10 Iconic Villains Who Deserved Much Better Deaths

Dying is usually part and parcel of being a movie villain, because audiences like to be able to cheer when baddies get their comeuppance, and we can all go home and imagine that everything is right with the world again.

But because of the rule of dramatic returns, the bigger the villain, the harder they have to fall - there has to be some pomp and ceremony as they take their last breaths, or curiously, we all feel a little bit robbed.

But then, Hollywood has an infuriating habit of killing great characters in terrible ways - Captain Kirk was fired down a mountain side on a bridge-death-sled, after all - and it seems that when a character actually deserves to die well, that fudging becomes even more noticable.

We don't want villains to go quietly into the night - we want explosions, melting Nazi faces and bits being chopped off, because at the heart of the matter, we're all just spectators sitting in an arena hoping the emperor gives the thumbs up and the gladiator gets his kill.

And frankly, the following despicable lot were never killed the way they deserved to be.

Honourable Mention

The Newborn - Alien: Resurrection

We've already established recently that Alien Resurrection's Newborn alien/human hybrid could have been an awful lot worse if the perverted designers had got their way, but the monster was still a disappointingly messy full-stop on the franchise.

And the vacuum-induced death, which saw the creatures insides sucked inside out into the unforgiving void of space was comically awful. It was a million miles away from the grandeur of the Aliens stand-off, and having the big bad squeezed like a tube of horrible tooth-paste is not how you're supposed to do it.

But then, quite frankly, that awful fate probably wasn't unjustified, given how utterly garbage the creature was, and the abomination got exactly what it deserved.