The 7 best mad characters of cinema
We could say that Disney movies have a bad effect on us (see the latest article). And who could blame us? Childhood is the period in which one receives the fundamental messages from life. However, we have to admit that the movies who fascinated us the most, the ones you exclusively watch when you’re adult, don’t exactly have harmless messages or innocent characters.
So, you can find here the seven best crazy characters from the movies:
1.Gollum. Absolutely creepy and a little frightening at first sight, the creature Gollum is the favourite crazy character of every fantasy enthusiast. Psychologically unstable even in the book, in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy (2001-2003) he is made absolutely unique. He has two opposite but complementary personalities and a mortal obsession for the Ring, that he owned for five hundred years and gave him a repulsive aspect and a sick mind. Together with his mimicry and his hoarse voice, his famous quote (“My precious!”) has become the symbol of an epic literary and cinematographic trilogy.
2.Silas. For a while, there has been a widespread annoying obsession: everytime someone entered in a church and saw a weird symbol on a wall, they thought to have discovered one of the ancient Western world secrets. However, we have to admit that ‘The Da Vinci Code’ was written with great skill and had the ability to fascinate everyone of us, and the same-named movie (2006) has only increased the suspense. Maybe, the character who upset us the most in the movie (even if the end revealed we were wrong) was the monk Silas.
He moves in the shadow thinking that he had to complete a mission in the name of God, he answers at the same time to a dark ‘Master’ and to his bishop. He kills a large number of people trying to get to the mysterious ‘Holy Grail’, which will be revealed for what it actually is only in the end of the movie, before the protagonist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks). It’s a good movie, a bit complicated as you noticed, but it should be seen with critical sense not to get the wrong idea.
3.Joker. He’s the ‘bad guy’ par excellence in the Batman universe. A lot of actors have interpreted this character, including Jack Nicholson in 1989 and Joaquin Phoenix, who has just won an Oscar for his role, in 2019. But the one we have in mind was interpreted by a great Heath Ledger, Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008).
He’s a crazy criminal, but his aims are very different from the ones of every gangster in Gotham City, so much that he has become famous thanks to the speech he makes while he burns a mountain of money: “All you care about is money. This city deserves a better class of criminals.” Committed to spread the chaos through the city and to prove the basic meanness of the human soul, but overall to carry on his love-hate relationship with Batman, facing him he says: “I don’t wanna kill you. What would I do without you? […] You complete me.”
4.Jack Torrance. We couldn’t but include in this list the eternal Stanley Kubrick, because he actually has that mood of instability that we like. Let’s also say that we can make a list of crazy characters by only including his movies, but let’s stick with one. And if you have to choose just one, we might as well pick the craziest one: Jack Torrance from Shining (1980).
It’s not a light-hearted movie, one that you watch when you have nothing to do, but it certainly is a masterpiece all around the world. We have seen millions of memes about Jack Nicholson, the actor in the movie, that, with his crazy eyes, looks out the door he has just destroyed with an axe and which opens the room where his wife is hiding. However, this is the end. Before that, the story is that the protagonist has to spend 5 months with his family to work in an isolated hotel in the middle of nowhere. It’s not the funniest job ever. If you then think about the fact that the spirit of a forerunner, who had killed his entire family before committing suicide, haunts Jack and drives him crazy, well, you have all the ingredients for a wonderful horror movie.
5.Leonard Lawrence, alias Gomer Pyle. Did we say that we just wanted to stick with one Kubrick’s character? Well, we were wrong. It’s not possible to just mention one, but this is the last, we swear. Poor Leonard Lawrence made a lot of people laugh, sadly, as ‘Full Metal Jacket’ (1987) in general. In fact, most of the people watch just the first half of the movie, neglecting the fact that it is a very dramatic film.
In this part, we see the poor 20-year-old that is a victim of the cruel hazing typical of the American army in the 1960s, used also by Sergeant Hartman who gives him the ‘Gomer Pyle’ nickname even more cruelly and encourages his comrades to hit him many times, all of this just to make him enter into the Marine corp. It’s no surprise that, halfway through the movie (usually the point when people realize it’s not a comedy and stop watching it), Gomer Pyle goes crazy, takes his rifle, kills Hartman and then himself before he could be sent to die in Vietnam.
6.John Doe. A thriller movie that gave Brad Pitt his world success, together with Morgan Freeman, ‘Seven’ (1995) has a complicated plot based on the seven deadly sins inserted in the frames of Dante’s purgatory and the law of retaliation. A crazy murderer (Kevin Spacey), who reveals his identity only at the end of the movie, kills one person for every deadly sin in horrible ways connected to the corresponding shame. For a change, he thinks to be a God’s messenger and, even if he dies in the end, we can say that he wins anyway.
7.Loris. Let’s end the list with an Italian crazy character, who was interpreted by one of our greatest actors: we’re talking about Loris, ‘The Monster’ (1994), played by Roberto Benigni. An eccentric apartment building resident is accused by all and also suspected by the police to be a serial killer (‘The Monster’), so everyone tries to set him a trap. The facts will prove that, despite his quirkiness, the ones who draw the attention are not always the ‘bad’ ones. The performance of Benigni is memorable and an integral part of the movie success.
