In high school, the range of activities during downtime was often limited to watching movies. And, being teenage boys, my friends and I often gravitated toward what lay people would call ‘bad movies.’

Coincidentally, many of the movies we enjoyed came from the science fiction genre. But instead of generally naming a few treasures from the big screen, I’ll honor my friends further by using this Thursday’s Top Three to celebrate my favorite Badass Sci-Fi Quotes. These lines gave us hours of enjoyment long after we’d agreed that the movie or origin was no masterpiece, inadvertantly proving that plaid and Pabst Blue Ribbon are not pre-requisites for ironic enjoyment.

“I’ll kill you with my teacup.”

Said by ‘Riddick’ in “The Chronicles of Riddick” (2004); David Twohy, dir.

Vin Diesel stole our adolescent hearts during senior year with “Pitch Black,” the first installment of the Riddick series. So we spent our college years eagerly awaiting the sequel. For a second, we even believed that Judi Dench signing on to the project would make it a more sophisticated feature. But that credit actually goes to Mr. Diesel, who pulled an epic ‘I got this’ by threatening one of his antagonists with death by the bluntest–and daintiest–kitchenware available.

Spoiler alert: The teacup was empty; the threat was not.

“We can do this easy, or we can do this real easy.”

Said by ‘Denton Van Zan’ in “Reign of Fire” (2002); Rob Bowman, dir.

Okay, so I think I was the only one who enjoyed this movie, including this strangely obscure quote that Matthew McConaughey brought to life in this post-apocalyptic action-thriller about man’s battle with the dragons. Leave it to an arrogant, battle-worn American with a tank to threaten Christian Bale‘s stone fortress, when they’ve both got bigger fish (or dragons, in this case) to fry.

Seriously, though, haven’t you asked yourself why that line hasn’t been used more often?

“F*ck this ship!”

Said by ‘Captain Miller’ in “Event Horizon” (1997); Paul W. S. Anderson

What else could you possibly say when your spaceship gets sucked into a black hole and starts killing your crew? You read that correctly: THE SHIP STARTS KILLING THE CREW. And even though Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) is supposed to go down with his ship, two rhetorical questions relieve him of that duty:

1)    Did the person who wrote that rule consider the possibility of the vessel itself being possessed?

2)    In deep space, where in the hell is ‘down’?

Postscript: While writing this piece, I realized that only one of the quotes came from a movie that my friends and I saw during high school. It didn’t occur to me how faithful we stuck to this pastime after we’d gone our separate ways to college. Perhaps it’s one of the things that kept us together. That’s a comforting thought. Welp! Thanks for reading. And to those few with whom I’ll be enjoying our 10-year reunion this weekend, I got a message from the Reunion Fairy last night. She said, “COME ON, YOU MINDLESS MOTHER #&@%(^$!”