25 movie villains with memorable monikers

If it’s true that the inspiration for possibly the most fearsome moniker off all time was a high school classmate of George Lucas’s named Gary Vader, it’s a perfect flourish for a film that was slapped together with spare pieces at just about every level (right down to the production design and the models). After decades of prequels and sequels and visual f/x upgrades, it’s easy to forget that the charm of “A New Hope” was its handmade quality. Everything looked a little junky and rusted and weatherbeaten. So why not name your “master of evil” after a guy who played defensive tackle on the varsity team.

“Dr. Jones. Again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.” We hate this mercenary French archeologist from the outset of Steven Spielberg’s classic and grow to loathe him as he teams up with the Nazis to find, at Hitler’s behest, the Ark of the Covenant. There’s a charming man of the world buried under all that venality, but once you throw in with monsters you become a monster yourself. Not that he had a choice. With a name like Belloq, you’re doomed to be a stinker.

Made at the height of the CB Radio boom, Hal Needham’s “Smokey and the Bandit” was a chaw-chompin’ paean to breaking the speed limit and smuggling 400 cases of Coors from Texas to Georgia - i.e. the very things that make life worth living. Only one man stands in the way of these all-American pursuits: Sheriff Buford T. Justice, a giant of Texas law enforcement played with exquisite Southern bluster by Jackie Gleason. The name says it all. He was born to serve and protect. The same cannot be said of his imbecile son, Junior (Mike Henry), who thwarts his father’s attempts to collar that no-good bootlegger Bo Darville aka “The Bandit” (Burt Reynolds).

Orson Welles gets arguably the best film entrance of all time and, inarguably, a top-ten monologue as the elusive, presumed dead Harry Lime. Taken literally, you expect Lime to be a zesty fellow with a biting wit - and he does not disappoint in his infamous ferris wheel speech. But as an American making profitable, postwar hay in Vienna, Lime is no mere scoundrel. He is selling diluted penicillin for use in children’s hospitals, which does not go well for the children. He is a monster. And yet this monster will always be remembered fondly by his friends because he was their monster. It’s a complex depiction of evil that spares no one.

A villain who checks every box: uniquely vicious, perfectly cast and a name chiseled into your memory. Clarence Boddicker was destined to be a classic villain due simply to the savagely satiric writing of Michael Miner and Ed Neumeier. But Kurtwood Smith, a little-known stage-and-screen actor at the time, sauntered into the frame and painted a portrait of lip-smacking malevolence that left audiences hissing and laughing and, when he gets his, cheering.

A creepy mutation of Robert Shaw’s “From Russia with Love” baddie and G. Gordon Liddy, Gary Busey’s Mr. Joshua is an ex-CIA operative who is impervious to pain, lethally skilled at mixed martial arts and blonde as blazes. The name is the kicker because it implies a loss of identity. Whatever Mr. Joshua was in the past, he’s now just a government-trained murder machine. This is nothing new for a Hollywood actioner, but Busey, a marvelously inventive actor when up to the task, sinks deep into the abyss, to the extent you’re worried about Riggs in that final fight.

Gary Sherman’s “Vice Squad” is not a movie for everyone. It is not a movie for most people. But if you think you can handle a full-throttle cop thriller set on the grime-soaked streets of Hollywood, CA circa 1981, you will make the vile acquaintance of Ramrod, an unhinged pimp played through the rotted roof by Wings Hauser. The character is the living embodiment of his namesake; if you get in his way, he’s going through you. He’s more frightening than any slasher because he is believably evil, especially today. He’s a businessman. He wants his money. And he’s psychotically entitled to it.

It’s not until a little past the midpoint of Janicza Bravo’s “Zola” that we learn the name of the intimidating pimp played by Colman Domingo. He’s a man of many unpleasant surprises. Early on, when challenged by Zola (Taylour Paige), a part-time stripper who’s adamantly opposed to sex work, Domingo’s façade shatters. His carefully cultivated American accent suddenly goes Nigerian. Zola’s rattled him, but only briefly. With all the cards on the table, he now views her as a protégé (whether she likes it or not). Later on, as the ultimate flex, he bullies the kids in his charge to say and repeat his name as a mantra. “Abegunde Olawale.” There are a lot of incongruent details of Olawale’s life, and, after a certain point,  Zola wisely wants to know as little as possible. She just wants to go home.

Bruce Willis’s smart-mouthed cat burglar meets his match in Darwin and Minerva Mayflower (Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard), a husband-and-wife supervillain duo that plans to dominate the world’s economy by rebuilding Leonardo da Vinci’s gold machine. Their name screams extravagance, and they live down to it with extreme, opulent vulgarity. Grant and Bernhard are masters of madness, and are clearly having a ball in what often feels like a completely different movie. They’re the MVPs of the ‘90s most unhinged action comedy.

“That bıtch! How dare she mess around with my poppies!” The great Shelley Winters plays every scene to the hilt as “Mommy”, a ruthless drug lord served by loyal hitmen and ministered to by a harem of lovely ladies. It’s good to be Mommy, and it’s good to be good to Mommy, otherwise, she’ll feed you a knuckle supper. It’s a hoot to watch Winters knock around lackeys and shriek with outrage every time our hero (Tamara Dobson) puts the screws to her. This isn’t the best ‘70s blaxploitation film, but it may have the most production value. It’s a big, good-looking movie!

“What are we gonna do with this one, Frank?” “Now that you’ve called me by name…” Frank. It’s such an innocuous name for a man who’s about to shoot a child at point-blank range, but the name is beside the point. Sergio Leone knew this when he cast Henry Fonda - portrayer of Abraham Lincoln, Tom Joad, and Wyatt Earp - as the sadistic hired gun for a greedy railroad tycoon. All he needed was for one of the most beloved movie stars of Hollywood’s golden age to show up clad completely in black. As John Carpenter says on the film’s DVD commentary track, “Holy shıt, that’s Henry Fonda.”

If you’re going to be one of the most wanted terrorists on the planet, a name like Heymar Weinhardt is a nice, gentlemanly handle. Once you’re known as “Wulfgar” , however, your rep is in the toilet. You might as well go by “Ramrod”. Rutgur Hauer’s Wulfgar earns his notoriety by having zero compunction about killing innocent women and children. He’s a real Wulfgar, that Wulfgar, and only anti-terrorist cops Deke DeSilva (Sylvester Stallone) and Matt Fox (Billy Dee Williams) can stop him.

Michael Ritchie’s criminally underrated and underseen crime flick pits hitman Lee Marvin against a mobbed-up slaughterhouse owner in Kansas City known for turning rival gangsters into literal sausage, and sending it back to their bosses in brown butcher roll. His name: Mary Ann. The actor: Gene Hackman. And if you can resist a movie in which Gene Hackman plays a homicidal meat packer named Mary Ann, maybe movies aren’t for you.

If you’re brainstorming names for a fiendish, white supremacist villain eager to poison the water supplies of “Chocolate Cities” like Washington, D.C., Detroit and Los Angeles, you might be tempted to go a little harder than “Monroe Feather”. But somehow this light touch makes Jay Robinson (whose baddie bonafides stretch back to playing Caligula in Henry Koster’s “The Robe”) all the more hateful as a neo-Nazi hellbent on black genocide. Rest assured, the trio of Jim Brown, Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly pluck this feather but good.

The name is repulsive enough for a wealthy Southerner who gets his rocks off watching slaves tear each other to pieces in “Mandingo fights” (the reward being the opportunity to live another day), but when you find out Leonardo diCaprio’s character calls his plantation “Candyland”, your disgust turns to outright hatred. Candie is evil, and must go down by any means necessary. This sets up a nifty late-second-act twist when one of the film’s heroes decide he cannot abide the man’s appalling existence, and shoots him dead knowing that Candie’s henchmen will gun him down in short order. It is a strangely exhilarating act of conscience.

Screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie got the last name of this iconic moniker from a Turkish idiom that means “to drown in words”, which is precisely what poor Chazz Palminteri does as he interrogates the seemingly hapless Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) throughout “The Usual Suspects”. So much can be accomplished with a striking name; this one teeters on the brink of silliness, but the reverence with which its spoken gives it a sinister gravity. This guy could be Satan for all we know (and, if so, it’s a much better cover than Lou Cipher).

How does Anton “Little Tony the Red” Gruber strike you? A little wordy. A little desperate. Not the slickest handle for a high-class thief who brags about his Armani wardrobe. So while this character originated in a Roderick Thorpe novel, we’re going to say that the adjustment made by screenwriters Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza helped to elevate a common Eurotrash villain to an icon of stylish villainy. Alan Rickman might’ve helped a little, too.

“I don’t deserve this.” It’s not uncommon for actors to play villains as if their characters see themselves as heroes in their own narrative. In the case of Gene Hackman’s “Little Bill” Daggett, you have a man who can, in the time that he lived, reasonably claim to have done the practical thing for all parties involved in an impossible situation. He could not, however, afford to do the right thing, and this is why he dies at the hands of a cold-blooded killer who, for possibly the first time in his life, is on the side of justice. Oh right, the name. There’s something Napoloeonic going on with that handle, but we’re never clued into what it’s all about (though the plot is kicked into motion by a sex worker giggling at a cowboy’s small package). Perhaps Daggett, to some horribly misguided degree, sympathizes with the young man’s humiliation. All we know for sure is that he was building a house.

Not a whole lot of explanation needed here. If you’re looking to be the top man in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, you ought not get cute with your nickname. And you’ll get extra intimidation points if you misspell it like a five-year-old. This is of little concern to “Mad” Max Rockatansky, whose family got run over in the first movie, and, well, is mad, but if you managed to survive the nuclear holocaust, maybe steer clear of Lord Humungus.

John Woo’s “Face/Off” howls its silly straight into your face with its overwrought mythical monikers of Castor and Pollux Troy (Nicolas Cage and Allesandro Nivola), and Woo is probably the only director on the planet who can sell audiences on such heightened nuttiness. The sibling bond between Castor and Pollux is profound… in myth. In the film, it just means Cage’s character gets super cheesed off when his brother dies. Bullets whiz, squibs explode and you thank the lord for an unabashed maestro of mayhem like Woo.

After decades of double-entendre-laden villain names in James Bond films and the many parodies they inspired, filmmakers Will Forte, John Solomon and Jorma Taccone went soaring over the top with evil mastermind Dieter Von Cunth, which, uh, leaves zero to the imagination (not that Pūssy Galore was a study in subtlety, but whatever). The genius here is the extraneous “h”, which makes the name incredibly awkward to pronounce. Val Kilmer’s perpetual annoyance as Von Cunth is just gravy.

“You know, Jack. I got a feelin’ the next time we run into each other we’re gonna have a killin’. Just a feelin’.” You know that rowdy-ȧss friend who caused more trouble than he was worth, but was always there for you on the rare occasion you got into trouble with the wrong people? That’s Powers Boothe as Cash Bailey in Walter Hill’s high-octane riff on Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch”. Cash is also the good-natured troublemaker who gets into bad trouble, and compounds it by giving into those awful impulses you always knew were there but didn’t want to acknowledge. Cashes typically aren’t long for this world.

We hear about Victor Maitland before we see him. He’s a respected businessman with an art gallery in the heart of Beverly Hills. He employs Jenny Summers (Lisa Eilbacher), the best friend of our hero, Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy). But he’s played by Steven Berkoff, which means he is, at minimum, one of the most evil people west of the Mississippi. It’s a great, stately name, one that Murphy savors time and again (particularly when he informs a maître d’ that Maitland has evidently contracted “Herpes Simplex 10). If you can’t say “Victor” without Murphy’s ebullience, you are letting down every Victor on the planet.

Leave it to Daniel Waters to name the music-industry villain of this action-comedy lark after “the destroyer and devourer of our human kind”. You might be looking for a burly Rick Rubin type to fill this part, but director Renny Harlin went with Vegas crooner Wayne Newton to play the menacing figure, and it’s hilariously jarring watching this wholesome pop icon share the screen with the filthiest comedian in showbiz.

Sylvester Stallone might've peaked with “Apollo Creed”, but once he started writing comic book versions of his celebrity journey (which is precisely what the “Rocky” sequels are), he conjured up some terrifically garish boxing names. This entry comes down to preference, and in this dojo we respect Clubber Lang. Ivan Drago is a splendid moniker, but when you see Mr. T bombing left and right hooks at the Italian Stallion, the name “Clubber” becomes ingrained in your memory. He deserves a more respectful sendoff than the series has thus far afforded him, and we hope the stewards of the “Creed” franchise are working on that now.