A repost from Myspace. Over there, I split it into two parts but I figured what the hell, let's just put the fucker together. I've also taken it upon myself to rewrite a few small areas, especially the really old and stale parts. I hope you enjoy. I've got a couple ideas for a new article, but I also want to hear ideas from everyone else.
Yes...I am now on Facebook. You can always contact me at bradleyfilmco@gmail.com.
Oh, and Stephen...this one's for you and y'all.
Ben's Ode to Crappy Villains
or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Terrible Movies
by Ben Bradley
Most information was obtained from good ole' IMDB with just a dash of Wikipedia for flavor.
In order to discuss bad villains, one must first examine what characteristics make up an effective villain (hint: it isn't a purple plastic helmet). It's no mystery that human beings share a list of “scary” criteria that crosses temporal, cultural, and geographical boundaries. There have been plenty of absolutely fantastic villains throughout film history; among them, Godzilla, Hannibal Lecter, Donald Sutherland, Scanners, and AIDS. In the interest of comparison, I've attempted to compile a short list of the things we, as humans, universally share as fears.
According to Google, the most popular phobias going today are homophobia, xenophobia, and agoraphobia. So apparently, if you can write a screenplay about a lesbian with bad hygiene who forces her victims to go shopping, you have yourself a winner, Future Oscar Hopeful. On the other hand, #17 on the popular phobia list is psychophobia, which translates literally to fear of the mind. I wouldn't stress too much about scaring a population who are afraid of thinking. Nevertheless, filmmakers have spent decades trying to figure out what scares us. Of course, scaring a filmgoer and scaring a real woman in a shower are two very different enterprises. Trust me, I have a girlfriend; I have researched this idea thoroughly. If we're talking a horror movie, the challenges for scaring an audience become very daunting indeed. From a filmmaking point of view, the pitfalls lie in several categories: most importantly, casting, sound, special effects, writing, and acting (not to be confused with casting).
Among the most notorious horror villains include Leatherface, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead, and those creepy mutants from The Hills Have Eyes.
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Step 1: We're definitely scared of the ugly, deformed, or people that will hurt if you lovingly pat them on the head. It helps if they're big and imposing too. Candyman wouldn't have been nearly as scary if he were played by, say, Katt Williams. These are the kinds of characters that depend mostly on casting (as in, the stature or physicality of the actor), costume, and makeup. Acting, we should say, is um...not quite as important, as is evident of anything else in which Robert Englund has ever "acted." Put it this way: who played the Predator in Predator?
Another common category of villain relates to the unseen. A deadly virus for instance, a la Outbreak and Cabin Fever, really gouges into the audience's fear of a killer that cannot be ambushed around a doorway with an axe, or even run up the stairs from in our underwear. This also includes all of our precious little ghost stories (Haunting, House on Haunted Hill, Haunting in Connecticut, American Haunting, Thirteen Ghosts, Ghost Ship) that have recently flooded the horror market. The strongest attributes of the ghost stories that are actually well done, such as The Shining and The Changeling, are inevitably weighted on the director, D.P., and sound editor.
Remember in White Noise when the whole damn movie is completely silent, and then after fifty thousand minutes of silence that radio cuts on in FULL VOLUME, and you jerk your body so hard you now have scoliosis? Well, you can thank the sound editor for that one. Ghost movies depend on basically this one technique to scare us.
Oh, and don't think I've forgotten you, The Mist or The Fog. You can't exactly beat a mist's brains in with a two-by-four, or even call Max Von Sydow to exorcise it. This also includes that which comprises our everyday lives or is considered benign by the general population, like the Chucky series and Black Sheep. Also included in our "Unseen" category are some of the more existential villains such as drugs (Requiem for a Dream), a bad temper (28 Days Later), and a pissed off vending machine that shoots soda cans at your balls (Maximum Overdrive).
Then of course we have movies where the villains are OURSELVES. This would include any movie that ends in "of the Dead" and any alien that snatches our bodies. This category is not as relevant to our research on fear, however, since anyone who's attended an introductory film class knows that these are simply commentaries on our society's slow and inevitable decay. Depressing; not so much scary. Interesting, however, that it does cater to all three of the most common Google phobias (I doubt the question has ever been posed in a proper scientific environment, but I'd be willing to bet that the average straight guy would rather be eaten by a zombie woman).
OK...fair enough. You got me.
The fourth most prominent category of villain is the cold, calculating, uber-intelligent, kinda-creepy-yet-somehow-fascinating serial killer type. The most famous of this category is of course Hannibal Lecter, luckily played by one of the greatest actors of all time. What many people forget is that Brian Cox played Hannibal before Hopkins in a tremendously mediocre film called Manhunter. Don't get me wrong, Brian Cox is a great actor. It was just a crap film.
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Included in this category are the particularly slithery and unscrupulous villains, the kind of sickening individuals that sicken because you, the audience, can identify with the level of realistic cruelty of which they are capable. Not only are they capable of atrocities, but chances are they're already two steps ahead of you, because you've already sent them a message on EHarmony. There's no need, though; he's looking at you right now across the street through binoculars.
Perfect examples of these characters are Annie Wilkes from Misery (played by Kathy Bates), Hans Gruber from Die Hard (Alan Rickman), and Patrick Bateman from American Psycho (Christian Bale). Notice the sort of names we're throwing out here. Obviously, a great deal of the burden of quality is placed on the shoulders of the actor playing the role. Unlike the slashers and teen screamers, these realistic villains have no mask or makeup to hide behind.
Characters like these also require a clever writer. One could argue that Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds was a kickass villain equally because of Quentin Tarantino's writing and Christoph Waltz's portrayal. It's a very delicate balance, and it's for reasons such as these that we breed so many terrible, awful, nauseatingly lame villains. That's really the problem here; as much as I'd love to blame everything else, it all begins with a decent concept and ends with skillful execution. It's very, very easy to fall short.
Take Keanu Reeves in The Watcher. I have a couple problems right off the bat.
Number 1, I mean...look at him. A marshmallow dressed as a teddy bear would be more terrifying. Plus, there's the issue of casting an actor whose most famous line is “Whoa.”Number 2, we have the opening scene. Keanu, dressed in his black leather jacket (there's that costume we were talking about), dances around a candle-lit room to Rob Zombie. I mean, the guy's gonna have a hard time getting the audience to take him seriously in the first place. So how do they scare the pants off of us in the first scene? Dancing. Really, really bad dancing.
I mean, just look at this guy.
Number 3, Keanu's modus operandi is, shall we put it gently, fucking bananas. He observes public places...yep...he's the Watcher...until a female catches his eye, so he takes the girl's picture, and mails it to a depressed detective (tragically played by James Spader) who wasted his life trying to track this idiot down. Actually, if I couldn't catch Keanu, I'd probably be pretty depressed too. So yeah...he failed to catch him years ago, so naturally he's the first choice to work the case. Then Keanu gives Spader a WHOLE DAY to find the girl before he even kidnaps her! That's the most retarded fictional permutation of the Zodiac Killer I've ever seen. At least Hard Target had Lance Henriksen and a freakin' arrow gun.Cajun mullet + arrow gun = awesome
Possibly the most embarrassing aspect of this movie is that Keanu's dancing strangler antics prove too deceptive for Chicago PD, up until the very end when he sets up a ridiculous trap involving a tied-up Marisa Tomei and an incredibly gay number of votive candles. Of course, the whole place goes up in flames. Good.Keanu is also famous for ruining good horror movies with bad accents, like Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Gift, in which he clumsily portrays a wife-beating redneck. And since I just hinted on the subject:
A Brief Note About the South:
Everyone who lives in the South knows that if someone from outside the region comes to visit, especially if they feel obliged to explore our lush forested regions, we are morally obligated to rape and kill them. Apparently, the same is true of the nice folks out in the Nevada desert and vampires in Alaska. This is an extension of the classic "Fear of the Unknown," in which a small group of two to eight smart ass yuppies venture into intellectual no-man's-land to find their lattes and fancy sunglasses quite useless against bumpy mutant rednecks. You could also say this is a variation of the Survival Story, only a giant murderous bear is replaced with redneck penises and probably a bow and arrow.
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Concluded in Part 2.
In the spirit of scholarly pursuit in film and art as a whole, I have compiled and elaborated upon several examples of what I feel to be especially terrible villains in contemporary film. Remember the criteria we discussed?
I don't think it's mathematically possible to compute the number of movies I've had to watch to complete this research, but what can I say? That's the kind of dedicated researcher I am. I'm the kind of guy that'll sit down and watch all of my zombie movies in chronological order. For fun. So here we go!
I'll begin with a villain that breaks every single rule we've discussed so far.
Rachael from American Psycho 2: All American Girl (2002 Dir. Morgan J. Freeman)
Played by Mila Kunis
Species: Female Turn-ons: Cleanliness, order, A+'s
Powers: Crazy Weaknesses: Father figures
American Psycho 2 presents the tale of Rachael, played by Mila Kunis. Now, say what you want about Christian Bale, American Psycho was a pretty badass movie. The Rules of Attraction is also based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel, and is equally badass in that disturbing sort of way. American Psycho 2, perhaps predictably, was based on nothing. The convoluted plot begins thus: traumatized by an attack by Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale from the first one, in which she somehow escapes and, in return, kills him), 10 year-old Rachael disappears to recreate her identity. She's conveniently inherited some of the familiar OCD traits of her wouldbe killer, and becomes a model student. She reappears at some random shitty college where she soon begins busying herself with killing her way to the top of the class. That's right: her grisly psychopathic motive is good grades.
If you haven't seen this movie, and I hope you haven't, you might as well imagine Jackie from That 70's Show has gone completely insane, because that's about the amount of effort Mila put into this role. Obsessed with winning a teacher's assistant gig with her Criminal Psychology professor, Mila mumbles her way through half-assed fem-dom manipulation scenes reminiscent of a time I watched Basic Instinct on VCR head cleaner. Once the killing starts, just imagine your garden variety hack-and-slash, only with a couple bizarre Animal House twists, such as a boy strangled by his own condom. I think that was a Greek myth.
The movie is also full of tedious narration that attempts to explain away the deus ex machina allowing Mila to vanish into the crowd by framing someone else, i.e. Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs. Normally, we would assume this is just a set up for another sequel, but thank God, this movie was a horrendous failure.
M. Bison from Street Fighter (1994 Dir. Steven de Souza)
Played by Raul Julia
Species: Dictator, made of lightning Turn-ons: Genetic experiments
Powers: Step in the ring and find out Weaknesses: Haduken!
Yes, the nineties was a bad decade for costumes. It took us so long to figure out that you can't just throw a bunch of leather onto a Puerto Rican and call him a video game character.
Little did anyone know, next year Paul W.S. Anderson would begin his aggressive video game movie campaign with Mortal Kombat. The development of CG and other special effects eventually allowed filmmakers to make an effective sci-fi or horror movie, not an action movie in which the explosions budget is wasted on blue camo and green makeup.
Eye from The Killer Eye (1999 Dir. David DeCoteau)
Played by a Remote Control
Species: Eye
Turn-ons: Visine
Powers: Zombifying psychic rays
Weaknesses: Onions, lemon juice, anything pointy
The Killer Eye comes from an all-Eye alternate dimension, accidentally summoned by a supposed genius scientist that keeps his lab in his studio apartment. First of all...it's an eye. I could be wrong, but I thought the eye was just about the most vulnerable organ on your body. They might as well have a villain made out of scrotum.
The clunky remote control eye slithers its way up and down the apartment building, acquiring mind control zombies with its psychic laser. Well, it couldn't actually slither, but the tail wiggled a little. Eventually, they find a way to send him back to the eye dimension in a contrived "cross the streams" sort of nonsense. This is what we call a backwards concept film. In other words, some special effects guy stayed behind in the office one night, most likely on some crystal meth-Nyquil cocktail. The next morning, when all of his coworkers returned, he had one of those "Look what I made!" moments, followed by everyone else saying, "Well fuck, I guess we need to make a Killer Eye movie now."
Leprechaun from Leprechaun (1993 Dir. Mark Jones)
Played by Warwick Davis
Species: Motherfuckin' Leprechaun
Turn-ons: Princesses
Powers: Imagine Gandalf was tiny and dressedlike a pimp.
Weaknesses: Pot of gold, Jennifer Aniston
I'm just kidding...Leprechaun was fucking awesome. And that's including Leprechaun in Space and both Leprechaun in the Hoods.
Shao Kahn from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997 Dir. John R. Leonetti)
Played by Brian Thompson
Species: Pseudo-God Demon King
Turn-ons: Evil, demons, fatalities.
Powers: Black magic, pointy helmet, karate chop Weaknesses: Fashion
What can you say about Mortal Kombat: Annihilation? The poor bastards thought they had a good formula going. Kids my age got excited about the original Mortal Kombat movie, because FINALLY, after Super Mario Brothers, Double Dragon, Street Fighter, someone managed to make a passable video game movie (although who cast Christopher Lambert as a chinese thunder god, I do not know). So naturally, Hollywood took a solid, effective narrative and raped it like it was Monica Bellucci.
Then he and Liu Kang explode into the cutest little claymation dragons you've ever seen, and they proceed to fight awkwardly for a few seconds.
"Holy shit, those are shitty dragons."Morty from The Fear 2: Halloween Night (1999 Dir. Chris Angel)
Played by Jon Fedele
Species: Wood
Turn-ons: Pledge
Powers: Hilarious run, morph into tree, hatchet
Weaknesses: He's made out of wood.
Remember that time in college when you rounded up a strangely diverse group of friends and hauled them all out to the country, where you performed fear experiments on them for your final paper? No? Well, me neither, but it sounds like a totally sweet idea.
Unfortunately, this film takes a shockingly sad turn when the main character's old Indian groundskeeper or what-the-fuck-ever unearths the kid's imaginary friend, a wooden effigy of a grumpy Indian midget wearing a crappy amulet. College kids die by some cheap rendition of their own professed fears, the main character has a childhood flashback, and finally someone thought of setting Morty on fire.
Bane from The Adventures of Batman & Robin (1997 Dir. Joel Schumacher)Played by Jeep Swenson
Turn-ons: Long rubber tubes
Powers: Mono-syllabic growling
Weaknesses: Häagen Dazs
Perhaps more famous for his role as Jumbo Stark in the hit TV show “Walker, Texas Ranger,” pro wrestler Jeep Swenson continues to marvel us with his tremendous acting range. With Shakespearean soliloquies such as “STEP” and “BOMB” interwoven into the drama, it may be astounding to discover that Swenson only spent three seconds preparing for this role.
It's not like the other villains of this film were passable. Arnold Shwarzenegger as the Retarded Mr. Freeze embarrassed both himself and me, and I watched Commando no less than 50,000 times between the years of 1989 and 1994.
I'm not going to waste any more energy complaining about these movies. Their time has come and gone, thank God. Besides, smarter and funnier people have already laid waste to this CG clusterfuck they call a trilogy.
Raccoon Coat from Pelts (2006 Dir. Dario Argento)Played by a coat
Turn-ons: Meatloaf
Powers: Causes suicidal compulsions in its wearers
Weaknesses: Pawn shop
Dario Argento is an Italian horror director most famous for confusing American film students with films such as Suspiria and Opera. Egomaniacal fans of the genre will name-drop him like it's going out of style, no doubt mentioning the Giallo films, which is Italian for "soundtrack by Goblyn." Argento directed an episode in the first season of Masters of Horror entitled Jenifer, which was pretty gratifying in a twisted splatterwhore sort of way. Season 2, much like many of the examples presented in this article, contracted a debilitating case of sequelitis.
The new face of evil.
First of all, the killer is a coat made from magical raccoon pelts that a couple of greasy hunters nabbed off an ancient Indian burial ground. Read that again if you have to. It sounds like two guys on ether threw darts at a Zoobooks poster. It's like Pet Semetary, only if the main character buried his wife's coat instead of his infant son.
The star of Pelts is Meat Loaf, but I guess this series isn't called Masters of Casting, plus Argento's Italian, so he can't tell if Americans are acting well anyway. It doesn't particularly matter, because the star of the show is blood and skin, the highlights being a seamstress sewing her own eyes shut and, in a corn syrup-soaked finale, Meat Loaf skins his own meatloafy torso like a saggy leather shirt.I get it, OK? The coat is symbolic for greed, and the story shows how every man's pursuit for riches and luxury is really only self-destruction. Fine. You can't take a symbol, dress it up in a crappy raccoon coat, skin everybody and call it a horror movie. That's just special effects guys jerking off. Sorry Dario.
I think I've made my point. It's funny though, in watching all of these piece of shit movies, I do realize that I am watching them, and that may prompt some of you to say, "Well I guess the filmmakers win after all, because their getting paid for you to complain." First of all, I haven't paid for a movie or a CD since 2002. It's called the internet, geniuses. Second, you have a point. I do get enjoyment out of these movies despite their obvious shortcomings. I guess the conclusion to this research is a tad bittersweet, because the fact is skillful execution and a solid concept are not required for a positive filmgoing experience. Ultimately, we'll love our villains, good or bad, not because of their predisposed criteria, but because of the context in which they intersected with our own lives. That's why I make my girlfriend dress up like the Ultimate Warrior. And that's what I call a win-win.
But seriously...love your movies, and love each other. That's right: it's one of those crappy Kung Fu movie endings when you spend the whole movie watching these guys beat the piss out of each other, just for them to decide that fighting is futile and the world just needs a hug.
THE END
As always, I appreciate any opinion, positive or negative. Thanks for reading.
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