Super-Villainy 101...A How-to Guide for Movie Villains

Okay, you’re a movie villain…you’ve dedicated your whole life to the pursuit of evil, probably for no other reason than your well-to-do parents made you practice the bassoon for eight hours a day, then sent you to Sunday school in a purple corduroy suit with half-mast trousers … but, hey… it scarred you!    

You were always last pick in sports, and the girls sniggered at your perfect elocution and lego hair…. And while your peers were watching Dukes of Hazards and The A-Team, you were made to study greek philosophy and advanced calculus, spending your Saturday mornings beating old men at chess. 

   

You were the misfit kid, the butt of jokes--a social rating of zero followed you through college and university into adult life, and with it the slow realisation that you were never going to fit in.  But, oh, were you going to make them pay for all those wet-willies and wedgies; the stink bombs and whoopee cushions.

Deep down, you realise that world domination and the destruction of western values is just an extension of some massive “mummy issues" you can’t get a handle on.  But you feed off it. You’re totally equipped to carry out your plans. Everything is going swimmingly, even into the second act … but there’s something missing. You need a nemesis, someone to complete you, a hero every bit as good as you are bad. So much so, that when you catch him you can’t help but give a sporting chance to the hapless hero.  

Rather than cold execution, you devise an elaborate death involving chains and pulleys, and possibly a bowling ball and gutter … all because when you were six you got the world’s hardest logic puzzle compendium for Chistmas instead of Mouse Trap.  You discourse your genius plans to the hero, just so he knows how intellectually superior you are … perhaps savouring a glass of vintage port and some French blue cheese while you do. (Despite the lasers, it’s all so civilised!)  

It’s like some kind of weird reverse Stockholm Syndrome. Could it be you you’re pleased when he predictably escapes?

Depending on the movie’s certification, you’ll end up dead or in a specially adapted secure prison for criminal masterminds. You might even get out for another crack at the hero, depending on how much the film grosses in the box office.   But even if you do, you won’t learn from your mistakes…you never will. Just like those Batman villains in the sixties TV show, you’ll be undone by your own glittering hubris....

But we'll watch you, and we may even root for you. Because there's a little bit of villainy in all of us...

MWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!