Reviews by Kyle Ellis

The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy (2001 – 2014)

“A great eye, lidless, wreathed in flame.” This description of the Dark Lord of Mordor is all well and good on paper, but how the hell do you make a massive fiery peeper remotely sinister on screen? Somehow, Peter Jackson and the Lord Of The Rings team pulled it off. It helped that the prologue shows us Sauron as an enormous, mace-wielding maniac, capable of twatting entire battalions with a single blow. But even when he loses his corporeal form he’s the stuff of nightmares, flashing into Frodo’s mind whenever he touches the Ring and scouring the land around him like a very angry person looking for a contacts lens.

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One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

The coldest of hearts, the sternest of looks, the reddest of tapes. Nurse Mildred Ratched is more than merely the head of administration at a psychiatric hospital. In Louise Fletcher’s Oscar-winning turn, she rules the ward with a quietly terrifying iron fist, serving passive-aggressive put-downs to break the spirits of the mentally ill, efficiently and effectively. It’s little wonder that über-producer Ryan Murphy last year looked beyond Jack Nicholson’s protagonist McMurphy in granting Ratched her own spin-off Netflix origin series. As McMurphy himself puts it: “She’s somethin’ of a cunt, ain’t she, Doc?”

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The Star Wars Saga (1983-2005)

When we first encountered him in the flesh, we knew him simply as The Emperor: Return Of The Jedi’s porridge-faced, croaky-voiced overlord, who arrived draped in a heavy robe as black as his soul. Though played with grimacing relish by Scottish character actor Ian McDiarmid, Darth Vader’s less-forgiving boss was hardly three-dimensional. But with the prequel trilogy, we got to know Sheev Palpatine, the man behind the Sith Lord, and appreciate what a slick and sneaky political manipulator he was. Though the films are flawed, you can’t deny they make Palpatine a more compelling and disturbingly realistic creation.

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The Matrix Trilogy (1999-2003)

With that permanently down-turned mouth and magnificently furrowed brow, Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith is a remorseless enforcer whose remit is simply to maintain cold, hard order. Of course, he’s just an AI program in

a virtual reality designed to keep humanity comatose. Technically, he shouldn’t even despise us, but clearly his files are corrupted, as that wonderful “I hate this place” speech to Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) reveals. That’s the key to Smith’s effectiveness as a baddie: he’s not just the epitome of an oppressive-regime stooge, but one who hates his job.

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Played by: Robert Englund

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Wes Craven reached into his nightmares and pulled out the greatest screen monster of them all. Craven fused Freddy Krueger from a combination of real-life experiences (he once had a scary encounter with a homeless man upon whose look he would base Freddy's appearance) and a fanciful notion about a monster who could operate in the dreamscape, a terrifying notion. Robert Englund - then best known as the nice alien, Willy, from V - revelled in the chance to give vent to his inner demons, pocking his voice with cruel, taunting hate, his face scarred and blemished beyond recognition. It was a marriage made in, well, Not Heaven. Freddy was built to be an instantly recognisable icon, with the hat and the scars and the glove made of four razor-sharp knives. What's interesting, though, is how the character mutated. His first and last appearances, both directed by Craven (we're ignoring Freddy Vs Jason for the sake of our theory and our sanity), see a truly sinister, frightening Freddy: a coldblooded killer, preying on kids (a child molester was, Craven has said, the very worst thing he could think of) with nary a one-liner in sight. But as the sequels (some of which have merit) progressed, and Freddy became the star of the show, the deaths became more elaborate, and Krueger himself became almost comedic, almost like Roger Moore's Bond, a wisecracking machine built of pure irony. It's testament to the character's strong foundations, and Englund's brilliant performance, that both versions of Freddy remain equally memorable.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

When looking for something to present a challenge to the hulking cyborg form of Arnold Schwarzenegger's original flavour Terminator, James Cameron conceived of something more complicated, even more driven and able to turn itself into almost anyone or anything, some laws of physics be damned. Robert Patrick was the man chosen to play the cunning metal killer, and left an impact that helped push Terminator 2 beyond the original in terms of popularity. Schwarzenegger's version might be famous for never stopping, but with Patrick's slinky shape-changer, you might never see him coming until it's too late. Sorry, Wolfie.

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Played by: Nick Castle

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At first glance, there's precious little that's interesting about Michael Myers. Yes, he shares a name with Austin Powers. Yes, he wears an inside-out, dyed William Shatner mask. But otherwise, he's just a blank, remorseless, mute killing machine like Jason Voorhees, slaughtering transgressive teens in their dozens, right? Well, wrong. As imagined by John Carpenter and brilliantly played by stuntman Nick Castle, Myers - aka The Shape, aka The Haddonfield Hacker (ok, we made that one up) - is the literal embodiment of pure evil, an unstoppable, glassy-eyed abyss staring right back at us. This particular abyss just happens to have a thing for butcher knives. Myers is also far more psychologically interesting than Jason or any of the myriad copycats that followed in his wake; for him, it's mostly about family. There's also an interesting wrinkle with Myers that you sense Carpenter wanted to leave hanging, open to interpretation. The last lines of Halloween are "Was it the boogeyman?"; "As a matter of fact, it was". Then we see that Myers has survived six bullets and a fall from a second-storey window. He now lurks everywhere, his breathing dominating the soundtrack. Why? Because there's a supernatural tinge here. How else can you explain his indestructibility? His penchant for appearing and disappearing, seemingly at will? Because he is the Boogeyman.