10 Movie Villains Who Had Warts On Their Souls
A rundown of cinema's most irredeemable baddies and monstrous villains...
Some villains are downright understandable, and their tragic backstories give them plenty of potential to turn their story around.
Some are irredeemable, but the brutality inflicted on them makes their evil actions comprehensible, even if they aren't excusable.
These are the sort of baddies who leave viewers thinking, "but for the grace of God go I..." and reflect on how lucky they are to have never been driven down a darker path.
And then there are the villains on this list.
Inspired by a quote that legendary critic Roger Ebert coined when discussing Michael Gambon's monstrous Layer Cake antagonist, these villains are the vile characters who were genuinely evil to the core. Without an ounce of sympathy, empathy, or understanding, they're the stand-out monsters who made the idea of being born evil seem not only possible but logical.
Pulling from intense horrors to cop thrillers to family films (well, one family film), this list is composed of the villains who were a special sort of evil, an irredeemable breed of baddie that is unforgettably unforgivable. These are the true worst of the worst, a rogue's gallery of villains who truly do have warts on their souls.
10. The Party Crasher: The Hard Way
Directed by action comedy hero John Badham, 1991's buddy cop comedy The Hard Way followed the director's equally impressive eighties efforts in the genre Stakeout and Bird on a Wire. The film followed a game Michael J Fox as a clueless Hollywood actor who is shadowing a taciturn detective played by James Woods. The naive newcomer's inexperience, along with Woods playing essentially the inverse of his later Simpsons cameo, resulted in a steady stream of laughs alongside some pacy and inventive action sequences.
So why did the film have the sickest villain in police procedurals since Dirty Harry's Scorpio?
Unusually twisted and apathetic for a cop thriller villain, the Party Crasher was a murderer who taunted the police as he killed petty criminals and prostitutes, all the while boasting that he was doing their work. As if this weren't enough, it's soon revealed that he's a remorseless monster who had previously murdered a child in cold blood.
A pseudo-moralizing creep, this serial killer was glib and uncaring about his rising body count and seemed dropped in from a far darker, more mean-spirited film.