A Look at Some of Cinema’s Best Bad Guys and What They Should Drive
Halloween is the time for all things creepy, scary, spooky, and unnerving. Because of that, we are going to take a good long look at the bad guys, boogeymen, and villains that have terrified us, then we’re going to take what is scary about them and use that to describe what they would be driving.
There is a popular communications theory that we are quite fond of, revolving around the character Batman. The Batman theory states, “Batman is always going to be the least interesting person in anything about Batman” insinuating that the most interesting elements of any story come from the villain that a protagonist has to face.
At Surfwrench, we love a solid villain. We like the ones who are charismatic, terrifying, and often times, not entirely wrong. Once again, this is because we do everything that we can to basically be the automotive industry’s Batman. So fire up the Saint-Saens and take a look at some of our favorite villains, and what they would drive if given the opportunity.
Hans Landa – ‘55 SL300 Gullwing
Image via IMDB
Hans Landa(Christoph Waltz) from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a hands down contender for “Most Terrifying Bad Guy” in any movie ever. Ruthless, intelligent, cruel, sarcastic, and with a weird, quirky sort of charm. Landa is a bad, bad man. He will find you. However, despite all of this, he is one of the most real boogie men out there. The organization that he represented, the SS, was a very real group of very real boogie men who perpetrated very real atrocities.
He gets his comeuppance in the end of Inglourious by way of getting a swastika carved into his head, only after ending WWII, getting the Medal of Honor, and an estate on Nantucket for his role in the demise of Hitler.
Image via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
As such, he needs a car that befits this sort of classy, elegant, intelligent bad guy status. We also think that he wouldn’t be totally ashamed of his SS past. Therefore, the only car that could fit a guy like this is a 1955 Mercedes Benz SL300 Gullwing. Seriously, never has a car ever fit a character better than the SL300 Gullwing does.
Anton Chigurh – 4th Gen Toyota Hilux Diesel
Image via IMDB
Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in the Coen Brothers Best Picture winning No Country For Old Men is another one of those scary/real types of boogeymen. If Landa is a scalpel, Anton is a roofing hammer – brutally effective and utterly unstoppable. Woody Harrelson describes it best with a bit of dialogue. The people who hire Chigurh ask Harrelson how dangerous he is, he gives one of the best lines of the movie.
Wait, did someone who kills people for a living just compare a fellow hitman to the bubonic plague? Wow, thats hardcore. Chigurh has one thing on his mind, hunting down the people who took a satchel of money from a drug deal gone bad as per his job description. Anything other than that is off the table. He does his job to the letter (ok, he shoots the guys who hired him because they didn’t trust him to do the job…but that’s not the point). Chigurh is so brutally utilitarian there’s only one thing that he would drive:
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Enter, the 4th Generation Toyota Hilux (we had to) Turbo Diesel. It’s foreign, strange, 4 wheel drive and utterly unstoppable. Chigurh is the type of operator that doesn’t mind being shot, crashed into, and having bones sticking out of this arm. Pair this with the fact that Toyota trucks have always had a reputation for surviving things that would kill a terminator. Seriously, if you gave Chigurh a Hilux, it would be classified as a weapon of mass destruction.
Alex Delarge – Citroen DS
Image via IMDB
Alexander DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) in the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, is one of the strangest villains of all time. His only real motivation for being a straight up villain, is that it’s fun. Drugs in the milk, robbery, grand theft auto, rape, murder: all in a night’s ultraviolence for Alex and his droogs all set to a bit of the old Ludwig Van.
Alex comes from a weird, dystopian world. The language is strange, the aesthetics are strange, and the methods of reform, I.E. the Ludovico Technique, is pretty strange. Brutality is the dish du jour, however, intelligence is also important.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
What better to fit this strange new world, than a car that was strange, and introduced a lot of new stuff to the world: the Citroen DS. The Citroen DS was a car straight out of science fiction, that would fit in perfectly to the dystopian Britain that Alex prowled. The DS featured an independent, ride leveling hydraulic suspension that would lower itself when the car came to a stop. It also featured headlights that would swivel with steering wheel so you could see around corners, a semi-automatic transmission, and headlights that would level up and down as well when braking or accelerating. We’re not saying that he would buy one of these, as they were quite expensive, but it would be a great car to knick on the way to and from some more ultraviolence.
Norman Bates – ‘60 Ford Falcon
Image via IMDB
Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Hitchcock’s 1960’s horror masterpiece Psycho comes across as more awkward than a full blown murderer in the early parts of the film. Yes, he is a bit unnerving, but not nearly a full blown monster like the previously mentioned villains. The brilliance of Norman Bates is that he would have no problem blending in.
Because of this, he would drive something hideously pedestrian. Something that no one would really suspect a deeply disturbed murder rolling up in. Something like a 1960 Ford Falcon. You’re not out running anyone with a ‘60 Falcon. However, no one would bat an eye. Although it doesn’t have room for mother…
Image by Rex Gray via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
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