10 Sci-Fi Movie Villains Who Actually Won
6. The Stepford Men's Association - The Stepford Wives
The original 1975 adaptation of Ira Levin's novel The Stepford Wives ends in savagely bleak fashion, unlike the more sanitised, crowd-pleasing 2004 remake.
In the '75 movie, Katharine Ross stars as Joanna Eberhart, a young woman who moves with her family to the idyllic town of Stepford, Connecticut, only to discover that the town's robotic, personality-devoid women are literally robots.
Stepford's Men's Association has systematically gone about replacing the town's women with compliant robotic substitutes, and at the end of the movie Joanna herself is killed and replaced by her own robotic duplicate.
It's a deeply chilling vision and one that remains bracingly effective today, brilliantly surmising the struggle for women to be heard, while facing off against men who will do anything to prevent that.
Numerous made-for-TV sequels were made in addition to the anemic '04 remake, but nothing tops the disturbingly cynical outlook of the original adaptation, where men exert their power over women in the most ultimate, unsettling way possible.