Halloween is a celebration of all kinds of things, but what most of us focus on other than stuffing our faces with candy is remembering all the creeps, ghouls, goblins, and nasties that are associated with this holiday. While people like the Nostalgia Critic are out there naming their favorite Halloween classics, I actually want to use our beloved holiday to discuss a different type of evil. For this year, I want to focus on the most hateable movie villains in the last 20 years.
Now, my definition of “most hateable” isn’t the same as “best villains in the last 20 years.” I’m not talking about the overall effectiveness of the villain or how well they were written. This list is for the 18 villains from my favorite movies who just made me want to reach my hands into the television and strangle them to death. I’m talking about villains who wormed their way under my skin and made it personal instead of just being an obstacle for our heroes. It’s time to salute those bastard-coated bastards with bastard fillings this Halloween, so let’s get started. Spoilers ahead, so proceed with caution.
18. Alice Ward from The Fighter (2010)
Played by Melissa Leo
A lot of Oscar Bait films get a reputation they don’t deserve, but for once, The Fighter is actually worth the hype. It’s a damn good movie. I’d argue it’s Mark Wahlberg’s best performance to date, and it’s also Christian Bale’s most compelling performance put to film. That being said, there’s a reason both Christian Bale AND Melissa Leo won Oscars for these roles.
Alice Ward is Micky’s overbearing mother, and that’s the simplified version. You would think in a film about a struggling small town boxer with a drug addict brother would cast other boxers as the main antagonists, but no. This film was brilliant in that the most formidable opponent Micky faces is not the boxers, but his hellbitch of a mother. She does all the classic bad mother things, but then amps them up to ridiculous heights.
She’s petty, selfish, manipulative, poisonous, and just plain nasty, but she also puts on this façade of motherly affection in order to get what she wants. It’s incredible. Micky has been living in his brother’s shadow his entire life thanks to the famous fight where Dicky allegedly knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard, and his mother is just as responsible for Micky’s troubles as his crackhead brother. She is constantly shoving him aside to give Dicky the attention and completely overlooks Micky’s needs in order to get what she wants. She dumps the responsibility for their entire clan on Micky and expects him to just be fine with it because he’s “family.” She’s a piece of work in epic proportions.
However, she’s low on the list because we find out that deep down, she really does love both of her sons but she is just so wrapped up in her control freak role that she can’t show them the motherly affection they both need and deserve. It’s one hell of a performance and you shouldn’t miss it.
17. Don Rafael Montero from The Mask of Zorro (1998)
Played by Stuart Wilson
The Mask of Zorro is one of my all-time favorite films. Ask my brother and my parents. I can’t stop watching it. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Hell, it taught me how to write sexual tension and witty banter and I still love it to this very day. It’s got everything you need—humor, romance, swashbuckling action, a killer soundtrack, and one of the best ensemble casts to date. Plus, people of color! Nothing makes me happier than a phenomenal film with a majority diverse cast.
Don Rafael Montero is Diego de la Vega’s archnemesis for a reason. At first, he seems like your typical slimy, corrupt politician, but in reality, he is so much more than that. If you missed out on the story, he was a cruel bastard ruling over the peasant folk and Diego de la Vega (Anthony Hopkins) sought to drive him out of California forever. Don Rafael figures out Diego is Zorro, and it also turns out that he has designs on Diego’s beautiful wife, Esperanza. They fight to the death, and one of Don Rafael’s soldier’s mistakenly shoots Esperanza, killing her. They apprehend Diego and send him to jail, but Rafael takes custody of Diego’s infant daughter, Elena, and raises her as his own.
It’s amazing how arrogant a man can be to insist that a woman should be with him when she has no love for him at all, and that he has the nerve to kidnap the child of his most hated enemy and raise her as his own. That’s staggering. What’s worse is that this sick man actually did seem to genuinely love Elena even though he lied to her and tried to kill her real father so she would never know the truth. It takes a special kind of villain to twist all that misery into something else, and it’s why Montero left a lasting impression on me from my childhood to now.
16. Chris D’Amico from Kick-Ass 2 (2013)
Played by Christopher-Mintz Plasse
Disclaimer: I love the first Kick Ass movie. It was fun, funny, irreverent, and the perfect satire for our superhero film revolution.
The second one? Not so much.
It was forgettable, except for one singular factor. That factor is Chris D’Amico.
If ever I could shoot a teenager in the face and get away with it, I’d shoot Chris with a shotgun point blank and sleep like a baby that night.
My God. Not only was he an immature jackass with no talent, too much money, and mouth that wouldn’t close, but he was as ineffectual as any villain can be, and that’s why he’s so hateable. Good villains have backstory and weight to their characters. They have flair. They have that x-factor that makes them formidable against our heroes. Chris D’Amico was nothing more than a spoiled, ignorant little brat, and even though he gets his comeuppance in the end, it’s not enough. There is nothing worse than a pathetic villain who just makes the hero’s life hell for a singular, paper-thin reason. Sure, Kick Ass killed his father, but guess what? His father was an evil bastard and was in the process of trying to murder a child whose father he also murdered. Not a big loss there, kiddo.
What’s more is with all that money and power, Chris could’ve chosen to do all kinds of things instead of get revenge, but he decided it would be better to become a murdering psychopath instead. For that and so many other reasons, I hate his freaking guts.
15. Eddie Martel from The Replacements (2001)
Played by Brett Cullen
This villain is a bit more obscure, so bear with me, but I love The Replacements. It’s this delightfully off-beat football movie with an all-star cast of misfits, plenty of hard hits, and a plethora of laughs. It’s like if you took The Longest Yard and Community and put them in a blender. It’s great.
Martel, for me, made it onto the list for the single reason of just being a bully. An exceptional bully. I was blown away by the fact that this grown ass man—this professional athlete—was so incredibly petty and arrogant despite the life he’d been given. First, for going on the strike for more money considering the millions he was already getting paid; second, for bullying Shane Falco for no reason other than to just be an asshole; third, for ragging on a deaf guy for being deaf (yes, he really did that and thank God, got his ass kicked immediately afterward); and finally, for being a lousy player and all around jackass during the most important game of the Sentinels’ career.
There’s just nothing quite like an honest-to-God bully. They do things that make your mind implode because they think they have earned the right to treat people like crap. What troubles me about villains like Martel is that a lot of them are based on true stories, like this one, and they don’t get as much comeuppance as they should. Martel and those like him are a class act and make you wish you were a 300 lb. sumo wrestler so you could teach them some manners.
14. Mother Gothel from Tangled (2010)
Played by Donna Murphy
I could rave about Tangled for hours, if you let me. It’s easily one of Disney’s best and certainly the best thing they’ve put out in the current decade. There are all kinds of reasons why I love it, and I have to admit Mother Gothel is one of them, which is why it was so hard to decide if she should be on my list or not.
The reason I almost didn’t put her on this list is because Mother Gothel is such an effective force of evil. She’s an amazing villain, one of Disney’s best, in my opinion. For that reason, I almost don’t hate her because she’s so good at being a devious, selfish monster, but she made it onto the list for that very reason.
How sick do you have to be to steal someone’s daughter and raise them as your own just so you can remain beautiful? Vanity. The deepest, cruelest, most awful kind of vanity is how. At first glance, Mother Gothel seems horrible, but when you consider she spent 18 years pretending to love Rapunzel just to use her hair, it reaches an entirely new level of evil. The fact that she could look Rapunzel in the eyes and say she loves her and not mean it is unspeakable. What a heartless witch. Then Mother Gothel murders the love of Rapunzel’s life right in front of her before forcing her into a life of slavery? Are you kidding me? There are black holes in space right now that aren’t that bloody cold and empty. She is one of the foulest villains ever spawned in fiction and as much as I adore that lovely singing voice, I was rooting for her to bite the big one by the end.
13. General Ross from The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Played by William Hurt
I think this Marvel Cinematic Universe film doesn’t get enough love. Sure, it’s no Iron Man or Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but I still think it was a damn fine movie in and of itself. It had solid acting, great action, and tied in nicely with the building Marvel continuity. I thought Edward Norton was so easy to love and root for, and that’s in part due to the epic douchebaggery of General Ross.
General Ross is yet another villain whose arrogance simply astounds me. How can you look at something as destructive and uncontrollable as the Hulk and say to yourself, “Yes, I should not only own this power, but be able to use it against my enemies.” Are you smoking crack, General? I understand that science has come a long way, but you are so out of your league that it’s not even funny.
If for a second I could forget about his epic bad idea of wanting to replicate the Hulk for the U.S. government, then there’s the fact that he’s so nasty and vindictive about capturing Bruce, who did nothing wrong but be a victim of a freak accident. It’s even worse that he alienated his only daughter Betty for hunting down the love of her life and didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass that he ruined both their lives and chances for happiness. A single-track mind like that just needs an epic punch to the ‘nads, if you ask me. Of the Marvel villains, he’s one of my most hated because he just doesn’t care about anything except power and he uses everything he can get his hands on to take it.
Also, I’m officially announcing that She Who Fights Monsters is having a Halloween sale. It will be FREE all day October 31, 2014. I’ll add a link for it in my third and final installment of my most hateable villains post that Friday.
-Kyoko