THE TOP TEN LAMEST VILLAINS

10. SUPER SHREDDER

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze” is a dumptruck full of awful from start to finish. But it’s the third act of the “film” that refuses to quit trying to out-lame itself. It all begins with Vanilla Ice serenading our boys with something called “Ninja Rap.” Thousands of dollars were lost when audiences in the theater bet each other that nothing worse than that could happen in this movie. And then, like a retarded bat out of hacky hell, comes Super Shredder. You see, when Shredder, who was never the best villain in the first place, fears he is facing defeat, he covers himself in the same mutagen that turned the turtles into Turtles. The mutagen makes Shredder so much bigger that they had to recast the character with a bigger actor, but the best part is…look at that costume! His costume mutated! Is that the secret of the ooze? I get how awkward it would have been if Shredder had of grown while remaining in a tiny costume, but that doesn’t matter because mutagen will make your clothes bigger, and much scarier looking. It will make you look like a Raiders fan, and Raiders fans are the only villains that rival Super Shredder in lameness. – RH

9. THE JASON WORM

Hey fellow New Line Cinema higher ups.  You know what would be a good idea?  Let’s buy Friday the 13th, one of the most successful franchises of all time.  We can make an awesome reinvention of the franchise and end it with a cliffhanger hyping a showdown between Jason and Freddy.  It will make millions!  Oh also I was thinking that instead of the huge unstoppable monster that people have paid to see for seven movies, we should make him a demonic worm that possesses people by crawling into their orifices.
I’d like to think that whoever thought this was a good idea was put in front of a firing squad the next day, but unfortunately history isn’t that kind.  Instead the Friday the 13th faithful were subjected to 90 minutes of blue balls as the Jason we know and love blew up in the first scene and turned into a little demon worm, making us wait until the end to see him in all his glory again.  The entire plot of the movie is basically the Jason worm switching from body to body trying to possess someone that shares his bloodline so that he can be reborn, which is fucking stupid.  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that this was supposedly going to be the last proper Friday the 13th, which makes their needless fucking with the character all the more maddening.  I would rather skydive into an active volcano full of rabid wolves than watch another scene with this cinematic abortion ever again. – ASW

8. QUIRREL

I am a Harry Potter fan. (Pause for ribbing.) Shut up.

Moving on.

So, I am a Harry Potter fan. Even so, Quirrel immediately came to mind as one of the worst villains of all time. Part of the reason for this is that I didn’t watch enough cartoons in the 80’s and I’m not a WWF fan. The other reason is that Quirrel’s only power was that he had a real bad guy attached to the back of his head. The back of his head? Really? Yes. Really. Quirrel was this squirrely little evil guy who was just a weak dumb host for a bad guy who was still two steps less scary than an evil scary fetus.
As a villain, Quirrel was by definition super clever. That’s why he cleverly hid the evil not-even-a-fetus growing out the back of his head by simply wearing a clever turban. I feel the need to emphasize this. His main contribution to the cause of evil was wearing a turban. He was exactly as evil as an aging Greta Garbo. Score one for the bad guys? – KA

7. THE RIDDLER

Conceptually I have no problem with the Riddler character.  A guy who makes up puzzles and messes with people is my type of guy.  But Jim Carrey’s Riddler character from the Batman Forever movie was really painful, as was the god-awful costume.  Granted, he didn’t have a whole lot of support from Tommy Lee Jones (one of his worst performances of his career) or Val Kilmer (worse than Jones, but nowhere near his worst), but I think he missed the point since it made me more scared of Jim Carrey’s movie choices than of the Riddler himself. I recently read that one of my favorite celebrity nerds, Will Shortz (New York Times crossword editor), wrote the riddles for that movie, and while they were not the weak point of the movie, he automatically drops a few notches in my book based on affiliation with the film. Now, I know that its not all of these people’s fault that the movie was produced to be family friendly (i.e. boring), but now they do have to live with the knowledge that they accepted millions of dollars to play the lamest set of characters in a franchise that has seen its fair share. Their biggest accomplishment was waiting 2 years until Batman & Robin, riddled with even campier, crappier villains.  How could they possibly make a worse Batman movie? It’s an engima. – LF

6. THE STAY PUFT MARSHMALLOW MAN

OK, I get it… the technicality is that Stay Puft wasn’t the real villain. Gozer, a SUMERIAN GOD, decided to take the form of a fucking Marshmallow Man. Really Dan Akroyd? Turning one of the most delicious treats in the world into something fearful and menacing doesn’t do it for me. There is no humor in it. There is no fear. There is no inclination to be impressed with this sort of sorcery, Gozer!
Every time I see that cute little holly face and sailor outfit, I want to see the Ghostbusters toast that motherfucker up and delight in warm gooey deliciousness. In fact, I see it as a challenge issued to the people of New York City! Get the guy from Man V. Food, super spikey annoying blonde man from the Food Network, and Rosie O’Donnell in on this madness and you got yourself an even match up. Ravenous sweet toothed citizens of the world can launch themselves off of buildings and use jet packs to both toast and propel themselves to a sugar coma. -MV

5. THE PLAGUE

Oh man it’s been a while since I’ve watched Hackers in all its future-retro ridiculousness. Those were the days, when computers were mysterious monolith light towers  astride a Tron racetrack and hacking the system involved visions of swirling equations. This whole movie is so cheesy-slick down to the overly stylized cyperpunk NYC teens rollerblading through an arcade built on the remnants of the set of Ninja Turtles.  You’d think in this realm of total fantasy the filmmakers have created they would pit the heroes against some sort of awesome Borg-like techno super villain. Instead they’re up against The Plague, an over-glorified corporate IT guy who spends his days terrorizing high school students.  I just can’t take a villain seriously when depicted as a middle-aged greaseball skateboarding through the office, trench coat flying and sour straw, clearly the most evil of all snack foods, dangling from his mouth.  He has the sickly pallor of the one of the “indoor kids” all grown up and whining that everyone still calls him Eugene instead of his handle. In reality the kids execute far more mayhem than he does, in orchestra a distraction they cause a city-wide car crash at every intersection. That’s some major felony charges of reckless destruction and at least a few counts of manslaughter that get glossed right over.  Both majorly criminal acts planned by The Plague end up foiled so the only dastardly deeds he’s guilty of committing are blackmail and gifting an inner-city teen a laptop.  Maybe if he weren’t trying so damn hard to look cool he could actually focus on evil and accomplish something. At one point he shows up to a blackmail exchange on his skateboard clinging to the side of the car. So he actually took the time to stop a block away from the checkpoint and hop on his board just to look super snazzy plucking the disc from Mr. Angelina Jolie the First’s hand. They have to pull over and let him back in before they can speed away! Least worthwhile entrance ever. The fact that his only henchman is Penn Jilette sporting a George Michael dangly earring should be the first clue this guy isn’t really supervillain material, after all stage magicians have the least street-cred of all the minions. -AS

4. PLANTS

This is not a spoiler alert. This spoils nothing, but will hopefully prevent you from watching The Happening. Because you know what’s not happening? Anyone ever enjoying that movie ever or ever saying anything good about it ever.  So here’s the plot twist, so you never (ever) have to see it: it was plants. The scary thing? Plants. The thing that everyone was staring out of windows worrying about in the preview? Plants. The reason this movie sucked? The plot twist was plants. Fucking plants. I don’t have to explain this, right? You’re a smart guy, you understand why that sucks. So, with the rest of my time I would like to suggest that when a writer/directer “jumps the shark” we now call it “getting scared of plants.” As in, “Man, I used to be a die-hard James Cameron fan but now he seems really scared of plants.” – KA

3. ANAKIN SKYWALKER

To call Anakin Skywalker a villain is fucking weak. I know that he went on to become Darth Vader, but Darth Vader is not Anakin Skywalker. Anakin Skywalker is a pussy that complains, moans and barely listens to his master but still becomes great. He falls to the dark side (because of his terribly weak will) and eventually has a chance to become a badass villain and kill the man that trained him. Fortunately for the viewers, this little pussy bitch gets hurled into lava and becomes the badass that we all know and love today. In summation, Darth Vader = cool and Anakin Skywalker = pussy ass, lame as shit, bitch tits of a villain. – JRN

2. MR. FREEZE

Everything about Batman & Robin is so cataclysmically bad that viewing it will actually give you shivers.  It’s evident that anyone involved with the production of this “film” sincerely and genuinely did not give a flying fuck about the content of the celluloid they would be presenting to the movie-going public because the movie-going public would pay indiscriminately to see anything with the Batman name slapped on it. Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze is a testament to this fact.
To be fair, Mr. Freeze has a fairly compelling back-story. A Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist, Dr. Victor Fries (pronounced freeze) is tragically unable to find a cure for the advanced-stage rare disease that plagues his wife. Desperate to save her life, he places her in a state of cryogenic stasis in order to buy himself more time. Amid his despair-fueled research, he falls victim to a laboratory accident which results, thanks to some comic-book-style-fake-science, in his need to wear a full-body cryogenic suit to survive. With nothing left to lose, he unsurprisingly turns to a life of crime. In a universe where billionaire playboys live alone with their octogenarian butlers and fight crime as a vigilante with cool toys, this looks like a rational genesis. However, this is where it all comes apart.
Dr. Fries decides he must have an alias and, in an obvious stroke of creative brilliance, decides upon Mr. Freeze. Instead of embracing the fact that mad scientists are some of the most formidable villains in existence, Fries opts for the decidedly less intimidating title of Mr. It should also be noted that changing the spelling of your name but not necessarily the name itself does not an effective alias make. Still, with his lowered social rank in place, Mr. Freeze now sets to the task of hiring himself some suitable minions. What he ends up with are rollerblading mullet-toting hockey thugs with weird hockey stick-sickle hybrids for weapons.  It’s not clear whether any of them ever landed an attack on Bruce or Dick, but a few did land some pretty tricky backflips. Next for Mr. Freeze is to stockpile some clever, canned puns to throw out during a fight, presumably to confound his opponents with his rapier wit. His arsenal ranges from the simple, “Let’s kick some ice!” to the factually incorrect, “What killed the dinosaurs? — THE ICE AGE!”
When it comes to villains, though, it all really boils down to how difficult they are for our beloved hero to defeat. In this instance, all it ultimately takes is a few reassuring words from the Dark Knight for Mr. Freeze to realize that he doesn’t have to be a criminal after all. With that, he allows himself to be quietly taken to Arkham Asylum. Taking all of this information into account, Mr. Freeze not so much a villain as he is that douche bag who won’t let go of his shitty mood and is determined to bring everyone else down with him. – KS

1. THE PENGUIN

The Penguin’s backstory is that he was raised by city dwelling sewer penguins. City. Dwelling. Sewer. Penguins. At some point the penguins then turn him over to a circus and the two groups apparently take turns raising him in some sort of shared custody arrangement. This is never easy on a child so the Penguin ends up looking and acting…kind of like Danny De Vito. He hooks up with Christopher Walken, who decides to get him elected as mayor by creating a bunch of crime and then promising to fix it. It’s an origin story as retarded as Tim Burton is retarded. Who taught the Penguin to speak English? Did the penguins breast feed him? Did they teach him to build weaponized umbrellas or just build them for him? Is Gotham City in Antarctica? trying to answer these questions will make you crazy, which is how I know Tim Burton is sane. In the final climactic scene Batman chases down the Penguin, who is fleeing in a giant rubber duck. The duck crashes, the Penguin wrestles around with Batman for a while in a way-too-revealing onesie and then the same penguins who raised him shoot him with giant fireworks strapped to their backs. The penguins, who were being radio controlled before, now gather around their adopted son and tenderly nudge him into the water, clearly saddened over the loss of a child. To say that the Penguin is the worst movie villain of all time isn’t enough. Nothing ever will be. I would have to invent a whole new language just to express how terrible this all is. All I know is that the world will be a better place if we kill all the penguins now. No good can ever come of their continued existence. – DT