His tool kit was impressive for the wide variety of hand axes, borers, knives, and choppers it contained.
A softer variation of her mother Goldie Hawn's ferociously perky baring of choppers, it lends her character in "Raising Helen" a likability belied by her profession.
But after it was used in the druggy road movie Easy Rider, as the soundtrack to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda riding "chopper" motorcycles, it took on a life of its own.
Designed by Matt Chambers, 50, a New Orleans lawyer who switched careers, the Hellcat does not have the long front end of a classic chopper, but it is radical and retro in its own way.
The handles fold in, switchblade style, to protect the sharp, curved stainless-steel blade of the chopper when it's not attacking a pile of herbs or mushrooms.
Having done so in awe-strikingly fashion against the masterpiece score, he then catches the falling chopper before it crushes innocent Metropolis citizens.
Leaning out of a tiny white chopper as it hovers perilously close to the tree tops in the South African bush, he has his sights on the behind of a black rhino, one of the most critically endangered animals in the world.
No doubt it was the baleful influence of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but the comedy-gore combination served crime films well until, I suspect, Andrew Dominik's Chopper took it all a bit too far in at the end of the decade.
Then, the local authorities confiscated his chopper, saying it was a "security risk".
