Bad year for villains
WHEN pulled off with just the right combination of sinister subtlety and soul-sundering evil, screen villainy can be the most awesome viewing experience on TV or in the movies.
Take Anthony Hopkins’ brilliant portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.” In the hands of many other established “evildoers,” the character would have been predictably terrifying.
But, Hopkins went beyond those standard parameters by stressing Lecter’s unsettling mix of total genius on the one hand, and consummate, debased and absolute evil on the other.
Contrast
Amazing light and the pitch-black darkness of the demonized soul—that’s the quirky contrast he effected that had viewers whimpering and shrieking in their theater seats, because they couldn’t predict what new and even more extreme terrors lurked around the next cinematic corner.
By that yardstick for on-screen evil, 2011 was a bad year for TV-movie villains, especially of the homegrown variety. Instead of reducing viewers to terrorized blobs, they were so-over-the-top in their alleged villainy that viewers were reduced—to giggles.
Part of the problem may have been the fact that some kontrabidas were so in-demand, hopping from one dastardly character to the next, that they didn’t have time to think up satisfyingly diverse portrayals.
For instance, in “Binondo Girl,” Cherry Pie Picache was assigned to play the series’ resident Chinoy billionaire’s other wife, who is so resentful of her second-violin status that she doesn’t rest until she’s financially ruined the man she swears she loves.
Fine, but the means she uses to express her jealousy and anger are much too patently obvious to be truly unsettling, so her game is up much too early.
—That’s the problem with obvious and in-your-face villainy: Viewers can see the kontrabida’s wicked schemes coming a mile away—so, their “shock value” is woefully depleted.
Mark Gil is another otherwise fine actor who’s been done in by his villain role in “Ikaw Ay Pag-ibig.” He’s practically the only character assigned to make life really miserable for his daughter, her lover and their love child. So, he has to be too unrelievedly, spectacularly bad to keep them in constant torment.
Gina Alajar is a similarly gifted thespian, but she was also a victim of the “pure evil” plot requirement in the recently concluded “Amaya” teleserye. Her unfair obligation was to make life a living hell for the title character, and she was given many opportunities to do her worst—thus coming across as a demented virago with precious few shreds of “humanizing” feelings left.
These and other less than effective screen villains need to remind themselves that evil shouldn’t be obvious, and that it can’t be unrelieved, because no human being, not even Hannibal Lecter himself, can be totally inhuman.
