"I don't give a good fuck what you know, or don't know, but I'm gonna torture you anyway, regardless. Not to get information. It's amusing, to me, to torture a cop. You can say anything you want, but I've heard it all before. All you can do is pray for a quick death... which you ain't gonna get."
— Mr. Blonde, Reservoir Dogs, proving what a monster he is.
Movie villains are quite the varied lot, as any browsing of the Villains page will tell you. This page covers the very worst of them, whose utter cruelty and horrible deeds are more than enough to earn these villains a special place in Hell.
This page is mostly for characters from live-action films. It is preferred that you keep mention of characters from animated films on the Western Animation page, or, if the characters in question are from a Disney film, the Disney page.
Alternatively, you may have wanted Monster.
The following films, have their own pages:
The Scorpio Killer from Dirty Harry, pictured above, with his nerve-screeching laugh, smug, cowardly demeanor (I have the right to a lawyer!), and sick sense of fun. His Moral Event Horizon is when he kidnaps a 14-year-old girl, hides her in a well with a limited oxygen supply, and sends the police a message that if the ransom money doesn't drop in time, the girl will die. Scorpio then proceeds to tell Harry Callahan that he changed his mind and is going to let the girl die anyway. When the girl is found, she's dead (and it's strongly implied Scorpio repeatedly raped her). Later, Scorpio captures a schoolbus full of children, planning to kill them all. Callahan, already disgusted with Scorpio getting away with his crimes, decides to take justice in his own hands.
Amon Goeth of Schindler's List is a classic example of a Complete Monster. Unlike the others on this page, the dead-eyed concentration camp commander has sympathetic moments, a sort of Morality Pet in his heroic friend Oskar Schindler, and comes off as a deeply troubled human being who doesn't cross the Moral Event Horizon until about halfway through the movie. Schindler describes him fondly as "a wonderful crook, who loves money, wine and the ladies," but we are shown a very different side to Amon - and the scariest thing about him is how completely irrational and unpredictable his cruelty is. The most infamous moment is either when he sends away trainloads of Jewish children to be gassed (while laughing at the crying parents) or when he goes out on his villa balcony in the morning with a sniper rifle and starts shooting random Jews only for sport.
Though The Joker/Jack Napier from Batman may not have been quite as gritty in his approach, the sheer scope of his reign of terror puts him on more or less the same level as his counterpart in The Dark Knight. Even before his transformation, Jack Napier was outright horrible: he was the one who murdered Bruce Wayne's parents, and if his accomplice hadn't yelled at him to get out of there, it's very likely the psycho would have killed young Bruce as well. From that to present day. For starters, he intends to poison all the Gothamites with Smylex Gas for no other reason than his own amusement, has three mob bosses killed (with him even joking about their deaths, at least one of which qualified under Nightmare Fuel, where he electrocutes him with enough voltage to turn him into a charred skeleton after claiming that shaking his hand will be the end of it if he refuses to agree with the Joker). He also horrifically disfigures Alicia Hunt and was also implied to have thrown her off a building later on in the film under the guise of suicide to free himself for Vicki Vale ("You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs."). Gasses an art gallery full of people to death just to have some "alone time" with Vicki Vale and puts the components of Smylex into different cosmetics to cause random city-wide deaths just to make the people panic. He even cold-bloodedly guns down his best and only friend, Bob the Goon, simply to vent his anger over Batman ruining the above attempt to gas everyone at the parade.
The Fallen from Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen. the other Primes didn't want to and had a law against it. At least from the perspective of the movie, he didn't have to destroy a populated solar system(which others Primes had a law against) and could've just continued using uninhabited solar systems along with the other Primes. He chose to destroy Earth's system because he thinks Transformers to be superior to all other forms of life and so holds the law forbidding destroying planets with life in utter contempt. He started the civil war that destroyed Cybertron and cost billions of lives and feels no remorse about it.
Laserbeak from Dark of the Moon has his moments. That poor, poor family.
The human villain Dylan Gould can be seen as worse than Laserbeak. He's spent his entire adult life aiding the Decepticons in their plans on Earth (saying they're "clients" he "inherited" from his father) and assisting them in their takeover of Chicago, which sees thousands of people gunned down in the streets, all to ensure that he'll be spared. This could just be written off as him being a Dirty Coward, but the moment that has him cross the line further is when several Autobots have been captured and Gould humbly suggests to Soundwave that they shouldn't be taking prisoners at all. When the pillars have been shut off, meaning the Decepticons' plan has been foiled and he has the option to defect to the good guys and possibly be spared, if jailed, he chooses to reactivate the pillars for no real reason. This is most sensibly interpreted as being done out of sheer spite, even at his own expense, considering the Decepticons have all their human minions killed once they cease to be useful and will likely do the same to him.
Jonathan Doe from Se7en is possibly the most twisted and disturbing Serial Killer in cinematic history. The reasons for his actions defy understanding. Judging from his diary entries and speech in the squad car, it can argued that Doe's actions are rooted in a deep disappointment with humanity that warped into extreme misanthropy, which doesn't change the fact his torture/rape/murders are completely horrifying (especially the last one, which is inexcusable from any standpoint). Because it would be unimaginable to actually show these crimes onscreen, only the gruesome aftermath is seen.
Captain Vidal from Pan's Labyrinth might be one of the worst and most despicable examples in recent cinema (or best, depending on how you look at it). The captain dwarfs the film's various fantastical monsters in his atrocities. For one particularly graphic example, when two people are captured on his estate, they are accused of being spies, but repeatedly claim to be innocent rabbit hunters and begged for their lives. A moment after seemingly accepting their excuse, Vidal smashes the son's face with a wine bottle until the whole skull caves in a gruesome way. Vidal then shoots both him and his father with a mixture of vague boredom and pleasure. When the soldiers turn out the men's bags, they find a rabbit, proving the men's story, so Vidal yells at them for wasting his time and eats the rabbit for dinner. He knew they were innocent the whole time and killed them anyway, just because. Perhaps his most memorable act would be the torture scene, where the sadistic Vidal shows his array of torture tools to a tied-up, stuttering rebel soldier, promising he will release the stutterer if he can count to "three" loud and clear. Guess if he can. Less dramatic yet still notable aspect of him is having married a woman solely for her to bear his son. He explicitly advises the doctor caring for her during childbirth to save the child over his wife. As it so happens, this decision, usually made with at least some anguish after being steered towards it, is the only way from the start for Vidal, who is not bothered by it in the slightest. It's telling that the man's humanizing moment is realizing he's a bastard and, instead of thinking of reforming, simply fantasizing about suicide for a moment before going back to his horrifically evil ways. Perhaps his worst act: he shoots Ofelia, his own 13-year old stepdaughter, in the end, purely because she attempts to save her newborn brother from Vidal. Viewes probably view it as a fitting demise that the rebels, while shooting Vidal dead, refuse to even tell his son about him. Sergi López himself thinks this on his character: "Vidal is the most evil character I've ever played in my career. It is impossible to improve upon it; the character is so solid and so well written. Vidal is deranged, a psychopath who is impossible to defend. Even though his father's personality marked his existence — and is certainly one of the reasons for his mental disorder — that cannot be an excuse." This may well have been the best thing about his character. His very powerful, human motive doesn't justify his actions, which any sane, morally adjusted person would not do. What it does, however, is make all of his actions seem like something that someone would actually do; rather than just evil for the pleasure of it, his actions come off as something that a violent and uncaring person could be driven to do, keeping Willing Suspension of Disbelief entirely intact and making him seem quite real and thus frightening. He's quite possibly one of the quintessential examples of how to do a Complete Monster character well.
One of the most famous examples is Richard Widmark's Oscar-nominated Tommy Udo, the original Giggling Villain, in Kiss of Death, who was most famous for shoving a wheelchair-bound old woman down the stairs, thinking her son had betrayed him. (He didn't.) Widmark's portrayal was a revolutionary role, inspiring imitators and an archetypal role that is still seen today.
Le Tenia from the French film Irreversible. He is a twisted and sadistic pimp, and if you see the film, you'll have no doubts about his monstrosity. Le Tenia assaults the main character Alex in an underpass at night, targeting her when she tells him to stop beating up his whore. The result is a horrifying rape scene that lasts fornine minutes. After the prolonged and uninterrupted rape of Alex, Le Tenia is satisfied, so he kicks her head repeatedly. She goes into a coma, and it's even worse when we find out that she was pregnant. Made even worse. Alex's husband Pierre tracks down a guy who he thinks is Le Tenia and beats his head in so hard his skull is crushed - all the while, the real Le Tenia looks on, faintly amused by it all. It's not even the worst about this guy that he clearly gets a kick out of violence. He escapes the film scot-free and, due to the reverse chronology of the film, the audience is aware of this from the get-go.
Margaret from the movie Carrie. Routinely abuses her daughter by beating her and locking her in a small room, preaches violent Bible Passages, and, in the end of the film, tries killing her daughter who had become a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
Chris Hargensen should qualify as well, as she is cruel beyond the typical Alpha Bitch standards in the way she treats Carrie. Her absolute cruelest act was using Sue's act of kindness toward the title character to set up her worst prank, which involved setting Carrie up to be prom queen and then dumping a bucket of pig blood on her — an act which also led to the death of Tommy, Carrie's date and Sue's boyfriend, when the bucket fell and hit him in the head. This resulted in Carrie unleashing her telekinetic powers in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Chris' sadistic boyfriend, played by John Travolta, is just as bad. If you can give them a mention of something good, they do at least have the grace to look horrified when they see the full extent of the Roaring Rampage of Revenge, particularly when Miss Collins, the gym teacher, gets brutally killed, even as she's screaming for Carrie's mercy. Since Chris has no love lost for Collins, maybe Even Evil Has Standards.
The first is the evil and psychotic Wild Bill. He is first mentioned on screen when the protagonist is informed of a triple murder at a stick up performed by Wild Bill (one of the victims was a pregnant woman), and when finally incarcerated, he manages to spend his days taunting the guards by peeing on them, spitting on their faces, and molesting one to the point they wet themselves, and also, later in the story, it is revealed he also murdered the girls which John Coffey was framed for.
The second is Percy Wetmore, a stuck up and sadistic prison guard who takes real pleasure in hurting the inmates (in more ways than one). His hobbies include taunting people with the classic "Dead Man Walking!" and otherwise being cruel to inmates (such as breaking the fingers of Eduard Delacroix and later stomping on his mouse). This would mark him as a mere Jerkass if not for his utter worst act, which is deliberately sabotaging Del's execution in revenge for laughing at him in an earlier scene, which results in Del being horrifically burned alive in the electric chair. The worst part is, nobody can do a thing about it due to his aunt being the governor. And he wishes to get a job with the administrators at a mental asylum (where he can easily inflict more pain), but when driven mad by John's touch, he simply shoots Wild Bill to death, goes catatonic, and gets put in the very mental hospital he wanted to get transferred to.
Let's mention It itself in the beginning. The thing eats children.
But nobody is as horrible as Patrick Hockstetter, who tortures animals for pleasure (like locking them in the fridge) and murdered his baby brother. Even Henry Bowers, a world-class scumbag and a monster in his own right in his adulthood, is disgusted by this guy.
Warden Norton, especially after he has Tommy murdered and gives Andy Dufresne a month in sensory deprivation. After he breaks the news about Tommy and threatens to demolish Andy's beloved library, he sentences the starving and half-mad Andy to isolation for another month, just to think about it.
There's also The Sisters with their leader, Bogs Diamond, who rape and brutalize Andy for an unspecified but long amount of time. When Red tells Andy that he caught their attention, he nonchalantly asks if it would matter that he's not gay. Red replies that they aren't either, because they'd have to be human first.
Marissa Wiegler's antics in Hanna makes her henchmen, even Issacs, look like saints. To start, Marissa terminated the Super Soldier program, killing 19 out of 20 children along with their parents. She follows this by ambushing and killing Hanna's mother as Hanna and Erik escaped to the forests. After systematically hiding her nefarious program details from her colleagues and murdering Hanna's grandmother, she captures and presumably kills Sophie and her family...and she enjoyed every second of it. All in all, she's arguably one of the most depraved and sadistic madwomen in film history.
One of the most famous examples is Richard Widmark's Oscar-nominated Tommy Udo, the original Giggling Villain, in Kiss of Death, who was most famous for shoving a wheelchair-bound old woman down the stairs, thinking her son had betrayed him. (He didn't.) Widmark's portrayal was a revolutionary role, inspiring imitators and an archetypal role that is still seen today.
Frank Costello of The Departed is quite an evil bastard. One of his defining traits is how nonchalantly he approaches performing evil and killing. In one moment, during his conversation with Leonardo DiCaprio's Billy Costigan, he casually withdraws a severed human hand from a Ziploc bag while carrying on a conversation about John Lennon with Costigan. Prior to this, he tortured Costigan by having his already broken arm re-injured due to his brief (and correct) supposition that Costigan was a cop. He manages to even unnerve his underlings: after killing a woman in the opening scene, he remarks while laughing, "Geez, she fell funny." His subordinate turns to him and says "Francis, you really should see somebody."
Howard Payne in Speed causes mass murder and destruction for money while playing mind games with his victims he seems to enjoy watching die. In addition, unbelievably smart, always being two steps ahead of the police. In other words, he succeeds in being a threat and a challenge to the hero.
The psychopathic Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs. He is hinted to be this throughout the first half of the movie, even though he seems calmer and more clear-headed than his partners-in-crime, who seem wary of him. Before the first scene, he turned a simple robbery into a massacre, and in a flashback, they say he had a history of raping "punks" in prison. And right before Mr. Blonde's infamous torture of the cop, we feel positively uneasy when the hardened criminal Mr. White dreads leaving the cop alone with him, which is completely justified, as the top page quote proves.
Actually, on Quentin Tarantino's topic, it makes sense to mention Boss Matsumoto from Kill Bill Volume I, a brutal Yakuza boss and a pedophile. When O-Ren Ishii was around 9 years old, Matsumoto and his henchmen confronted her father (apparently, a Chinese-American soldier stationed in Okinawa), and despite him putting quite the fight, he is ultimately murdered by the mooks, while Matsumoto laughs on a couch. Then Matsumoto gets up, grabs the man's Japanese wife, tosses her on a nearby bed...and uses his own katana to stab her to death, narrowly missing child!O-Ren, who was hiding under said bed. Then, they set the place on fire and leave, laughing about it. Ultimately, however, Karma catches up with Matsumoto...when an 11-year-old O-Ren goes Little Miss Badass on him, posing as a child prostitute so she can be taken to his bedroom (it's unclear if he did have sex with her, but we wouldn't put it past him) and stabbing himwith the same katana he used to kill her mother, telling him to look at her in the eye and recognize her as the daughter of two of his victims.
William Tavington from The Patriot likes to shoot little boys and set churches filled with innocent people on fire. The audience can only cheer when the hero kills him.
Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men certainly fits this trope. He strangles a cop to death with cuffs, shoots both his employers in cold blood because he wanted the money they were chasing after, shoots a crying, surrendering man hiding in a shower and has absolutely no qualms about killing innocent people, including a random old man for his car and a motorist that did nothing except pick up the main character. In his most senselessly cruel act, he murders the dead protagonist's wife only to fulfill a pointless promise to him. Some consider Carla Jean's refusal to accept his offer as a Crowning Moment of Awesome, calling out his bullshit of giving his victims a 50-50 chance. Even knowing Anton Chigurh puts you in mortal danger. Like one line by Carson Wells points out: "Even if you gave him the money, he would still kill you just for...inconveniencing him." The worst thing about him is how he subjects his victims to a bizarre form of Mind Rape and actually convinces them to accept their death. It's easy to see why his partner-in-crime Carson Wells compares him to the Bubonic Plague. He faces no repercussions, which goes chillingly well along with the nature of his character: an unstoppable force of nature personified in human flesh. He does not enjoy these acts, he is just a evil psychopath with utterly no regard for the lives of anyone.
In The Proposition, Eden Fletcher, the Smug Snake orders not only a brutal massacre of aborigines, but the fatal flogging of a retarded fourteen-year old. The fourteen-year old in question is innocent of the crime (his older brother Arthur did it) and dies from the bloody flogging. Arthur Miller is a downplayed version, which fits with one of the main themes, civilization versus savagery. He thinks like a wild animal. He is the main character's brother (and a surprisingly kind one). He loves his family and will do anything to protect them, but people outside this little group are not really viewed as people. For Arthur, raping or killing them(for instance, raping a pregnant woman and shooting a baby) is like smashing a wasp.
Brett from Eden Lake is possibly the most evil teenager ever put to screen. A sadistic chav (British young white-trash), he is the ringleader of a teen gang. Brett crosses the Moral Event Horizon when he forces all his "friends", even the youngest ones, to take turns slashing the male protagonist with knives, while he films the whole thing on his mobile to incriminate them. He escalates to his worst deed later, when his gang burn the male protagonist on a stake and Brett forces his bullying victim to light the fire, while saying "It's fucking you, not me!" When the heroine escapes, Brett "rewards" the boy by drenching him in gasoline as well and burning him to death out of anger. Worst of all, he gets away thanks to the whole community of other residents implied to be just as nasty.
Peter and Paul, the duo of vicious torturers in Funny Games, are possibly worse than Brett. They are, oddly enough, protagonist examples. This is intentional, though, since they are supposed to be created solely to exist as villains in a film, like demonstrated with their occasional Breaking the Fourth Wall and contradicting Freudian Excuses.
Noah Cross. Exploiter and incestuous rapist underneath a grandfatherly exterior. The ending of Chinatown doesn't help matters.
John Ryder from The Hitcher (1986 original). When a character, in just the first ten minutes of a film, butchers at least a dozen people (including children) for the hell of it, any semblance of empathy is long gone. His most despicable act is ripping Nash, the protagonist's love interest, in half in the movie's most infamous scene.
Clarence Boddicker from the original Robocop is an example. His blood-soaked criminal career is more play than work for him and his sadistically joyful gang of buddies. The cruel way he and his men shoot up Murphy is only the tip of the iceberg. There are moments where he makes wisecracks like an evil version of Duke Nukem, but these are almost always followed by displays of brutality. For example, his most famous line among the Robocop fandom comes when he breaks into a man's house to find him enjoying the company of several women, to which he comments, "Bitches, leave." He then proceeds to shoot the man in both knees and leave a live HE grenade next to him, and calmly walks out.
Dick Jones in the original is the Corrupt Corporate Executive version of this trope and is possibly even worse than Boddicker. Boddicker does all of these monstrous actions and Dick Jones is the one, who orders him to do it.
Cain, the Nuke cult leader from Robocop 2 goes further; he blew up a drug treatment center just because they were trying to cure people of their addiction to Nuke, he cut open the stomach of one of his minions after Robocop forced him to reveal the location of one of the labs where Nuke was made, was willing to use children as soldiers in his gang, and later killed all the members of his own gang. Let's not forget that when he finds in his limo an illegal immigrant worker from the drug lab, pleading not to be turned over the police, he coldly shoots her and pulls her out. When he discovers that a corrupt and Nuke-addicted cop gave information to Robocop, he has him eviscerated whilst still alive, scaring even his two accomplices, Hob and Angie.
Cain (with a psycho look on his face): Doesn't he look scared?
Strucker, the antagonist of Bulletproof Monk, is a staunch Nazi who, later in the film, seems to extend his racial prejudices to everyone who isn't a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He is ruthless in his goal for world domination, perhaps epitomised early in the film where he slaughters a temple-full of Tibetan monks who refuse to defend themselves. He also has the informant who'd been helping him brutally executed and threatens his own granddaughter when she continues to fail him. He seemingly has no redeeming qualities and no goals beyond orchestrating a Holocaust Times Ten. 'Course, this all might just have been in order to make the thief protagonist look a bit more amiable.
Albert Spica from The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover, who is a British Tony Soprano with sociopathy and general nastiness multiplied by a thousand. He is blatantly racist, misogynistic, has nothing but contempt for any intellectualism, kills a man by forcing his books down his throat, stabs a man's wife in the face because the man disagreed with him (the poor woman was just standing there), and enjoys humiliating/beating his wife in public. By the end, all his goons have deserted him.
Detective Stansfield in The Professional is a manic psychopath who thinks nothing of murdering a family, including the children, for shits and giggles while listening to classical music. Even though he seems upset about his henchmen killing Mathilda's little brother, he is really more worried about answering to his superiors for killing the little brother and his compassion seems to be more about finding out who sent Mathilda. Also, his voluntarily going through lots of pills is to be taken into account, for any emotions he shows might be because of his wild, drug-addled mood swings. When one of his henchmen responds with disdain after the little brother is killed, Stansfield himself seems to have no concern one way or the other. As he later puts it "I take no pleasure in taking a life if it's from a person who doesn't care about it."
Slater from Thr3e has traits of this, though in a surprise twist. Slater turns out to be a split personality of the main hero and so does his girlfriend. The real killer was tracking the hero simply because he hated copycats and was bombing people for shits and giggles, while the "fights" he got into with the kid he believed to become the serial killer were really fights with himself and physical and mental acts of 'locking away the evil' coinciding with one another. Resembled Fight Club on a smaller scale. The true Complete Monster gets away with it all in the end and it isn't the serial killer either. It's his controlling and horribly abusive aunt, who drenched him in cold water regularly and beat him with hoses whenever he tried to interact with the outside world. She sees the outer world as a sin-filled bastion of immorality and forbids her son, her husband and him from ever leaving their rural six-room home and his cousin and uncle eventually develop Stockholm Syndrome and view her as their protector and only refer to her as Princess. Possible Lampshade Hanging by the officer in charge of the case as she laments nothing will happen to the evil aunt despite all that's happened. Exactly what the audience is wondering as she says it.
Mr. Baek from Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. A serial child murderer, who documents his crimes in shocking snuff tapes, has sexual relations with the protagonist when she is a minor and blackmails her into taking the fall for his first murder. He kidnaps the kids, videotapes them pleading for their lives, kills them, then asks for ransom. The reason for asking for ransom? "He wanted to buy a yacht."
Savage Messiah, a Canadian film based on a real-life story, has one of these as a main character. The man, Roch "Moses" Thériault, is a total and utter sociopath who nevertheless has a harem of wives and children all begging to him because he is Affably Evil. The Dissonant Serenity when he casually dismembers one of his wives is eerie. Roch abuses all the members of his cult in horrific ways (Abusive Parents doesn't even begin to define it), and yet gets away with it because he is just that manipulative. And he convinces the third-party researchers that come to view his cult that he's innocent.
Archibald Cunningham from Rob Roy. He stole a heap of money from peasants in order to buy himself fancy new clothes, murdered a man in the process, pinned the crime on Rob Roy, and then volunteered to capture the "thief" by destroying his home, killing his livestock, and brutally raping his wife. And in his spare time, Archie would seduce a chambermaid, impregnate her, and abandon her, mocking her in the process.
Detective Jack Scagnetti from Natural Born Killers. Behind his image as a hero cop, he is a sadistic rapist and serial killer of women. As he hunts the protagonists, he develops a sick obsession with Mallory Knox. Even though Mickey and Mallory are killers too, it's impossible to do anything but cheer during Scagnetti's darkly comic death scene.
In a movie about the SS and anti-Nazi resistance in WW2, it's hard to pin down a single specific monster, so Dr. Akkerman stresses himself to the limit to impress in Verhoeven's Zwartboek. Hans Akkerman sent, for a cut of their worldly belongings, hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jews, resistance fighters, anti-Nazis, and just plain unfortunate people to their deaths at the hands of resident SS attache Franken. Through a ruse conducted as an escape to freedom, he and Van Gein secure safe passage for them into neutral or Allied territory, but step off before the boats leave, pledging to bring other refugees safe passage. Shortly after leaving the dock, the boats are machine-gunned by a Nazi patrol, their bodies looted, and the spoils divided between the conspirators. Towards the end of the movie, Akkerman begins to kill off the conspirators, at first appearing to have had a heroic attack of conscience, only to later reveal he just didn't wish to share the wealth. Later on, he tries to kill the female protagonist to silence her knowledge of the goings-on and hold onto his status as a war hero. She escapes, gives the evidence to the sole surviving resistance member, and they kill him before he can escape, but his reputation escapes intact for an indeterminate amount of time afterwards. Any the synopsis of this movie simply does NOT do Akkerman justice. You have to see his caring, respectable, humanist behavior prior to the final act to take it all in. Every single thing was an act. An act which got innumerable amounts of people killed. All so he could steal their heirlooms and melt them or sell them. That's just fucked up. If he were ever real and there were ever a hell, he just won his place as Greed, solely for the lengths he was willing to go for so little at a time.
Johnny Wong of Hard Boiled tops John Woo's other villains in terms of sheer nastiness. He and his men have absolutely no qualms in blowing away innocent bystanders who are unfortunate enough to get in their way, as shown during the very first shootout of the movie. And they only get worse from there, culminating in the hospital sequence where they kill patients for trying to escape the hospital, take a room hostage, and fire on the SWAT team even as they try to evacuate the babies of the hospital's maternity ward. Johnny's most despicable act is firing his Uzi into a crowd of patients standing between him and Alan, and then killing his Dragon Mad Dog when he blasts the gun out of his hands. The following quote by Johnny during the hospital sequence says it all.
Johnny Wong: There is no room for failure now. The innocent must die!
Eddie "Chaos" Cooper from the 2005 film Chaos. So shockingly atrocious and abominable, he makes the probable character of his inspiration (the main antagonist of the Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left) look like the Pope in comparison. Roger Ebert (who was immensely disgusted with the character and the film itself) and David DeFalco (the film's director and writer) actually had a heated debate about it.
The District 9 protagonist's father-in-law calmly discusses Wikus' impending live vivisection with technicians while the guy is right there on the operating table, begging him for help. Following this he callously and seemingly remorselessly lies several times to his own daughter concerning her husband's fate and actions. Viewers likely hope she at the very least breaks all ties with the bastard.
From the same movie, the sadistic mercenary captain Koobus Venter who shoots aliens for sport certainly counts. He's not subtle about it, either.
Koobus: I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this... I love watching Prawns die!
Also, the Nigerian gangsters, especially the mobster in a wheelchair, who run the black market for cat food (which the aliens particularly love) and forced prostitution and eat alien arms, believing it gives them power.
The Condemned has THREE of them. Least is Saiga, the Asian martial artist, who assists the main Complete Monster in his atrocities. Coming in second is Breckel, the TV producer who orchestrated the whole thing, giave weapons to the psychopath, and obviously placed less value on human life than entertainment and money. The number one spot in the movie, though, goes to McStarley, who, before the movie began, was on death row for burning down a village and raping/torturing/murdering its inhabitants. In the movie, he breaks Paco's leg, chains him up, and forces him to watch McStarley beat, rape, stab, and blow up his wife. Then he tracks down the wounded Paco, brutally beats him with Saiga's help, shoots him with an arrow as he lies helpless, then sets him on fire. As if that weren't enough, near the end of the movie, he machine-guns the crew of the show except Breck.
in which he appears, he orders the destruction of a heavily populated and influential planet purely to make a point to Leia and seems quite willing to repeat the process ad infinitum if such is necessary to quash the Rebellion. The only emotion he shows at all at this prospect is a kind of cold satisfaction. The Expanded Universe just makes him worse, by showing that he codified the Empire's policy of rule through fear as "The Tarkin Doctrine", and revealing that he first came to the Emperor's attention after he crushed a peace protest under his boots - he landed his Star Destroyer on them. In short, there is nothing remotely sympathetic about the guy, and his arrogance means he doesn't even get the consolation prize of being a Magnificent Bastard like his boss.
It says something that when he appears in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the guy is utterly and completely without any positive character traits. He spends the entire rescue arc being an Ungrateful Bastard, and the fact that Anakin agrees with some of his ideals only foreshadows the inevitable.
Ultimately though, Palpatine himself counts in spite of Rule Of Cool. Even with his being a Magnificent Bastard, it was made clear in the holocron repositories in the official atlas that he enjoys cultivating lifeforms because he will eventually terminate them. Ian McDiarmid, Palpatine's actor, even stated that he was pure evil, even going as far as to state that he was born that way. Oh, and if there was any doubt that he was a Complete Monster long before ascending to power, it's all but confirmed in Star Wars: Darth Plagueis when he ended up crashing his racer and killing two people without any remorse on his part, and, in fact, was extremely glad that he got away with breaking the law and insensitively decided to reveal that instant that he wants to become a racer. In addition, when Darth Tenebrous, a Sith Lord, foresaw Palpatine's murder of Plagueis upon his death and possession of Plagueis after the latter betrayed him, he was noticably horrified at not only Plagueis' murder at the hands of Palpatine, but at how evil Palpatine is, implying that Palpatine was so evil, that even the Sith, who are infamous for committing various crimes with the Dark Side, were repulsed by him.
The David Lynch film Blue Velvet features one of cinema's crowning examples in Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth. A sadistic sociopath with a penchant for random acts of rape and violence, Booth introduces himself in the film by savagely beating and raping an abused nightclub singer and then taunting her about her mutilated husband (by him no less). It later turns out that Booth kidnapped the poor woman's husband and son (killing the husband in the process) only in order to make the woman his sadomasochistic sex slave, even cutting off her dead husband's ear and presenting it to her, just to torment her. When he figured out that Jeffrey Beaumont warned the police, he, in act of reprisal, beats Dorothy nearly to death, strips her naked, and leaves her in front of Beaumont's house. During the ending, we also discovered he has also brutally lobotomized one of his henchmen after having killed Dorothy's husband. Not to speak of raping the protagonist.
Frank, from Once Upon a Time in the West. His first appearance says enough. Played completely against type by Henry Fonda, no less. Frank is one of Leone's most cold-blooded and reprehensible villains, but special mention must be made of his absolute worst act and the reason that Harmonica wants him dead so badly: when Harmonica was just a boy, Frank murdered his older brother in one of the worst acts of cruelty ever committed by a Leone villain - he has a rope tied around the guy's neck and then has him hoisted upon young Harmonica's shoulders, effectively using the kid as a human stool. If Harmonica's strength gives out, the brother will die by hanging. And the harmonica that gave this character his name? It's stuck into the poor kid's mouth by Frank himself. The only reason that Harmonica isn't completely torn up by failing to keep his brother alive is because his brother, in an act of sacrifice, kicked Harmonica away, choosing to die on his own terms rather than let Frank destroy his brother.
I beg to differ — if you haven't seen Mr. Fonda in Fort Apache...he's a right bastard in that.
Colonel Günther "Gutierez" Reza in A Fistful of Dynamite is a silent villain who, throughout the entire movie, doesn't express a single emotion. He would torture revolution suspects promising them freedom ONLY if they picked out other members from the crowds arrested. Those chosen would be executed by firing squad. The catch being he MADE THEM WATCH.
Angel Eyes Sentenza of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a sociopathicmercenary who's only concern is making as much money as possible. In the opening scenes of the film, he tracks down and murders a man at another's behest. When his victim offers him money if he will spare his life, Angel Eyes replies that "Once I'm been paid, I always see my job through." He kills the man and his son, takes the money, and reports to his employer...who he promptly murders, since he feels that in taking the victim's money he has accepted the job (plus, he wants to keep the gold he's found out about for himself). Later on, he has Tuco tortured — and is implied to have done the same thing to countless Confederate prisoners at the camp — and watches with absolutely no emotion on his face. He's less a character than he is Greed in a trenchcoat and cowboy hat. He's so bad that the other two main characters — no saints themselves — both agree to shoot him in the three way Mexican Standoff that ends the film, despite their extreme distaste for one another. Perhaps the most impressive part about it is that it's done almost entirely on performance — none of his actions are really objectively worse than those made by Blondie and Tuco, yet Lee Van Cleef's performance is so chilling that you never once doubt that he is the greater of three evils and utterly deserving of the moniker "The Bad".
El Indio of For a Few Dollars More is the classic Mexican Bandito turned Up to Eleven. He forces one of his victims to watch his family being slaughtered, than offers the man a chance for revenge, but rigs the duel — and continues to rig his duels throughout the film. He betrays his entire gang, so that he can keep the loot from their robbery for himself and is eventually revealed to have raped Colonel Mortimer's sister, driving her to suicide. He tortures both Mortimer and Manco for kicks, before using them as pawns to massacre his own men, and shows absolutely no remorse when Nino, the one man he'd intended to keep around, is killed in front of him. On top of that, he's an arrogant, Ax Crazy drug-addict, whose connection to reality is tenuous at best. In many ways, he's the exact opposite of Angel Eyes while still having utterly no redeeming qualities: where the former is emotionless and almost inhuman, Indio is animalistically alive, if in a spectacularly negative fashion.
Ramon Rojo from A Fistful of Dollars. El Indio at least had a main goal, Ramon just seems to enjoy being evil. In his first entrance, he and his gang brutally massacre a Mexican army unit to steal their gold. He kidnaps a woman and forces her to live with him solely because he thinks her husband was cheating at cards. He massacres the entire Baxter family (including their Evil Matriarch leader, which would have been incredibly bad at the time), tortures Joe for helping the girl escape, and, towards the end, has Silvanito tortured when he thinks he might be hiding Joe and was also about to hang him.
Clarence Darby from Law Abiding Citizen qualifies big time. He rapes Clyde Shelton's wife, murders her, savagely beats Clyde with a baseball bat, and then murders Clyde's young daughter. They don't even show the audience that scene, it's so horrible. He just takes her into the next room. The line "Don't worry...kids like me." could be viewed to hint that he raped the girl too. He also attempts to murder Clyde. He proceeds to lie, saying that his partner did it (when, in fact, the partner had tried to talk him out of it), and subsequently laughed his head off when he hears about his partner's agonizing death. Now, Clyde might be a bad guy himself, but considering the monster that Darby was, no tears are shed when Darby meets his Karmic Death.
Rhoda, the perfect little girl in The Bad Seed, murders a classmate to get a medal he'd won, had earlier killed an old woman by "accidentally" bumping into her on the ice, sets a suspicious caretaker on fire and plots to kill a friendly neighbor to get her pet lovebirds.
Reinhard Heydrich (played by Kenneth Branagh) in Conspiracy, a film about the 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which a group of German bureaucrats and leaders worked out the major details of the Final Solution. What's interesting about Heydrich in Conspiracy was that they tried to make him handsome and mild-mannered, and only showed him in Soft Light (instead of having shadows on his face). In fact, All the Nazis in this movie are Complete Monsters; Heydrich is merely the most prominent example. This is, after all, a movie about the planning of the Holocaust. It's particularly notable in that the two characters who actually object to the "solution" put forward do not do so out of the moral grounds of exterminating a people; they'd be quite happy for the Jews to be wiped out, but their objections are based on legalistic grounds: it would just cause too much paperwork and probably become a complete bureaucratic mess. Most Nazi leaders in movies about Nazis will be portrayed as this.
The Galactic warlord Sarris from Galaxy Quest could be considered a complete monster, especially by comedy film standards. For no discernible reason, he attempts complete genocide of the peaceful Thermians. He doesn't do this simply through brute force, but also through lies and promises of mercy, when the Thermians don't even understand the CONCEPT of deception or lies. And then, when he decides to execute the remainder of the Thermians by destroying the ship ("Far too simple a death for them, isn't it?"), he decides that it would be far more fitting for them to slowly suffocate as the air was pumped out of the ship. It doesn't fit to forget his torture of the Thermians' last captain before Mathesar: she told Sarris everything she knew about the ship and the Omega-13 and begged him to kill her. His response? "When I grow tired of the noises you make, you shall die." Andwhat happened to the shield tech who didn't get the shields up fast enough for Sarris' liking. Complete Monster? Without a doubt.
The rapist/murderers in The Last House on the Left. After escaping prison for their previous brutal crimes in the beginning of the film, they kidnap two teenage girls, subject them to humiliation beyond words, rape them, and brutally kill them. They had no remorse for this and tried to shack up with the parents of one of the victims for the night (who eventually found out). You're very happy when they die. The only sympathetic member of the group is Junior, the son of the leader of the monsters who was hooked on drugs as a kid as a way for his dad to control him, who honestly tried to reach out to one victim and who felt completely guilt-ridden and horrible after the deed was done. As said by Mari, he was really just a willow, blowing in the wind that was his father (who was more a force of evil than a human).
Eddie Kim in Snakes on a Plane. In his very first scene, he beats a guy prosecuting him to death with a baseball bat, taunting him about how his son will grow up without a father. Then, to kill the witness to his crime, he releases the aforementioned snakes on the plane, killing dozens of people. Happily, he will most certainly not get away with it, as he is likely to be sentenced to death on multiple counts of murder (and the witness lives).
In City of God, Lil' Zé, a drug kingpin based on a real person, revels in this trope. As a kid, he goes on a shooting spree within the first ten minutes of the film, calmly walking into a whorehouse and smiling as he kills both whores and customers. He goes on to murder countless people as he grows up. In an infamous scene, Zé recruits a local child into his gang by forcing him to execute one of his friends. When he is refused a dance by a girl at a party, he forces her boyfriend to strip naked at gunpoint. On the way home, he ambushes them and brutally rapes the girl in front of her boyfriend. It's still not enough for him - his gang later surround the boyfriend's house and open fire, killing his little brother and uncle, which triggers a huge gang war. His Karmic Death is, unsurprisingly, utterly ironic: he's gunned down by the same children whom he forced to shoot their friends.
Commodus from Gladiator. He killed his father to become emperor, tried to force his sister to sleep withhim by threatening her son's life, had the protagonist's wife and small son crucified (with the wife being viciously gang-raped before this), stabbed the guy in the back before fighting him in public, etc.
Raynald de Chatillon from Kingdom of Heaven leads attacks on innocent Arab villages in orgies of rape and head-chopping, just to provoke Saladin. It doesn't work until he cruelly and personally murders Saladin's sister.
And drinking water meant for King Guy gets his throat slit.
Offering the King water, cold water even, was a gesture meant to show that Guy was being offered parole. Guy was trying to place Raynald under Saladin's hospitality. Saladin was having none of that shit.
Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. She'll remorselessly and cruelly manipulate anyone to keep her stranglehold on a bunch of virtually harmless mental patients, all while maintaining a sterling image for outsiders and her superiors, who likely don't have the perspective needed to understand just how horrible she really is.
On the topic of hillbilly rapists from, there are the ones from I Spit on Your Grave. It's very, very hard to have any sympathy for them after a 45-minute rape scene, which is five times the scene from Irreversible mentioned above.
The three gang members we see in the beginning of the original Assault on Precinct 13, specifically the blonde one, who casually shoots the little girl holding an ice cream cone!
Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney) in Leave Her To Heaven. Cornel Wilde marries her not aware of how insanely jealous she is of anyone she thinks will come between them. She lets his handicapped little brother drown in a lake while she calmly sits in a rowboat nearby. She becomes jealous of her husband's affection for their unborn baby so intentionally falls down a flight of stairs to abort it. Finally she poisons herself and frames Wilde for her murder.
The Incident: The two punks who terrorize a subway car full of people. They are named Joe (who is the main villain) and his flunkie, Artie, who is played by a young Martin Sheen. They harass and threaten each of the passengers psychologically until finally they are stopped by a soldier with his arm in a cast, played by Beau Bridges. What makes the situation worse is that whenever Joe is sadistically tormenting a passenger or two, the others are too terrified to intervene and just sit and watch helplessly, even though Joe and Artie seem to be unarmed.
Harry Roat in Wait Until Dark, who kills a few people and terrorizes and tries to kill a blind woman played by Audrey Hepburn in order to find a doll filled with heroin. More specifically, he romances and kills a woman, then brings her two exes in and sets them up so they'll be forced to work for him. He then makes said blind woman think that her husband's an adulterer and uses the other two to psychologically torture her and make her afraid to leave her own home. He's such a sick bastard that his unwilling partners try to finish him off and both end up dead. Then he proceeds to torment the blind woman face to face, ironically in the dark, in one of the most chilling climaxes in film history. Even she realizes toward the end that the doll is of secondary importance to Roat...he enjoys doing evil for evil's sake above all. And to cap it off in a bit of Fridge Horror: had he found out the little girl who was helping the blind woman, he most certainly would have murdered her without a second thought.
In the original Halloween films, Michael Myers was described as nothing but pure and simple evil: he doesn't have any rudimentary sense of, really, anything; all he knows how to do is kill, kill, kill. Before the series started, he killed his older sister when still a small child. The scary thing about Myers is that there's no indication he gets pleasure out of it. Or any other reward. He's also seen as more of a force of nature and the lack of motive is played for Nightmare Fuel.
The lack of motive carries over to the remakes; Word Of God from Rob Zombie says that Michael doesn't kill because of his shitty childhood; he kills because he's evil. The abuse and terrible living conditions were incidental.
From the same series, Doctor Terence Wynn. At one point in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Loomis even states "I thought Michael was a monster, but you..."
Qualen from Cliffhanger has no problems killing innocent people to further his goals (which he does several times) and then coolly murders his lover so that he'll be the only available pilot.
Qualen: Do you know what real love is, Kristel?
Kristel: No.
Qualen: [Whispers in her ear] Sacrifice...
[Shoots her]
Delmar could be considered EVEN WORSE then Qualen himself - he shots poor Frank dead for apparently no reason - probably for pure sadism - and then tortures Hal using him as a football in order to practice his kicking technique.
Auric Goldfinger is such a memorable and witty villain that you almost forget that he's a criminally insane maniac. His plan involves poisoning an army barracks and the surrounding town - 60,000 people (he shrugs this off with A Million is a Statistic) - and then detonating a nuclear device in Fort Knox to trigger a major economic crisis for his own profit, and considers such a scheme potentially one of the greatest achievements in human endeavor, up there with scaling Everest and splitting the Atom. He punishes his assistant, who becomes a Bond girl and costs him a rigged card game, by having her murdered with golden paint; he tries to have James Bond sawn in half with a laser, and he gives an Evil Speech Of Evil to his mob partners even though he always planned on killing them (and does) - he just wanted to let them know how brilliant a criminal mastermind he was. Bond panders to his ego because he sees just how dangerously mad he is.
Francisco Scaramanga, The Man With the Golden Gun, the world's most highly paid assassin and Bond's Shadow Archetype. Unlike Bond, he greatly enjoys killing and charges a million dollars a hit to fund a luxurious lifestyle with it. His mistress loathes him because he is cold, domineering, and cruel, and perverse as he enjoys caressing her with his gun, and only makes love to her before he kills in the belief that it improves his aim. When he betrays her, he murders her with a long distance pistol shot in a crowded stadium, apparently enjoying the challenge of such a difficult kill. He regards himself as an artist, believes he and Bond "are the best", and desires a duel to the death with him to be his "masterpiece", in between murdering his employer and planning to auction off a revolutionary solar device to the highest bidder. He's a vain, cold, deluded, sadistic egomaniac, and Bond considers Scaramanga's attempts to compare them insulting.
Hugo Drax in Moonraker. He has the most monstrous plan of any Bond villain to date - the extermination of the human race, intending to repopulate the Earth with his own specially chosen perfect specimens. He has a massive ego to the point where he talks about how "I alone" created his giant space station and has a French chateau imported brick by brick to California to be his house. He is one of the few villains to try and justify Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? by saying he wanted to give Bond an "amusing death", and when the first two fail, he still manages to give his assistant, whom Bond had seduced, a gruesome death - he has her chased down and mauled by his dogs!
Max Zorin in A View to a Kill really qualifies big time. Besides his main plan to cause a flood that would kill many innocents by triggering an earthquake, he drops a businessman to his death when he disagrees with his plan, kills the mayor and gets Bond blamed for it, murders the subway workers in a gleeful manner, and while doing this, betrays May Day, his main henchwoman.
Franz Sanchez from Licence to Kill. Although in some scenes he's Affably Evil and charming, he's also uncommonly brutal and ruthless in dealing with his enemies or those he perceives as disloyal to him - he brutally whips his mistress, Lupe Lamora, with a stingray-tail whip as a punishment for infidelity. It is also implied that under his orders, his top henchman Dario removed the heart of the man she has slept with. He feeds Bond's best friend, Felix Leiter, to a shark (he had his newlywed wife raped and killed right before), and he kills one of his collaborators, locking him in a decompression chamber, believing he stole his money. Towards the climax, he also decides to start "cutting overhead" and shoots his financial advisor.
Dario "used to be with the Contras until they kicked him out." He must have been pretty bad for that to happen. He carried out said order to cut out the heart.
Mr. Harvey in The Lovely Bones. The way he's found out is when his Scrapbook o' Susie is found, including his plan for killing her, pictures of her, and a lock of her hair.
The fascist libertines in Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom bring this trope and "evil" to a whole new level. They abduct 18 youths at random from their parents, and then openly mock how one's mother died while futilely trying to save her daughter right in front of the girl as she stands there naked and humiliated. And then, to make matters worse, they take them in and engage in extreme tortures on them, such as forcing them to eat feces or throwing nails into a cake they are feeding them for no other reason than their own amusement. Then comes the ending when they sit and laugh as all are brutally tortured to death. To find more horrifying characters in fiction is a difficult task. The events in this film were toned down from the original Marquis de Sade book this was based off of. The libertines in their original incarnation were MUCH worse.
Miss Minchin from A Little Princess crushes the spirits of little girls, publicly humiliates them in class, smacks them around for being hungry, turns happy girls into servants, and takes away all their stuff because their father has died, then, on top of THAT, snatches away and obsessively keeps a locket with the girl's dead mother's picture in it. After THAT, she's got the nerve to tell a girl not yet 12 to "look in the mirror", telling her to go fuck herself and stop being happy. Arguably, the absolute worst thing she does is when Sara's father, who everyone thought was killed in the war, returns, but has lost his memory due to his injuries. Sara sees him and shouts that he's her father, but her father doesn't remember her. Miss Minchin is asked if the man is Sara's father, and, knowing full well that he is, says no, simply because she wants to see Sara suffer. Sara was able to make the bitch cry in the movie when she accidentally hinted toward an unrevealed (and far too distant to matter anyway) Freudian Excuse. Even after that, she won't stop. Somehow, one little girl can magically steal furniture similar to a five-star restaurant in just under five hours through an attic window, and she ALMOST succeeds in getting the girls taken away by the police for no reason whatsoever. Plenty may cheer when the much-abused little chimney cleaning boy starts to order HER around.
Dr. Merrick from The Island. He heartlessly murders clones by having them dissected alive. He takes pride in his work, viewing himself as some twisted messiah. He also plans to harvest Jordan, even though he knows that it won't help. He also knowingly lies to them and conceals them from the truth. Some of the staff also qualify, if only for the heartlessness with which they kill the clones.
Miles Slade in The Tournament. Considering that every character in the movie is a professional assassin who's trying to kill everyone else, Slade has to really be outstandingly immoral to qualify as the evilest character in the movie. But he manages it.
Judge Turpin rapes Sweeney's wife, and presumably wants to do the same to his sixteen-year-old ward, the daughter of the woman in question. He also has no problem with putting a false charge on Benjamin Barker just to get him out of the way or being fully prepared to kill Anthony for just looking at Johanna. Turpin also sentences a boy who couldn't have been older than ten to hang, then afterwards asks Beadle Bamford if he was even guilty.
The Beadle, too. Quite apart from carrying out the worst of Turpin's orders, like beating the living daylights out of Anthony and escorting Lucy Barker to the masquerade, he makes it clear that he enjoys it — particularly when he removes his mask so he can get a better view of Lucy getting raped.
It's also implied that he's taking advantage of the Beggar Woman's insanity to get her to sleep with him. The way she relies on him ("Tell it to the Beadle and the police as well," and singing "Beadle deedle deedle dumplin'" as she's looking for him towards the end) mixed with his attempts at primping for the ladies is incredibly Squicky, even more so when we learn that the Beggar Woman is Lucy Barker.
And depending on your perspective, Lovett qualifies as well, particularly once she encourages Sweeney Todd to murder people and bake them into pies for the unsuspecting populace.
Chad, the Villain Protagonist of 90s cult dark comedy In the Company of Men. What's most baffling is that, unlike almost every other example listed on this page, he commits not one murder, rape, arson, jaywalk, or indeed any other criminal offense. Yet he is perhaps one of the most disgusting and unsympathetic characters ever portrayed on film. First, he cooks up a scheme with his pathetic divorcee 'friend' Howard, both of whom having endured messy break-ups with their respective partners. They decide to both date a sweet naive deaf girl, string her along and fill her with false hopes all the while using her for casual sex, then dump her, leaving her heartbroken and embittered. All the while this is happening, we are treated to Chad's daily routine: cracking sexist jokes, humiliating and slagging off his so-called friends behind their backs, and treating the people who work for him like shit (he's apparently some kind of businessman, though we never see him do any work other than brown nosing the right people). Eventually, Howard realizes that he loves the deaf girl and calls the whole thing off, and Chad responds by backstabbing him and getting him demoted to a lower paying job. Then, at the climax of the film, we realize that the one thing that gave Chad the slightest bit of sympathy to start with was a lie: his girlfriend never dumped him or was anything other than faithful. He'd just wanted to manipulate Howard more easily. An appalled Howard asks him why and Chad leers: "Because I could." Then, while Howard undergoes a nervous breakdown, he gets back into bed with his beautiful, completely oblivious girlfriend, who gives him a well-earned blowjob. HE IS NOT PUNISHED IN THE SLIGHTEST. NOT ONCE IN THE WHOLE FILM. What makes Chad so monstrous is that despite the comfortable upbringing, college education, good job, fancy apartment, and steady relationship with a woman who loves him, this isn't enough. So he belittles and humiliates the people around him purely out of sadistic pleasure. We know this because he constantly asks people how they're feeling, usually before and after he's ruined their day, so that he may rest assured that his efforts were not in vain. And yet despite being a smug manipulative sociopath with no regard for anything but his own satisfaction, he strikes you as the sort of person you could bump into and not bat an eyelid, even find quite likable. He's a normal human being. And what makes the film so hard to watch is the way it shows how mundane evil can be. Now, how do you feel?
"For all the men who have been beaten down by manipulative women, or been forced to endure petty, selfish, unnerving cunts year after year, Aaron Eckhart’s Chad is an unmatched hero. But lest you think he is mean and selfish because he got hurt, he eventually reveals his true malevolence: he displays cruelty for no other reason than the chestnut, “because he can.” Women across the country hated the film, I’m guessing because at one time they have all loved a man like Chad. And perhaps still do."
Most of the kidnappers in Big Jake; they start off by murdering two children in cold blood (and half the staff of the McCandles ranch) and just go on from there. They kidnap a young boy and are clearly ready to kill him at any moment, if they think they won't get their money. Their leader is an interesting example in that he is also Affably Evil — he'd be happy to have a nice, pleasant, friendly conversation with you...just before pulling out a gun and murdering you in cold blood without so much as flinching. The worst of the bunch is the machete-wielding, overweight kidnapper. There is also among their number a man who enjoys shooting people in the back. Fortunately, the title character catches up with them in the end.
Linton Barwick of In the Loop — and being the least likable character in that particular film is an achievement in itself. For most characters, using a live hand grenade as a paperweight would be awesome, but not this charmless warmonger. For him, the vote to go to war is a mere personal battle, and his determination to send thousands of people to their deaths is driven by his pride. He revels in his ability to start an illegal war without a shred of evidence for it, and his power to crush and belittle anyone who may get in his way. Most in the film are terrified of him, and only Malcolm Tucker seems to show the slightest shred of bravery in his face:
Dr. Royer-Collard, the "alienist" brought in to treat the Marquis de Sade in Quills. How bad is he? Well, he makes Sade look positively decent in contrast. During the course of the film, he subjects a number of innocent inmates to torture as part of his quackish "treatment", marries a teenage girl a third of his age and then rapes her, orders a woman flogged for helping the Marquis disseminate his work, drives his asylum's Good Shepherd resident priest to commit atrocities on the Marquis, and not only abandons an innocent woman to be raped and murdered by a lunatic, but ensures that no one else will stumble on the scene in time to save her.
Blood Diamond. The Revolutionary United Front commander Captain Poison embodies this trope. We first see him leading a raid on a peaceful village, slaughtering the inhabitants with the assistance of child soldiers and then chopping off the hands of the survivors except for a few they figure are strong enough to use for slave labor. Later at this camp, we see him catching one captive trying to pocket a diamond. He demands that he give it back, which he does, but then guns him down in cold blood anyway. Brutal brainwashing of captured children to become child soldiers follows. Anyone is going to want to cheer a lot when he is taken out.
And the worst thing is that it's hinted that he was once upon a time a normal family man just like Solomon, but became evil because he "lived in hell", an Evil Counterpart of what Solomon could had turned into if he was the one leading RUF, and that he secretly hates what he does.
Savior has several examples that would qualify as a Complete Monster. The protagonist himself even starts out committing several monstrous acts, but considering the death of his wife and son and later his friend and his later attempt to do good and becoming The Atoner, it's clear he's a conflicted and problematic man rather than one of these. Several other characters, though, have no excuse:
Goran, a Serbian soldier who serves as his partner at the beginning of the film, is impossible to not be disgusted by. In the beginning, he's shown looting off the corpses of slaughtered villagers. Later, during a prisoner exchange, he casually brags about raping the young woman they are exchanging. Once he exchanges her for a woman who is clearly pregnant as the result of a rape, he beats the woman regardless, forcing her into early labor and plans on killing both her and the child until he is stopped and killed by the protagonist.
The woman's father, however, is not much better and walks dangerously close to this trope. After learning of this, he plans on killing both the protagonist and his own daughter for not only killing Goran but allowing herself to be raped without killing herself. He is stopped only by the persuasion of her brother, one of the few fully moral characters in the film.
However, perhaps the absolute worst example of this is an unnamed character with no real dialogue. A Croat army commander who is shown later having captured several Serb civilians, including the mother of the baby the protagonist is now caring for and protecting, and lining them up nervously while a large brutish soldier kills several by hitting them in the head with a hammer before the rest of the soldiers get tired of waiting and simply gun them all down. What makes him especially horrifying is his actions during this, he merely walks off to the side and shaves casually, no different than most men would shave in the morning. It's quite clear that, to him, this action is no bigger a deal than eating breakfast and he's done it many times before and thinks nothing of it. The horror gets even worse when one considers that the Balkan Wars no doubt had countless examples of such people.
Max Cady from Cape Fear. Especially Robert Mitchum, whose subtle performance makes Cady feel even more human and therefore even more terrifying.
The Interrogator in Closet Land. He starts out as something close to an Obstructive Bureaucrat, then quickly spirals down into Complete Monster territory. Being an Amnesty International-funded film about how cruel criminal interrogations can be meant that this was never going to be a light, happy film (or that the Interrogator would be anything but a monster), but even still, it's horrifying.*
Wong Hoi/Johnny Weng, the Big Bad from The Killer, definitely qualifies as a monster towards the final act of the movie, where he delivers a savage No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Jeffery/Ah Jong's close friend Fung Sei/Sydney Fung (who had come on Ah Jong's behalf to get the money he needs to have Jenny's eyes fixed), kills the priest of Ah Jong's church so that he can take Jenny hostage, kills his own syndicate hitman after he is used to try to break the Put Down Your Gun and Step Away situation with poor Jenny, and, worst of all, brutally murders Ah Jong, blinding him so that his eyes cannot be used to have Jenny's fixed, leaving her blind forever. There isn't even any victory in his final death at the hands of Inspector Li Ying because it happens right in front of the cops that he had just surrendered to, resulting in Li's arrest at the very end of the movie.
The Duke in Moulin Rouge! may seem comedic, but it soon turns out his obsession with Satine is no joke. He is willing to murder people in order to eliminate the competition, beat her in order to get her to submit, threaten her loved ones to make her agree with his plans...and during the Tango Roxanne, it's HEAVILY implied that he would rape her if she did not agree to have sex with him.
Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me. Full stop. At first it seems like he might be somewhat sympathetic because he was molested and screwed up by his mother, who introduced him to his sadomasochistic ways, and he does seem sorry after his first few crimes, but then you find out that he's been assaulting and killing people for YEARS and letting other people take the fall and he just becomes irredeemable.
Godzilla vs. Destoroyah: Destoroyah. To give a good idea as to how sadistic he is, he BRUTALLY murders Godzilla Junior in front of Godzilla himself and, just to rub the proverbial salt into the wound, he then wraps his tail around Godzilla's throat and begins to drag him around while laughing. While Godzilla mourned the loss of his only child, Destoroyah grabbed him and hurled him away, preventing him from attempting to revive him or grieve. The fact that Destoroyah seemed to be enjoying every minute of it hammers home how twisted this monster is.
The majority of Godzilla's other enemies are simply big, dumb, and/or mind controlled. A few, however, belong on this list every bit as much as Destoroyah does. King Ghidorah is the standout. One of the big guy's most powerful adversaries, Ghidorah is one of the few monsters to actively enjoy causing destruction, as evidenced by his cackling, Joker-esque laugh. An Omnicidal Maniac of the first order, Ghidorah has made a career out of destroying planets and all the life on them and seems to get a thrill out of taunting the human military when it fails to destroy him. It's Expy, Desigidorah, took this up another step, by slowly draining the Earth of all life. And there's its evolved form, Kaiser Ghidorah/Monster X. Originally mindcontrolled by the alien Xillians in its Monster X form, Ghidorah battles Godzilla to a standstill, during which time the aliens are defeated. Freed of their control, Ghidorah evolves into Kaiser Ghidorah and proceeds to use it's Vampiric Draining on Godzilla, slowly torturing him to death for no real reason beyond hatred (since it's no longer receiving orders from the Xillians). This isn't a first for Ghidorah—in Destroy All Monsters, after the Kilaaks control tower was destroyed, freeing all the creatures under its control, King Ghidorah kept right on attacking Godzilla and co. And that's without getting into the Rebirth of Mothra films, where Grand King Ghidorah drained the souls of children. It's about as malevolent as a film monster can get.
Gigan is of a similar mind to Ghidorah. Essentially a forty-story Psycho for Hire, Gigan is utterly Ax Crazy and enjoys slowly dismembering other monsters with his buzzsaw and scythes. He regularly attacks Earth while in the employ/thrall of one alien race after another, and typically takes his time in slowly cutting his opposition to pieces—even when he could just shoot them. He's also got elements of Dirty Coward in his nature, frequently abandoning allies when the going gets tough, and enjoys ganging up on single opponents alongside the likes of Megalon and fellow sociopath Ghidorah. Amongst the fandom, he is generally regarded as Godzilla's most brutal adversary.
Hedorah (also incredibly sadistic and destructive like Gigan) may also count.
Word Of God states that Godzilla himself in Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack was intended to be this. Nobody really thinks of him as being one, though, probably because of the fact that he's Godzilla.
A few of the alien enemies in Godzilla films also fit, specifically X from Godzilla: Final Wars. Sure, he's a Large Ham who has a Villainous Breakdown after each of his monsters bites the dust, but that doesn't hide just how evil he is. The Controller wanted to take Earth peacefully and was simply a Well-Intentioned Extremist trying to save his people. X offs him the moment he gets the chance and takes over, instantly letting loose his entire army of monsters and begins the destruction of human civilization. While many alien invaders in Godzilla movies have done just that, it's the sadistic glee present in X as he watches the horror he's unleashed that makes it clear that, unlike his more peaceful predecessor, he's a sadist who enjoys what he's doing! When he captures the Gotengo at the climax of the film, he orders his men to slaughter the entire crew except the ones he wanted personally. Where his predecessor took prisoners even when he could've simply let the victim die, X has absolutely no regard for life at all. During the Final Battle of the film, he takes his time to enjoy the Curbstomp Battle he's inflicting on his opponent.
Mola Ram and his Thuggee Cult from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom kidnaps children from their families and forces them to work like slaves in dangerous mines for the stones and beats them mercilessly...and brainwashing them to the Cult of Kali. If Indy didn't arrived on time, it could be possible that the cult would have killed the children anyway. And there's the way he sacrifices people to Kali Mah...
Takeo from Ju-on, even before he became part of the curse (but only after his Freak Out). He murders his wife (by not only snapping her neck, but leaving her still alive, paralysed and in sheer agony for a period of time before he finally kills her with a knife), his child, and his child's cat in a fit of extreme jealousy - mostly looking extremely calm (if detached) while he does so - and then brutally murders Manami, Kobayashi's wife, in her own home, cuts out her unborn child, sticks it in a plastic sack, phones Kobayashi to inform him of what he's just done, and then proceeds to bash the foetus against railings in the street. After his death, his other assorted atrocities have included him driving Kyoko completely insane by forcing her to watch what he did to Manami, possessing Tatsuya, and murdering Rika (in the novel, he tortures and rapes her instead).
Bernie in Millers Crossing is well established as a good-for-nothing, but betraying and blackmailing the person who saved his life and killing his own lover to save his skin may catapult him into this category.
Colonel William Stryker from X2: X-Men United brainwashes Nightcrawler into attempting to assassinate the President of the United States, and was also implied to have brainwashed Magneto into helping Stryker capture Professor X. He later deliberately conducts a raid on aschool, kidnapping several of the students for experimentation, brainwashes Xavier and Cyclops, and uses Xavier in an attempt to wipe out Mutants across the world with a Cerebro clone. His brainwashing method? His own son. He is also the reason why Wolverine was imbedded with an adamantium-plated skeleton, the exact same procedure he subjected his second-in-command, Yuriko Oyama, through. In addition, he brainwashed the latter. In one scene, we see Yuriko start to wake up from the brainwashing, only for him to grab her and dose her up again before she can do anything. There's also the fact that the brainwashing serum leaves the victims conscious, but unable to control their bodies, which means that he was abducting innocent people and making them do horrible things and in a state to watch themselves do it! Nightcrawler actually thinks that he was possessed by a demon when it's done to him.
In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, shortly after assigning James Howlett and Victor Creed into Team X, he led them to a village where a mysterious meteorite was located. He had the chieftain killed when he refuses to give the location, and had some of the team attack the villagers as a result, disgusting James enough to have him quit Team X immediately. The same film also shows how Stryker is no different from his father. The latter kept a mutant unlawfully detained and wanted to bomb the island with mutants who just saved the day even while a fellow agent was also there. The so-called justification being that the law doesn't apply to mutants and the agent was "collateral damage". Like father, like son is so true in William's case, seeing how he has no scruples, as we see from his various heinous actions. Having Victor Creed kill off his former unit, blackmailing Kayla (Logan's girlfriend) into keeping tabs on Logan, faking her death at the hands of Victor Creed via capturing her sister (Emma Frost), getting Logan into participating in the Weapon X program to give him the adamantium skeleton, having Creed round up and experiment on mutants to produce Weapon XI (Deadpool) and having Zero kill a farming family who took Logan in after his escape (framing him with the deed), just to recapture him. Murdered a general when the man called Stryker out on the fact that he was motivated by prejudices. Kidnaped innocent mutants other than Kayla's sister just for experiments. The Three Mile Island incident only doesn't count because it was unintentional on his part. Not that it matters on the list of deliberate malice this long already. Talk about a well deserved death.
Even Stryker is nothing compared to Dr. Klaus Schmidt/Sebastian Shaw from X-Men First Class: In case you're wondering why he has a German name, it's because in the beginning of the movie, he worked as a Nazi scientist for Auschwitz, and then had Erik try to move a concentration camp-coin, feeling that he had a lot of potential after witnessing him wreck a gate. It is in this scene that he also mocks the Nazi belief that blond hair and blue eyes are the superior race. Yes, that's right, he actually MOCKS what would have been considered the most heinous crime in history because he felt that the Nazi belief on a master race was purely superficial. It gets even worse in the same scene: he has some Nazi guards bring Erik's mother in, not to reunite her with her son, but to use her as leverage to make him move the coin, stating that at the count to three, if he doesn't move the coin with his abilities, he'll kill her. Erik fails to move it before three. Erik is so enraged at it that he ends up crushing everything metallic in the room, even the soldier's helmets while the soldiers are wearing it, with Schmidt actually congratulating him for this action, even when his office and lab lay in shambles. In addition, flashbacks that were seen via Emma Frost's telepathic abilities implied that Schmidt also subjected Erik to experimentation afterwards. It also becomes apparent later on that he plans on instigating what history will later know as the Cuban Missile Crisis to start a thermonuclear war so that the mutants will grow stronger and decimate all of the normal humans, abducting an Army Colonel and then having him to agree to the U.S. to place American nuclear missiles in Turkey, and then proceeds to blow the colonel up by absorbing a grenade blast and reflecting it back at him (then again, considering the fact that the Colonel was preparing to blackmail him via grenade and apparently was bribed to do so given his statements, the guy kinda deserved it), and he planned to manipulate the Soviet general. Later, after he learns that Xavier was recruiting mutants to his side, he and his Hellfire group attack the CIA building used to research mutants, recruiting Angel to his side, and also managing to murder Darwin by absorbing Havok's disc energy and force-feeding Darwin the ability, causing him to self-destruct after the latter attempted to fake defection to stop them. He then successfully manipulates (or rather, forces) the Soviet general into delivering nukes to Cuba and later to deliver them past the embargo line, even arranging for the crew to be murdered in order to ensure that it crosses, in case the crew decided to turn back. He then follows the Soviet transport tanker and planned that should something go wrong even after these anticipations, he'll attempt to absorb all of the energy from his sub's nuclear reactor to destroy Cuba, then pin the blame on the United States, to follow through with his plans to instigate World War III. Not only that, but he is also directly responsible for Erik's conversion into Magneto as well as his start of darkness, right when the latter managed to murder him with the very coin he tried to have him move.
Xavior in Saw II. All of the villains in this franchise have at least some redeeming qualities or Freudian Excuse for why they do what they do. Not this guy. Before the events of the movie, he is a drug dealer. About a third of the way in, he throws Amanda into the trap intended for himself, shouting threats at her the whole time. A bit later, he murders Jonas, and leaves several other characters to die in their traps. As a grand finale, he tries to kill Daniel (a 16-ish year old kid) and Amanda so he can get to the last antidote. His death is deeply satisfying to watch.
Hoffman was working towards this in Saw V and VI, but was still badass enough and seemed to be obeying Jigsaw's "code" enough that most of the fans rejoiced at his victory in both movies. However, in the 7th installment (Saw 3D), he is firmly in Complete Monster territory. He wants to kill Jill and kills everyone in his path to get to her. He murders four skinhead-racists in a complex plot to sneak into police headquarters. From there, he murders most of a police department in order to get to Jill, and then murders her as well. By the time it's over, it isn't clear if the city even has a police force left. Any sympathy the audience may have had for him is LONG gone. When he gets his due at the end, it's pretty sweet.
Wah Sing Ku in Lethal Weapon 4, played massively against type by Jet Li, has to be the most evil villain of the series and truly enjoys watching people suffer. A ruthless Triad leader, he crosses the Moral Event Horizon early on by burning down Murtaugh's house with Riggs and Murtaugh inside, all with a smug grin on his face. He later kills the Affably Evil Uncle Benny as well as an innocent man and his uncle to just to prove how evil he is. Yet somehow, people like the sonofabitch.
Waingro from Heat. Murders unarmed guards who he thinks looked at him funny, as well as rapes and kills multiple prostitutes. His final horrid act is to murder Danny Trejo's girlfriend and beat Trejo half to death, but not kill him because that would be a Mercy Kill. This all shows you how much better Neil Mccauley is, even if he is a thief himself.
The Albanian sex slave traffickers and their associates in Taken have absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever, give horrific treatment to those poor girls who fall in their clutches, and are, all of them, Too Dumb to Live. The fact that Bryan Mills destroys the whole organization is quite a relief.
Captain Harrison Love, the Psycho for HireDragon in The Mask of Zorro. Keeps the dismembered bodyparts of Alejandro's brother pickled in alcohol, which he drinks "based on an Incan custom". And when he learns Zorro has the means to expose Don Rafael's plan (buying California with stolen gold), he calmly suggests destroying the mine to hide evidence of the theft...with the slaves who did the mining still inside, "to destroy all the evidence".
Also McGivens, the creepy Bandito from The Legend of Zorro, who uses the tenuous claim that his crimes are justified, as he is doing the Lord's work. The main reason why he's considered a true monster is probably the fact that he coldly kills Alejandro/Zorro's best friend.
Lord Blackwood from 2009's Sherlock Holmes has killed 5 girls for his satanic rituals and is stated to have killed many more. He also plans to eliminate much of Parliament members, having them poisoned to create a new future where he and his followers, but specifically him, will rule the world. He also wants to bring America back under English rule.
Bolo has way too much fun killing those incompetent guards (and generally just looks like he could be a Terminator). Pity he goes out like a chump to Roper.
O'Hara, whose treachery has disgraced us all, counts too. It was his actions that led Su Lin, the lead character's sister, to kill herself with a piece of glass when she is cornered by him and his men.
Mr. Han. First, he put his kitten into a guillotine with no other reason than to simply show how evil he is ("Very few people can be totally ruthless. It isn't easy; it takes more strength than you might believe.")! He also organized martial arts competitions that involve life and death. And what else? He enjoys trading with opium, and he then puts the poor people affected by it in cages! And that's not even mentioning what he does to Williams.
In Die Hard, we have Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) - it's revealed that the final part of his plan is to herd the hostages to the roof which he'll then blow away, killing every one of them with his C4 once the police send the helicopter. He might be Affably Evil and give his hostages some food, but won’t hesitate when he has to pull the trigger - as Takagi and Ellis learn firsthand.
In Die Hard 2, it's Colonel Stuart's turn, in which he makes airplanes full of passengers crash just in order to show he's not joking around. His destruction of the British plane ranks right up there with any vile act in the movies' universe.
Sgt. Bob Barnes from Platoon, probably the epitome of the Sociopathic Soldier. In one scene, believing that some villagers are aiding Viet Cong soldiers, he shoots a defiant woman (the village chief's wife) in the head. When the murdered woman's daughter cries out, Barnes takes the child at gunpoint, threatening to shoot her next if the villagers do not reveal the whereabouts of the Viet Cong. Worse yet, during a firefight with the enemy, he murders Sgt. Elias, the only one with the balls to do something about his atrocious acts all of the soldiers have witnessed.
Then there's Bunny, who's just a younger, more crazy version of Barnes.
It's also heavily implied that Alex's own evil (and he and his gang of droogs are plenty evil in this movie) pales before that of the people responsible for his reconditioning, since they tortured and abused him just to see if their technique worked, but weren't terribly interested in the after effects. When he's unable to defend himself from a beating, they simply shoved hush money in his face, uncaring of the possibility that he's broken free of their brainwashing.
Kyung-Chul Jang, the Serial Killer from I Saw the Devil, definitely qualifies. He kidnaps, rapes and murders young women while relishing every moment of it. One of his least heinous deeds in the movie is gloating to the man who's chasing him that he murdered said man's pregnant fiancée even though she begged for her life.
Godfrey from Robin Hood is a sadistic and ruthless knight. He betrayed England in the first place. He enjoys killing people and burning villages. Oh, and he slew poor and blind Sir Walter!!
In Eight MM, several qualify. In order of depravity from least to greatest, they are as follows:
Mr. Christian — Anybody who contracts someone to find a snuff film for their viewing pleasure "just because they can" is complete scum.
Eddie Poole — Despite admitting that the sight of Mary Anne's murder made him sick, his efforts to cover up his involvement in her death at any cost obliterate any kind of sympathy we might have had for him. Moreover, he showed no remorse for deceiving oblivious runaways into believing he would lead them to stardom before ushering them into an industry that mercilessly exploited them.
Daniel Longsdale — a Smug Snake attorney who was the prime mover of Mary Anne Matthews' murder. After being unable to find a snuff film on the Black Market for Mr. Christian, he improvises by commissioning Velvet to make one. The reason: a quick profit of $1,000,000.
Dino Velvet — a twisted pornographer who makes films centered around the torture and brutalization of women (a disgusting practice that ultimately leads to Mary Anne's murder).
"Machine" — a psychopath who stars in Velvet's films to indulge his sadistic appetites. It is he who murders Mary Anne Matthews in the snuff film organized by Longsdale. By his own admission, he has no Freudian Excuse for his actions and merely partakes in such activities for his own personal amusement. What makes the "Machine" such a disturbing character is that not only did he choose to kill in spite of a somewhat comfortable upbringing and no Freudian Excuse in any way, but the fact that a Complete Monster can be in any shape and form, particular The Machine's true appearance...A bald, harmless man in glasses named George.
Dear old Uncle Bart in Jet Li's Unleashed. The man took in Danny after the death of his mother (whom he killed when she refused him) and spent years turning him into an unthinking, unfeeling killing machine. He made Danny into an animal, programmed to fight when his collar is clicked off, and used him to beat uncooperative debtors into submission.
Alejandro Sosa from Scarface, who demonstrates his monstrosity by ordering the killing of a man along with his wife and children, just so he wouldn't implicate him and his friends on national TV. Tony, for all the drugs and killings he's involved in, absolutely refuses to hurt innocents and blows the brains out of Sosa's assassin for trying to blow them up. Unfortunately for Tony, Sosa is not happy and Tony is killed in a firefight with Sosa's men during the movie's climax, leaving Sosa free of any consequences; that is until the game (retconned to Tony escaping the shootout), where Tony finally gives Sosa his comeuppance.
Christini from Dobermann. Putting it simply, he's a cold-blooded thug with a badge to abuse his power. Also has a few Kick the Dog and Moral Event Horizon moments like abusing Olivier/Sonia's parents and wife then murdering her, as well as the Dobermann's partner in crime, Jacky "Pitbull" Sweat. Gets a Karmic Death at the hands of the Dobermann with a shave against the freaking road!
Heymar Reinhardt, or his alias "Wulfgar", from Nighthawks. He is a terrorist who manipulates everyone around him and kills the people who help him. Even his employers don't like him, as evidenced by one of them refusing to pay him because several children were killed by his last attack at the beginning of the movie. He doesn't care who gets injured or killed by his actions, even if the victims are children. He takes a frail old woman hostage at a subway, and before that, he murdered the flight attendant he was staying with after she looked in his briefcase, calmly telling her that everything was okay, before murdering her offscreen. Later on, he takes more hostages, including an eight-month-old infant. The only reason that he lets the infant live is because he knows that doing so would make him seem more employable to future or potential terrorist organizations, provided he can escape his current predicament alive. He does escape, but then he makes the mistake of trying to kill DaSilva's ex-wife, and DaSilva shoots him dead before he can do so. The scariest part is that this is easily one of the most realistic terrorists in cinema when compared to terrorists featured in other movies.
Jacinto from The Devils Backbone. He cheats on his girlfriend with his much older teacher, Carmen, and later tries to steal gold from Carmen and Dr. Casares, which is bad enough, but he officially crosses the Moral Event Horizon when he blows up the orphanage and kills his girlfriend by stabbing her. Also, he's responsible for killing Santi.
Super Mario Bros. has one, and surprisingly, it's not the Big Bad King Koopa (his role is more comparable to a Well-Intentioned Extremist, since his main motivation for trying to conquer the Mario Bros. dimension was for the survival of his species, since they had to put up with a crapsack world for what is implied to be billions of years.), but his second in command, Lena. She attempted to kill Daisy specifically because she was a threat to her spotlight, and then stabbed Yoshi when he attempted to defend her. She also attempted to steal from Koopa a vital meteorite fragment to fuel her own agenda, which, she makes very clear after retrieving it, is universal domination, and unlike Koopa, she makes it pretty clear that she doesn't even care one bit about her own species when declaring what she is doing.
Louis Roulet from The Lincoln Lawyer is an absolutely vicious, sadistic, misogynistic rapist and murderer who shows no empathy for anyone he hurts, sent an innocent man to prison for one of his crimes, and is perfectly willing to murder or threaten anyone who might pose any threat to him, including a young girl. Quite notable that he is the case that caused the textbook Amoral Attorney protagonist to finally turn on a client.
His mother isn't much better, either!
How has Carter Burke from Aliens not been mentioned? The guy seems okay at first, but then his true colors are slowly revealed to show that not only is he a Dirty Coward, but a Complete Monster willing to send colonists to their deaths if it gets him paid and to get chestbursters implanted into Newt and Ripley to get alien samples back home.
His actor, Paul Reiser, brought his parents to the film, and when his character was killed, his parents nodded in approval. When your parents completely approve of your character's death, you know he was a Complete Monster.
The Master Vampire Jan Valek from John Carpenter's Vampires: he's probably one of the most truly evil vampire in the movie universe (along with Dracula). He's a sadist creature with a merciless taste for blood and mass murderers, who would be too excessive even for any other vampire (or some of 'em). Anyone who stands in his way is either killed or used to achieve many of his dark schemes. His relentless blood-drenched massacre of almost all of Jack Crow's team is nowadays brutal and shocking to see. And let's not forget all those harmless monks he and his followers slaughter and butcher - Valek personally beheads one even after he tells him the whereabouts of the Berzier Cross.
John Herod in The Quick and the Dead. In his younger days, he was the sort of man who'd string a man up from a tree, prop him up on a chair, and offer to let him go if his eight-year-old daughter could shoot through the rope (being that she was eight, she accidentally shot her father instead). Now that he's older and more sedentary, he has to content himself with things like killing unarmed men, ordering Catholic missions burned down, and blowing away his own son in order to win a dueling contest.
The Kurgan from Highlander. An ancient immortal warrior with Rape, Pillage, and Burn as his raison d'être. If murdering Connor's mentor, raping his wife, and later claiming that she liked it doesn't cement his status as in irredeemable bastard, nothing can.
Ghostface from the Scream saga. In contrast to the unkillable mute monsters who usually inhabit slasher movies, most of the wearers of the mask are cunning, sadistic, intelligent villains with twisted motivations. Almost all of them qualify.
In the original Scream, Billy Loomis and his henchman Stu Redman are a duo of thrill-seeking sociopaths who treat rape and murder as a game. While Billy does have a Freudian Excuse of sorts (Sidney's mother broke up his family by having an affair with his father), it in no way excuses his mass killing spree or his framing of an innocent man for the entire thing.
In Scream 2, Mickey is a fame-seeking psychopath seemingly unconcerned with how many innocents he kills as long as he gets famous. But his partner in crime, Mrs. Loomis, is even worse. While avenging your dead son may be a Freudian Excuse for a killing spree, it loses some of its power if that son was a rapist/killer.
But he loses his title in Scream 4. Sidney's cousin Jill is easily the worst villain in the series, a deranged copycat killer who wipes out her own friends in a twisted attempt to become Sidney and hijack her fame. She even has her own mother killed and is easily the most Ax Crazy of the Ghostfaces so far. Her partner in crime, horror geek Charlie, may be the only Ghostface not to qualify as a Complete Monster. While he is a murderous psychopath, he was suckered into it by Jill, and his woobieish expression when he's killed by his own partner/girlfriend makes it seem like he was in way over his head.
The rapists from the first Death Wish, who rape Paul Kersey's daughter, force his wife to watch and service one of the others orally, then murder the wife to keep her from using the telephone before just zipping up like nothing out of ordinary happened and leaving.
Manny Fraker's sadistically joyful gang of buddies in 3 certainly qualify as well. They murder, rape, and pillage virtually everything and everyone in sight and feel absolutely no remorse about it. They just made the simple mistake of thinking that Kersey was someone to push around, and they allgettheir comeuppance.
Novecento has Attila and his girlfriend, who rape and kill a young boy unfortunate enough to walk in on them.
Brian Cox's Lektor in Manhunter isn't exactly a teddy bear. While Hannibal of Silence of the Lambs is a touchy subject due to the unpopular Hannibal Rising giving him a Freudian Excuse, Lektor has none of that, nor any redeeming features. Whilst his crimes are not specified beyond murdering young girls, what makes him so repulsive is that he enjoys torturing Will Graham with the knowledge that the only way he can catch killers is to think like them. Far from Lecter's acerbic mocking, Lektor is friendly, cooperative, never becomes angry, and assists Will in punishing him by suggesting the confiscation of his books if he doesn't help. This only makes him worse as it becomes more apparent that he's pushing Will further and further away from sanity with his subtle mocking ("The reason you caught me, Will, is we're just alike."). Even worse is that nothing he says can be contradicted or refuted: it's all true.
Late in the film, Lektor telephones Will to explain why he killed his victims - it made him feel like he was God. And he says it let Will know that if and when he kills the Big Bad Francis Dolarhyde, that's what he will feel too, and he should embrace it and do it again.
Mason Verger in Hannibal. He's an incestual pedophile bisexual rapist obsessed with watching the title character being eaten alive by wild boars. Many of his previous evil deeds - such as the adolescent rape/abuse of his lesbian sister - are only hinted at. An evil deed that is explicitly mentioned? He emotionally tortures orphans until they cry, at which point he drinks their tears in martinis. In a series based around vicious serial killers, Verger manages to stand out.
Reginald Shaw, the Big Bad gangster boss in 2010's The Tourist. As another character says, "He bragged...that he had killed every man his wife had slept with before she met him. When he found out how many there had been, he killed her too." As Shaw himself says, "You know, in our quaint legal system, if a man sleeps with my wife, I kill him and her, I get away scot free. Crime of passion is what it's called. But my passion extends to all the things I own. They are me. They represent me. So if a man steals from me, I kill him, I kill his wife, his children, his mother, I might even throw in the family doctor for good measure. For he has taken from me something for which I have paid the infinite price. My soul." (And there's that little incident where Shaw strangles an incompetent minion to death with a measuring tape, right in the middle of being fitted for a new suit.)
Thulsa Doom from the 1982 Conan the Barbarian film. He starts by slaughtering Conan's village (including decapitating Conan's mom while he stands next to her) and selling the children as slaves simply so that he can obtain weapons of fine steel from the barbarians. Later in the film, he orders a young woman to jump to her death just so he can illustrate how much control he has over his followers, then he orders Conan to be crucified. Shortly after that, we find out that he and his followers practice cannibalism. And then he kills Valeria, probably Conan's greatest love in the movie-verse, with a snake arrow, and then coldly tries to do the same thing to the Princess after deeming her no longer useful to him after Rexor and his army are defeated in the Battle of the Mounds.
Stripe from Gremlins is a sociopathic and sadistic creature, unlike the rest of the title monsters, who are more Laughably Evil. He's also merciless towards other Gremlins - it is shown when he kills one of them by shooting them in the head for cheating during a poker game. Even as a Mogwai, he is extremely vicious, at one point trying to bite the index finger of Pete Fountaine. Besides, we can see in the movie that a Gremlin is almost never shown directly hurting anyone (but only sabotaging to fatal effect the technology the characters in the film use). But not in Stripe's case, who attacks Billy with sawblades, a crossbow, and, worst of all, a chainsaw. And for more evilness, he enjoys it too much to stop doing it.
Duxton Chevalier from Mr. Accident is a surprisingly serious and evil villain for a comedy film. He forces his brother to hand over his egg company by threatening to chop the leg off of his beloved dog, and he gets more sinister as the film goes on. It's revealed that he murdered his own brother after already getting the company, stuffing his body in a refrigerator and sending it through a recycling machine...at least we thinkthe brother was already dead. He then spikes the chicken feed with nicotine in order to produce nicotine-spiked eggs to get people addicted to the eggs so he can bring in the cash. He does love his girlfriend, Sunday...of the homicidal Stalker with a Crush kind. As a result, when he discovers Roger is her new boyfriend, he stuffs him and his best friend in another refrigerator and tries to repeat what he did with his brother, while they're still alive! He then moves on to try to murder Sunday with an ax (which, frighteningly, he has on him at all times...) when she rebukes his affections one last time. After Roger confronts him on his plan, Roger asks if baby food is next. Duxton's reaction? "We're working on it."! In the end, he gets his when Roger sends him falling to a messy Disney Villain Death.
Lord Naritsugu of Thirteen Assassins is The Caligula to an insane degree. His very first scene has him raping the daughter-in-law of a lord who's hosting him for the night, and then killing her husband for good measure. This isn't an isolated incident, either. Naritsugu has been doing this for so long, he threatens the very stability of the nation, and nobody can touch him as he's the Shogun's brother. Later, we see him tie up a family for target practice (including a little girl) and hear how he massacred a peasant revolt, taking the leader's daughter, after cutting out her tongue and chopping off her limbs, for his use as a sex slave. His only reaction to seeing the titular assassins mow down his loyal soldiers who die in defense of him is to contemplate how amazing the era of war must have been while deciding to return to such days.
Surprising absolutely nobody, Johann "The Red Skull" Schmidt in Captain America: The First Avenger is one. Kills people even after he gets what he wants for no real reason? Check. Has no loyalty to anyone but himself? (Seriously, he's The Starscream to Hitler.) Check. Plans to annihilate all 'enemy' cities, including his own capital? Check. He even has POWs used in torturous experiments and plans to rule the world as the God he fancies himself as.
Also, the Nazi spy who uses a kid as a human shield when trying to escape from Captain America and then throws him into the river when he's done with him.
Carnegie from The Book of Eli. The man whores out his stepdaughter and later threatens to kill her (after promising her to his right hand man) and physically abuses her mother in order to extort information from her. And that's just what he does onscreen.
John Leslie Stevenson (AKA Jack the Ripper) from Time After Time is this. He kills a prostitute in the first ten minutes of the film, and after he escapes the police by traveling to the future, continues his killing spree. He blackmails H.G. Wells (who followed Stevenson to 1979) by threatening to kill the women Wells fell in love with if he doesn't give Stevenson the key that will prevent the time machine from returning to its time of departure and thus allowing Wells to continue following him. And when Wells gives Stevenson the key, he continues to hold the women Wells fell in love with hostage anyway. Also, his motivation for becoming the Ripper was a philosophy that violence is the natural order of things and that you might as well embrace it. Stevenson's Fate Worse than Death was well-deserved.
What about the classics? Ygor from Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein easily qualifies. He is first revealed to be a former assistant to Dr. Frankenstein who was hanged for grave robbing. He then embarks on a career of revenge using the Monster, until the Monster is crippled in an accident. After Wolf Frankenstein revives the Monster, he uses it to kill the rest of the jurors from his trial. He is then shot by Wolf and thought killed until Ghost. He survives the gun shot, revives the Monster, and blackmails Ludwig Frankenstein to bring the monster to full strength or he'll reveal Ludwig's family history to the people of Vasaria. Ludwig then tries put his assistant's brain in the Monster's head but Ygor convinces another of Ludwig's assistants, Doctor Bohmer, to put his brain in the Monster. This succeeds and Ygor becomes the Monster. However, Laser-Guided Karma kicks in, due to not being the same blood type as the intended brain donor. He goes blind before he kills Ludwigs's assistant that helped him. And then sets Ludwig's house on fire, killing both him and Ludwig.
It's even nastier when you consider that Ygor repeatedly described the Monster as 'his only friend'. The Monster trusted him too, so Ygor betrayed his sole friend just so he could become an immortal, invincible superhuman. For that matter, the Monster wanted to have the brain of a little eight-year-old girl put into his skull! And when Ygor disagrees, saying "Tonight, your brain will be Ygor's brain!... Ygor will die for you!" the Monster obliges him.
Did no one mention Norma Bates in the Psycho -series yet? She regularly berates Norman for bringing women in the motel and offs them if they come. It turns out she's been Dead All Along and that Norman has created a Split Personality of her.
The fourth movie reveals more to this. She slaps Norman just for laughing at his father's funeral, although she is the one who made him laugh, locks him up in a closet after finding out he has dirty magazines, and dresses him in girl clothes for finding him with a prostitute. When she becomes engaged to Chet Rudolph, Norman kills both of themby poison, starting the events of the first movie. So, in hindsight, he shouldn't have regretted killing his own mother after all, if only because she was the single worst parent anyone in a horror film's universe could ever have (aside from Carrie's mother, that is). He just shouldn't have tried to preserve the illusion that she was still alive, as that was what got him mixed up in what will happen in the franchise, starting with the first film; after all, why bother trying to impersonate your own mother when she's on the level of Carrie's mom, if not worse?
If you were to look up the term "Sexual sadist" in a dictionary, chances are Vukmir from A Serbian Film would be pictured right next to the definition. No atrocity is too low for him in his films (murder, rape, necrophilia, pedophilia) and even in his last, twisted moments on Earth at the hands of the protagonist, he revels in the violence surrounding him.
Sylvia Ganush in Drag Me to Hell fails to repay her loan extensions twice and, when she's denied it a third time, makes a fool of herself in front of a bank while begging for a third extension, then blames Christy for shaming her and then curses her to HELL for it! For all eternity. For what? Just for doing her job. And worse: Sam Raimi has said that this was justified.
Also qualifying is the unnamed gypsy who did the same thing to a child for stealing a mere trinket. Which his family tried to return. Although it is strongly implied it was Sylvia, who cursed him.
The title character from Zodiac, who tortures and kills random people and flaunts his crimes to the police and media, all for shits and giggles.
Brick Top in Snatch is probably the most horrible human being to yet appear in a Guy Ritchie movie (which would be saying something). His Establishing Character Moment shows him ordering two Mooks tasered and suffocated with plastic bags, after which they are to be dismembered and fed to pigs, and he only gets worse from there. He shows absolutely no compunction about having a clan of Irish Travellers murdered if one of their number doesn't fight for him in a rigged boxing match, and to prove it, he orders the fighter's mother burned alive in her trailer. There are two kinds of characters in that movie: characters who have never heard of Brick Top and characters who are terrified of him.
General Thade from the 2001 Planet of the Apes. A brutal leader of Ape armies who enslaves humans, tortures them, and wants to simply exterminate them. In one scene, he also kills two of his henchmen, who told him about a crashed spacecraft, to ensure the information remained a secret.
Victor Frankenstein from The Curse of Frankenstein, in contrast with every other interpretation of the character. Not only is he willing to kill people to salvage body parts to construct his monster, he also has the monster kill a servant girl he promised he would marry so she wouldn't snitch on him and his experiment.
In Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, the version of M. Bison seen therein ritually sacrificed his pregnant wife, transferring the last shreds of his conscience into their newborn daughter after ripping her out (proof that you can, indeed, fall from the floor). In the film story proper, he has Balrog punch Chun-Li's mother so hard that she gets cancer, holds the families of property owners hostage to force them to sign their land over to him, repurposes a henchwoman as a punching bag, and snaps the neck of Chun-Li's father right in front of her.
In the 2010 polish movie Lincz, the main villain Zaranek is truly disturbing. The fact that his film is based on real events in Poland makes this even more disturbing. To name only some examples of his behavior: trying to extort money from an old lady and, after she refuses, beating her and stabbing her; threatening people who try to stop him with the slaughter of their children; etc.
In 2010 Horror Movie Stake Land, the Big Bad Jebediah Loven is already a religious nutcase, but he crosses the Moral Event Horizon when he tries to rape a sister. He goes Up to Eleven when he tortures and kills a pregnant woman. He brutally and deservedly meets his end thanks to Martin and the Badass Mister.
In the 2010 Legion, there is God himself! Instead of being a loving and merciful God, he is likely the most triumphant example of the God Is Evil trope. Instead of just mercifully making the planet explode, He resorts to the underhanded method of bodysnatching human hosts to attack and murder other humans, some of these human suits being children. Also, if God is supposedly omniscient, He would know about the redemptive traits of the humans in the diner, nevermind humans the world over, and their selfless attempts to save each other, but ignores them in favor of continuing the genocide. If the sequel (if it's made) doesn't feature Charlie's baby overthrowing God following an epic Shut Up, Hannibal!/"The Reason You Suck" Speech, there will be Hell to pay.
Hyperion, the King of Crete from 2011's Immortals, is an extremely brutal and terrifying villain. Having been presumably devout and good enough a king to inspire fanatical loyalty in his men prior to the death of his family during a plague he blames the gods for doesn't mitigate this fact nearly enough. In his first scene, he and his soldiers raid a monastery to obtain the location of the Epirus Bow from the priest there. When the priest doesn't talk, he douses him with oil and burns him alive. When the keepers of the oracle refuse to tell him as well, he executes them using the Bronze Bull, a torture device specifically designed to put people through as much pain as possible as it roasts them alive. He only gets worse. He marches his army through Greece, raping and pillaging across the land and brutally slaughtering everything in his way. One scene in particular that stands out is his raid of Theseus' home village; after his army destroys all resistance, they start carrying off the woman as slaves. When Theseus runs to his mother's aid, slaying a few soldiers, Hyperion, for no reason other than to be evil, slits Theseus mother's throat. And what is his motivation for all this? He wants to use the Epirus Bow to release the Titans, specifically for the purpose of killing the gods, all of which are portrayed sympathetically, while at the same time raping all women he comes across to leave a legacy of children across Greece. All this, combined with his love of others' pain and casual disregard for the lives of his own men (who he regularly kills forvariousreasons), makes it impossible for the audience not to cheer when Theseus finally kills him by pressing a knife into his throat, the same knife Hyperion had previously used to slit Thesus's mother's throat.
Azazel from Fallen. With one of his victims, he possesses them, then impersonates them for a few days and completely ruins their life and career, and finally wakes them back up so that they're actually aware that their life has been ruined (unlike an earlier victim who was killed while still possessed)...right before violently killing them. Yes, he's that cruel.
Oba from Jailhouse 41, the second of the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, paints herself as this. She drowned her son and stabbed her unborn baby to death because her husband was unfaithful; she uses the scars to instill fear and exert her authority. She tortures and humiliates hostages, both the misogynist men who killed one of her companions and some perfectly innocent women. She eventually dies on a rubbish dump, cursing the people of her hometown, fantasising about returning to stab them and burn their houses down.
In 1996 film The Adventures of Pinocchio, there is Lorenzini. It is another incarnation of the evil Coachman who is already mentioned on the Disney and Literature pages. In this incarnation, however, he is a Composite Character together with the puppet master. As always, he kidnaps a bunch of innocent children and turns them into donkeys. Luckily, unlike all the other versions, he is NOT a Karma Houdini in this one.
Ivan Korshunov from Air Force One is a cruel and heartless terrorist who remorselessly murders innocent hostages (including one woman who begs for her life) in order to force President James Marshall to comply with his demands of releasing a genocidal general from prison.
Probably Hendricks from the fourth Mission: Impossible. His goal is to destroy the whole world and kill every human being just to check what it would be like! While this may sound like a typical Omnicidal Maniac, he arguably becomes a Complete Monster when he deliberately commits suicide in order to ensure that his evil plan will work. See?! He values his horrible plans even more than his own life!
Owen Davian in the third movie. His actions (selling weapons to terrorists, killing agents by bombs implanted in their heads, brutally beating up the defenceless hero in front of his equally defenseless wife) are bad enough, but still things to be expected from a villain in a spy movie. It's his complete lack of any redeeming qualities and incapability of showing any other emotion than annoyance, anger, and a really creepy combination of Dull Surprise and sadistic glee that really makes him qualify for the title. Hearing him count to ten while holding Ethan's wife hostage execution-style is pants-shitting scary.
"What I did to your friend was....fun. It was fun."
Professor Moriarty in the second Sherlock Holmes film. He targets Dr. Watson and his wife on their honeymoon when Watson isn't even connected to the case (in other words, simply to spite Holmes); blackmails a man into doing Moriarty's work and then killing himself by holding the man's family; bombs a diplomatic conference to mask a single murder; personally tortures Holmes using a large industrial hook while enjoying every minute of it; and his ultimate goal is to ignite a world war so that he can gain money through his investments in arms, steel, and medicine.
Simon Phoenix from Demolition Man. In the movie's opening he takes 20 people hostage, which a misjudging of the cop John Spartan killed - actually, it's later revealed that they were all dead before Spartan arrived. Even worst, the body count of those hostages was 30, as Phoenix planned it for his perverse amusement and having Spartan take a part of the responsibility. In 2032, he's even worse, as he plans to spread chaos again, setting free a dozen of the worst criminals of the 20th century, one of them Jeffrey Dahmer.
Silers and his gang from Winnetou und sein Freund Old Firehand. They attack the peaceful village full of innocent people and almost turn it into a sea of flames. When Silers' brother gets captured (which, according to Silers, is a motive of why they do all these things), half of the village tries to free him, and when they do, he gets killed by one of the main characters. People leave the town out of fear, only to meet Silers with his gang. They try to explain to them every single thing and how they tried to help. What is the gang's reaction?
"We decide who is Amigos here. Definitely not some filthy coward begging for his life."
Then, they kill everybody, including the women and children.
Jennet, aka the Woman in Black, in The Woman in Black. She turns out to be the ghost that was responsible for the deaths of the children in the town. She manipulates them into committing suicide. And it's also hinted that she has possession of those children's souls after their deaths. And she also kills Arthur and his son at the end as well (although its implied that she softened the blow on Arthur and his son, given that they evidentially still retained their souls in the ending). The fact that she has a Freudian Excuse in that she lost her son in the marshes does not excuse the murders of the other innocent children. And she was also not looking for closure even after her son's corpse was brought to her, saying that she would never forgive.
Hobo With a Shotgun, being a tribute to 70s and 80s vigilante movies, features these a lot:
Most of Scumtown's police force. When the Hobo goes to a station and tries to get them to put a stop to the Drake's sadistic reign, one officer tries to convince the Hobo they can't do anything. As the Hobo keeps insisting on justice and Ivan, one of the Drake's sons, enters, this same officer starts watching in disdainful satisfaction as Ivan carves the word 'scum' into Hob's chest and throws him into a back alley. It's made clear the police don't do anything, not because they couldn't, but because The Drake pays them a lot and they don't mind corruption at all. There's also one dirty cop who tries to molest Abby and uses words like 'fuck' and 'cunt' more than you'd think would sound realistic (apparently to make sure we realize he is an unpleasant person).
Many scumbags like this can be seen in passing. A snuff-film maker, who enjoys to watch people eat shards of glass and other horrible junk in exchange for payment, verbally basking in how demeaning it is. Masked robbers, who happen to be attempting to rob a convenience store, demanding money, one of them pointing a gun at a nearby baby and giggling like he's ready to pull the trigger at any moment. Fortunately, for both the storekeeper and the baby, the Hobo happens to be there, with a fully loaded shotgun within arm's reach. A pedophile Santa. A rapist, who forcibly takes a girl from studying in order to force her to have sex with him. All of these scumbags meet their demise at the wrong end of the shotgun.
Slick and Ivan. Encouraging arcade-goers to snort cocaine to ease off pain, reveling in their power to cause people suffering, attempting to rape Abby, and surprising the Hobo at the police station to carve the word 'scum' into his chest, these men are really nasty to begin with. When the news of the Hobo cleansing the town reach the ears of The Drake, Slick and Ivan, ever so much like their father, are more than happy to sow new terror. Slick, following some inspirational speech from his father, casually goes to a schoolbus and asks children whether they like hoboes. When they cheerfully answer yes, he says, with a mixed expression of anger and enthusiasm, that he hates them. Then he gleefully torches the children while Ivan casually plays some music on a radio he is carrying and flashes a sociopathic grin. Following this, Slick goes to a local news station, kills a newsreader, and showcases a charred corpse of a child, influencing the whole town to start killing homeless people just to get spared from a similar fate themselves. He and Ivan later manage to trace Hobo down themselves and break into Abby's apartment. A fight ensues, during which Hobo manages to parry Slick's skater blade with a toaster, getting the latter's body to twitch. This only drives him to orgasm. Soon, Ivan escapes and Hobo grieviously injures Slick by shooting him into his groin. Just after Hobo leaves, Slick calls his father, only to be interrupted by a ghostly, charred schoolbus arriving right before him. As its doors open, creepy, otherwordly wailing of children can be heard and Slick quickly finds himself inside it, hitting a window with both his palms in desperation, possibly indicating he got dragged to Hell. Even when Slick is dead, Ivan still gets no favor from his father, much to his great dismay (not that it likely wins him any sympathy). At the climax, he demands some, only for the Drake to coldly shoot him dead before proceeding to attempt to do the same to Hobo as to his (the Drake's) brother at the beginning.
Then there's the Drake himself, the sadistically hammy main villain. We first see him capturing his brother, whose head he has already locked in a sewer lid. The Drake, along with his sons Slick and Ivan, then put him in a sewer hole and tie a rope around his neck with another end of the rope tied to exhaust pipe before driving off, detaching the poor fellow's head, which results in one a blood shower. All the while, they are showing off their power to the downtroddened citizens of the city. The Drake practically revels in corruption, murdering random innocent people for show and having unashamedparental favoritism. At the climax, he is aiming to do the same to Hobo as to his (the Drake's) brother at the beginning. He mocks Hobo, trying to get him to believe his influence was ultimately for nothing - to be proven wrong as Abby's reinforcements arrive and the onlooking game-show audience members also decide they've had enough. When Abby fights the Drake, he sticks her hand into a whirling lawnmower blade, reducing it to a bloody stump - which still doesn't stop Abby from lifting the sewer lid weighing Hobo into a hole. Hobo finishes the Drake off, not even minding getting killed himself along the rest of the corrupt town in an extreme version of a Mexican Standoff.
Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) from The Third Man. He steals penicillin from hospitals in post-World War II Vienna, waters it down so that it is useless, and sells it back to the open market. It's saying something when the lucky ones are those who merely die from the now-lethal medicine: many people, including children, are driven insane and die painfully. All this happens and Lime doesn't even feel any remorse.
The one armed man. The opening scenes of the movie featuring the flashbacks to Helen Kimble's murder and how brutal it was makes one shiver.
Dr. Nichols. As despicable as the one-armed man was, he was merely hired muscle. Nichols? Arranged the murder of Kimble and his wife, did absolutely nothing while Kimble was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, then acted as though he were aiding Kimble in his efforts to prove his innocence, while, in reality, he was again planning to have Kimble killed. He did all this while pretending to be Kimble's friend and all for the money he was going to make off of a pharmaceutical deal.
Colonel Zaysen from Rambo destroys entire Afghan villages and kills innocent people, including women and children, with mines, bio-weapons, and other evil stuff for no reason at all, even when said people did nothing at all.
The bullies (especially the male ones, particulary their leader Anders, Paul, and few others) and, by extension, almost the entire class from the Estonian film Klass. They may seem like ordinary jerkasses and bullies, but their treatment of Joseph and Kaspar pushes them into this territory. Their treatment towards these two is very cruel and despicable, even for the bullies. These guys just keep running further beyond the Moral Event Horizon. In the beginning of movie, they bully and belittle Joseph in a basketball game, then fully undress him and push him into the girl's changing room. This was so bad that it made Kaspar, one of the bullies, have a change of heart and become Joseph's friend after realizing what he has been doing. Then the bullies begin targeting both Joseph and Kaspar and their bullying gets worse: stealing Joseph's notebook and not giving him it back, later forcing Joseph to apologise for telling the teacher about their bullying, cutting and stealing his shoes, assaulting him both at school and out of it, calling Joseph and Kaspar homosexuals because they are friends, sending them insulting notes, framing Kaspar for Joseph's bullying. Later, they begin beating Joseph and Anders kicks him in the stomach several times. After that, they still want to force Joseph to apologise for telling about their bullying. The girls of the class also join the bullying by laughing at Joseph's suffering, insulting him, and supporting the bullies. After Joseph consequently tells his parents about their bullying and they inform the school about the class bullying Joseph, the class choose to blame Joseph for everything, despite the fact that they were the ones who started bullying Joseph. Wanting revenge, they call both Kaspar and Joseph into going to beach by writing emails to them showing each other as the fake sender. If you don't think they have crossed the Moral Event Horizon a while ago, you most likely see this point as crossing that crucial line for the remotest of antagonist sympathy. They force Kaspar to fellate Joseph at knife point and photograph the sexual act without showing the knife, emotionally breaking both Kaspar and Joseph by doing this, and they simply laugh at their suffering. Even worse, before doing this, Paul, one of the bullies, thinks that this is not evil enough! This finally pushes Joseph and Kaspar over the edge and thus leads them to stealing the guns from Joseph's father, going into the school, and killing the bullies to avenge themselves. While the ending is terrifying, the class deserved their deaths due to their treatment and those who escaped the shooting will have to deal with the fact that the people they cruelly bullied almost killed them. The only people from Joseph's class who escape this trope are Joseph and Kaspar, Kaspar's ex-girlfriend Thea (although she's no saint herself as she broke up with Kaspar because he was protecting Joseph and participated in their bullying herself), who was disgusted with the aforementioned fellating, and Kerli, the goth girl of the class and the only one who did not participate in the class bullying of Joseph and Kaspar and was disgusted with the class' treatment of the two boys (a few scenes indicating that the class teased her too due to this). Joseph and Kaspar allow her to leave the cafeteria, before they begin to shoot the bullies. Made worse by the fact that the film was based on Real Life events.
Peter in Final Destination 5 is not only perfectly willing to commit murder to save his own life, he's the first human villain to pose a serious threat. Comparatively, the only human villain in the series before him, William Bludworth, is actually a Harmless Villain, since his main purpose is to serve as Death's own personal janitor and give protagonists some cryptic clues on how to evade death for as long as they can. Also, when he suggested that the protagonists "kill or be killed" and Peter subsequently went mad and tried to kill Molly because Sam didn't save Candice in his vision, it was Peter's own decision to go the murder route; Bludworth, all-knowing he may be, can't control the actions of those who he gives his cryptic advice to. Nathan took Bludworth's advice completely by accident when the opportunity presented itself (if you look closely, you'll notice that Roy actually pushed Nathan away from the hook right before being impaled by it himself), and Sam used Bludworth's words responsibly by killing Peter to protect Molly from him.
Death itself is also one of these. It committs mass murders purely for fun and in the most gruesome way, always giving a Hope Spot to the survivors, making'em believe they escaped their doom...before having them slayed by the killing machines. It's also shown to be extremely sadistic as it can also manipulate objects around it to create some sort of twisted irony before killing someone, like playing a song on the radio or having the death happen in front of someone in particular.
Both villains in the film Act of Valor fit this trope:
Abu Shabal is a Chechnyan Jihadist who desires to commit terror attacks on America for Islam. His first appearance has him driving an Ice Cream Truck with an accomplice that'srigged to explode, and his target was a Phillipino school, killing several schoolchildren, including an American child and his father, the American ambassador. He then gains some bomb jackets that cannot be detected specifically because they use ceramic ball berings rather than metallic ones so they could commit terrorism on a massive scale in America and cause a collapse to society. It's also strongly implied that he forces several of his minions to undergo martyrdom against their will, as the accomplice from the car bomb is shown terrified at having to go through with the suicide bombing, and the woman he rigs with the vest to distract the SEALs when they are in hot pursuit to the tunnel is shown to be hesitant in going through with it (to which Shamal "reassures" her that she'll be reunited with her husband in heaven) and is visibly shown silently sobbing when she ends up having to go through with the suicide bombing.
Christo, the Ukrainian drug dealer, is also cut from the same cloth, even with his one redeemable trait (his love for his family). First off, he is shown delivering drugs to various people across the world. In addition, he is also in league with Abu Shamal and arranges for the capture of a CIA agent in Costa Rica when it became apparent that she discovered some evidence about his partnership with Shamal, and then orders for her to be tortured, including being beat up, and then have her hands and feet impaled with a drill. Oh, and the reason why he qualifies as one despite his loyalty to his family? He is shown grinning upon his capture when telling the SEALs that the can't stop Shabal's plans after explaining them when faced with the prospect that he won't see his family again when he was captured, meaning that even after admitting what Shabal's plans, he has absolutely no regrets with working with him. Also, he's the one who supplied the vests to Shabal and his Jihadists, as well as a means to smuggle them into the country, meaning that he was also responsible for Shabal's crimes had he succeeded in infiltrating America and committing terrorist attacks.
Kevin Khatchadourian from We Need To Talk About Kevin is as unremittingly evil as any character that has ever been put to screen. He psychologically tortures his mother for the entire film, making sure to only show his true colors to her, and leading others to believe that he's just misunderstood. In reality, Kevin seems unable to truly feel anything but hate and boredom, which eventually leads him to murder his loving father and little sister and to calmly walk into his school and do the same thing to several classmates of his. Presumably at random. Kevin has no Freudian Excuse of any kind. The closest he comes to displaying any kind of remorse is when he, after spending 2 years in prison, admits that even he doesn't really know why he did what he did.
Don Logan in Sexy Beast is a Psycho for Hire with a Hair-Trigger Temper, who is one of the most frightening and hateful Complete Monsters in film. He does not do anything in the film that is not about physically or mentally torturing a weaker person.
The sour-faced little Centurion from The Passion of the Christ who gets mocked by his soldiers and takes out his rage on Jesus - by making his men continue the whipping, but with scourges that have sharp metal hooks. After Jesus is flayed by this, the Centurion makes them turn him over and do the same to his belly and chest. It doesn't stop until Pilate himself interferes. The Sanhedrin priesthood qualifies too, but especially the high priest Caiaphas. He blackmails Pontius Pilate into crucifying Jesus or he would have a revolt on his hands that would kill both Jesus and Pilate. Unfortunate Implications about Jews abound.
Satan himself counts as well. He is Satan after all and he can be considered responsible for all the horrible things that happen in the movie.
