge is a dish best served cold. That’s exactly how Mel Gibson delivers it in this week’s Edge of Darkness, in which he plays a desperate father hunting his daughter’s killers with a cache of shotguns, pistols, and paternal bloodlust at his disposal. But throughout the history of cinema we’ve seen vengeance served up in many other ways, whether exacted upon criminals, murderers, double-crossers, evil bosses, or school bullies. And, irresponsible as it sounds, we kind of like it.

Let’s be clear; vengeance ain’t pretty. But when it comes to the movies, it can be really, really gratifying to watch: just think of The Bride (Uma Thurman) crossing another name off her list, Sweeney Todd slicing and dicing his way to the man who ruined his life, or the nerds of Lambda Lambda Lambda finally getting a little respect. It’s a movie genre that anyone who’s ever been crossed can get behind; an entire genre that gives you a protagonist who’s has enough, dammit, and they’re going to do something about it! Of course, in real life such crusades are ill-advised, especially considering that in the movies the cost of getting revenge is often one’s own life, plus the wanton destruction of anything that gets in the way. But that’s why movie characters do what they do: so we don’t have to.

As Madman Mel blasts his way through hitmen and conspirators this week (in an example of classic parental-domestic revenge), we consider 10 kinds of movie vengeance that have given us vicarious vigilante thrills before. (Keep in mind that many of these subgenres overlap. There’s plenty of revenge to go around!)

Domestic Vengeance

It’s by far the most prolific subcategory within revenge cinema: character exacts revenge for the killing/harming/violating of their child/wife/husband/significant other. Usually it’s the one-two punch of a man losing both a wife and child in one fell swoop (Old Boy, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Death Wish, Mad Max), sometimes it stems from a single attack on a girlfriend (Irreversible), wife (Memento), daughter (The Virgin Spring, The Limey), or a fiancé (The Brave One). Other times, losing an only child can drive a parent so mad with revenge that they become monsters (Friday the 13th) although if said parent is Liam Neeson in Taken, it results in pure awesome.

Female Vengeance **

Female vengeance films come with many motivating forces, but they always have one thing in common: an ass-kicking female lead hell-bent on getting revenge. Modern audiences know Uma Thurman’s character from Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 best, but Tarantino’s Bride owes a large debt to the ones who came before, like Meiko Kaji as a lethal 19th-century assassin who is literally conceived for revenge in Lady Snowblood and Jeanne Moreau as a vengeful widow in Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black. [More faves: Christina Lindberg in Thriller - A Cruel Picture (aka They Call Her One-Eye) and Reiko Ike in Sex & Fury.] However, while it’s always thrilling to see a heroine get her revenge, the subgenre too often requires her to be raped, an unnecessary last straw which I suppose is the female equivalent of a hero hitting rock bottom/near death before the last-act finale. In the cases where sexual violence is what pushes a meek, helpless woman over the edge toward a path of brutal retribution, she often turns into an avenging angel so disturbed it’s hard to keep rooting for her (I Spit On Your Grave, Ms. 45).

Sibling Vengeance

We like to think we can shield our siblings from the harsh, cruel world. So when said world ends up eating little bro or sis alive, it brings out the protector in us. Such is the case in Get Carter, where Michael Caine dispatches half of Newcastle, England while investigating the death of his brother. Or in Coffy, where Pam Grier’s titular “one-chick hit-squad” cleans up the mean streets of Los Angeles after her little sister overdoses on heroin. In the South Korean film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, one man’s quest to get his dying sis a kidney becomes another man’s vendetta, while over in Thailand, Jean-Claude Van Damme gets back at the man who paralyzed his brother in a slightly more constructive way: by mastering the art of Muy Thai (Kickboxer)!

Comic Vengeance

The realm of revenge isn’t mined very often for laughs; blame it on the moral quandaries and legal gray area involved when you take justice into your own hands. Of course, when it’s little Kevin McAllister tormenting two bumbling burglars on Christmas Eve (Home Alone), vengeance is not only deserved, it’s hilarious. Ditto the misadventures of three office workers punishing their chauvinistic boss (9 to 5) and the heroic, jock-defeating exploits of the Tri-Lambs fraternity of Adams College (Revenge of the Nerds).

Vigilante Vengeance

Crusaders for the greater good have moral righteousness in mind when they exact revenge on behalf of others — say, the victims of a pedophile (Hard Candy), or the millions killed by Hitler and his Nazi party during World War II (Inglorious Basterds). One horror franchise staple takes his mission to the extreme: Jigsaw, the twisted Saw killer whose torture chamber death traps are designed to save people from themselves — or teach them a deadly lesson if they can’t change their ways.

Supernatural Vengeance

Revenge flicks are fantasies unto themselves, but when supernatural forces step in, they become fantastical in a whole new way. Take The Crow, for instance, in which the late Brandon Lee plays a murdered musician brought back on the one-year anniversary of his death, equipped with invincibility to get back at the thugs responsible. Or V for Vendetta, in which a government experiment gone wrong turns one man into a mysterious masked hero whose resulting mental powers enable him to orchestrate the undoing of an entire fascist state. Even Clint Eastwood got into the otherworldly mix with High Plains Drifter, directing himself as a lone gunman who comes back from beyond the grave to settle old scores.

Bullied Vengeance

Whether prodded into uncharacteristic action by bullies or simply unleashing a rage that was always simmering under the surface, these characters are almost always driven to the breaking point by their intimidating tormentors. In Carrie, we understand completely; poor Sissy Spacek’s attacked at home by her religious nut job mother AND at school, where she’s not even safe in the locker room showers. Thankfully, those mean girls get their comeuppance in the dark comedy Heathers, though eventually Winona Ryder sees that killing her idiot classmates with her deranged boyfriend doesn’t exactly make for a healthy relationship. The kids in Larry Clark’s Bully, based on chilling true events, don’t quite get that message; they plot to take out their mean, menacing frenemy in murderous fashion, resulting in perhaps the most disturbing anti-vengeance film ever made.

Space Vengeance

In space, no one can hear you scream … unless you’re William Shatner and you’re screaming “Khaaaaan!” at Ricardo Montalban, that is. Khan, the genetically-engineered villain of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (and the Star Trek: TOS episode “Space Seed”), blames Captain Kirk for the death of his people and his wife, and he’ll stop at nothing — including sliding space eels into dudes’ ears and driving his spaceship into a trap — to get his revenge. Coincidentally, nearly three decades later (in the alternate timeline of 2009′s Star Trek), a younger Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) encounters Nero, one of few angry survivors out for revenge after Romulus and its people are destroyed.

Western Vengeance

Honor, revenge, duels at high noon … the Western genre provides a perfect backdrop for tales of gunslingers battling for redemption and retribution, for daughters avenging their fathers (The Quick and the Dead, Cat Ballou), fathers avenging their families (The Outlaw Josey Wales, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood), and good guys avenging their own attempted murder (Hang ‘Em High, also starring Eastwood). Even Once Upon A Time In The West, one of the best films ever made, unites a landowner’s widow (Claudia Cardinale), a local bandit (Jason Robards), and a gunman on a mission (Charles Bronson) in a twofold quest for justice against a greedy railroad tycoon and his murderous gun for hire (Henry Fonda).

Good Old Personal Vengeance

When it gets personal, revenge takes on a whole new intensity. Consider the case of Walker (Lee Marvin), who is double-crossed and left for dead when his partner decides to take his cut, and his wife, for himself (Point Blank, also remade as Payback). Likewise, Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji) of the 1972 women-in-prison classic Female Convict 701: Scorpion breaks out of prison to get bloody revenge on the policeman lover who betrayed her, along with his Yakuza accomplices who tried to kill her. But amazingly, none of the revenge movies mentioned above holds one-tenth of the ruthlessness on display in Titus, Julie Taymor’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” about a long-running feud between a Roman general (Anthony Hopkins) and his enemy-turned-Queen (Jessica Lange) that sends arms flying and blood spilling as their respective families engage in a back-and-forth exchange of vengeful, violent acts.

** My very favorite brand of cinematic payback.

Jen Yamato writes weekly for Film.com. Tell her your favorite revenge flicks on Twitter.

Tags: memento, revenge cinema, v for vendetta