I can’t resist participating in MCF’s blogparty, and throwing my nominees for the top five villains from movies, comics, TV, etc, into the mix:

5) Darth Vader... A no-brainer. He’s got to be on the list.

4) ”Sideshow Bob” Terwilliger... I love it when Sideshow Bob pops up on an episode of The Simpsons. As voiced by Kelsey Grammer, Sideshow Bob is both menacing and hilarious. I could name favorite appearances by him on the show, but this blog entry would take several pages. If I had to pick a favorite, it would have to be when he married Aunt Selma and tried to blow her up.

3) Dr. Doom... Hey, disfigured, super-techno-powered comic book bad guys are a dime a dozen. How many of them are also diplomats? Dr. Doom enjoys political privileges that the Green Goblin and the Joker and The Kingpin could only dream of… and his position in the comics universe is unlike any other. To heck with him being the villain in the Fantastic Four movie… Doom deserves a movie of his own.

2) Amon Goeth... I hope I’m not cheating here by going to a villain from real life, and I hope it doesn’t seem that I’m making light of the Holocaust in any way… but Amon Goeth, as played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, is absolutely chilling. Fiennes gives a performance of uncommon depth and power, and manages to make Goeth both human and purely evil. The scenes where he experiments with forgiveness, only to find it unrewarding, and then reverts back to absolute disregard for human life, are hard to shake. He's believable, both as an absolute devil and as a real man.

1) Tommy DeVito... You’d have to be a pretty heinous to come in ahead of a real life Nazi on this list, and Tommy DeVito, as played by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, is heinous indeed. Based on real-life gangster Tommy DeSimone, Pesci’s character was absolutely ruthless, vicious, and vile. He didn’t mind murdering. In fact, he enjoyed it. And the messier and more violent the killing was, the more he liked it. The amazing thing is, as horrifying as Pesci’s character in Goodfellas is, the real Tommy DeSimone was worse… angrier, more bloodthirsty, and a great deal larger and more physically intimidating than Pesci’s diminutive size. Imagine that!

So there’s my list of the five best (meaning worst) villains from pop culture. Each of them dark, each of them evil... and one of them is probably the real Keyser Soze!