12 Awesome Villains In Otherwise Terrible Movies
When bad movies happen to good bad guys...
As vastly more talented people will tell you, writing a villain is a lot harder than writing a hero. The worst (and the best proof of the difficulty involved) tend to be in poorly made horror movies and lazy comic book movies.
Both tend to believe the fundamental lie that if you make a villain look good and slap on some vague nefarious plan, nobody will care that they're about as limited as pantomime baddies.
In contrast, the best are complex as well as slightly cartoonish, grotesque as well as perversely sympathetic and burrow behind your eyes with charm as well as bloody misdeeds. And it's really quite stunning when a film-maker or writer or a combination of both manages to hit all of those strokes, but then fundamentally forgets to make a good film around them.
It's like managing to build something as complex and impressive as a Flux Capacitor and simply forgetting to put the wheels on the Delorean. Or the doors. Or any good characters inside it. And you'd be surprised how many times movies with truly great villains manage to spectacularly drop the ball.
A moment of reflection for the poor brilliant rogues trapped in terrible movies...