Villain Visuals and Mannequin: On the Move (1991)

There are a few types of conflict that can be used to build a story. The main character could be battling society. They could be fighting their own demons. The protagonist could be up against some sort of force of nature. Or, when things are boiled down to the simplest form of conflict, there could be a basic character versus character struggle. Each type of conflict could bring a different struggle for the main character or characters, but some conflicts are easier than others.

The easiest, and most common, type of conflict is a character versus character conflict. It gives the villain of the story a face. They are personified in an evil person or group of people who can be beat, maimed, killed, or defeated in any number of ways at the end of the story. A society could be brought down, but it feels better to have a person in charge of that society. They will feel the pain of their society failing and dying. They may die along with it. It’s always nice to have a face to go along with the villainy.

It is within this character versus character conflict that film has had so many of its memorable villains. When the villain is one person and possibly their henchman, things can be done to make them more recognizable. They can be given distinct personalities that set them apart from other film villains. There could be a theme within the score that goes along with the character. Or there could be some sort of visual aesthetic that sets them apart from the many other villains out there.

Mannequin: On the Move was a 1991 romantic comedy that gave its villain a distinct look. Jason Williamson (William Ragsdale) was a new employee at a department store. He was paired with visual artist Hollywood Montrose (Meshach Taylor) to create a show that would highlight the new clothing line. One of the special features was a mannequin that was actually a frozen-in-time peasant girl named Jessie (Kristy Swanson). When she was brought back to life, 1000 years after being frozen, an evil sorcerer named Count Spretzle (Terry Kiser) tried to take control of her. Only, she was in love with Jason, the reincarnated version of her true love, Prince William. Hijinks ensued.

There was one simple physical trait that gave a unique look to Count Spretzle. He had a wart on the side of his face. That wasn’t it, though. A single wart wouldn’t be that big of a deal. There are a bunch of villains that have had warts. For whatever reason, a wart is a symbol of evil in movies. Evil witches have warts on their noses. That principal from Uncle Buck had a wart that Buck told her to get chewed off. The difference with Count Spretzle’s wart was that there was an extremely long hair hanging from it. The hair was like a flowing lock of hair but coming from a wart instead of the top of his head. There aren’t too many villains with a long-haired wart on the side of their face.

That’s only a minor physical trait for a villain to have. It could be part of the reason that Count Spretzle didn’t become a classic villain that people have remembered in the decades since the film was released. Perhaps that was because of how dull Mannequin: On the Move was. It’s a mostly forgotten sequel to a semi-forgotten original film. Most iconic movie villains come from movies that are either more well-remembered or just of a better quality.

Consider the Star Wars films for a minute. There have been five distinct villains, among a few others, within just the nine films in the Skywalker saga. The original trilogy brought Darth Vader with his memorable suit and breathing. Those three films also introduced audiences to the Emperor, with his shadowy, pale, wrinkled face. The Phantom Menace brought the red and black, horned head of Darth Maul, with his dual light sabre. The sequel trilogy came to theatres with Kylo Ren, who looked like a newer age Darth Vader, and Supreme Leader Snoke, who looked like his head was caving in on itself. The franchise has thrived on memorable villains.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was another franchise that excelled with giving their villains some interesting visual elements. Part of that could be that the movies were based on comic books, which are a wholly visual medium. The other way that the characters got their interesting looks were from the toy line. In order to sell more toys to kids, new characters needed to be created. They needed to be visually appealing so that they would catch kids’ eyes.

Shredder was the main villain of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. He had a metal helmet and face guard. He had metal blades on his hands. He had metal armor and metal spikes on his shoulders. He was basically an evil samurai knight, if you were to put western knights together with eastern samurai. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze has Super Shredder, who was basically Shredder on steroids. That film also introduced Tokka, a mutated snapping turtle, and Rahzar, a mutated wolf, as villains. They were clear riffs on Bebop and Rocksteady, two humans that were mutated into a warthog and a rhino, respectively. Those characters would appear in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows in 2016. And one final villain, who appeared in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, was Krang, a weird looking alien inside a robot body, poking his face out where a belt would normally be.

Each villain that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise featured had a unique look. For a samurai knight to large, mutated animals to an alien in a humanoid robot, they each had a look that set them apart from the angry white men that so many mainstream movies featured as villains. They presented a look that would forever be associated with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When the 2014 and 2016 films were being made, audiences wanted Bebop and Rocksteady to make their film debut because they remembered those characters from the toys and old cartoons. The visuals were locked in their minds and they wanted them translated to the big screen.

Slasher films are a subgenre of movies where the look of a villain can have a great impact over the audience. In many cases, the villain goes on to become the face of the franchise. Everyone else ends up dead, but the villain remains to cause death and destruction for the next group of victims. The audience becomes invested in how the villains look. They dress up as the villains for conventions and Halloween parties. The villains become more famous than the actors that roll through the films.

The Friday the 13^th franchise had a few different killers, but the villain was usually Jason Voorhees. He had a few different looks throughout the franchise, but the one that people associated with him was the hockey mask and the machete. When someone else was killing people during the events of Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning, they were using the hockey mask look of Jason. People thought that, maybe, Jason had come back to life. He hadn’t. His look had become a legacy. During Jason X, Jason was transformed into Uber Jason, and that version still had a hockey mask, albeit a revamped Uber Mask.

Going beyond the Friday the 13^th franchise, there was Michael Myers in Halloween. He wore a mechanics’ outfit and a William Shatner mask (or some other mask made to look like the original Shatner mask). Freddy Krueger, of A Nightmare on Elm Street, had a hat, a knife glove, a striped shirt, and a face covered with burn scars. Leprechaun had a leprechaun. Scream featured Ghostface, with a stretched, white ghost face mask and black robe. Child’s Play had the Good Guy doll. Hellraiser had Pinhead. They each looked unique to their franchise of films and became the characters most associated with those franchises. Much of that had to do with the looks of the characters. They imprinted themselves on the minds of the audiences and haunted their nightmares.

A good villain must be many things. They must be a threat to the heroes. They could either be smarter, sneakier, stronger, or more resilient. It should take all the hero’s capabilities to stop the villain. The villain should feel like a real threat. Worlds will be changed based on what they do. If the main characters can’t stop the villain, something very bad will happen. Depending on the stakes of the movie, that something could threaten the entire world, or just the community of the characters. The villain should also have a look that sets them apart from the other villains that people know. This way, they stick in the audience’s minds.

The easiest type of conflict to insert into a story is a character-versus-character conflict. The entire battle that the main character is fighting can be personified through one person and possibly some henchmen. That’s not the only conflict a movie can have. There could be a person-versus-nature, or versus-society, or even versus-themselves. But it’s these person-versus-person conflicts that create most of the memorable villains that we know from film history. And television history. And book history. These are the villains we remember.

We may or may not remember these notes:

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was mentioned in this post. I’ve covered three movies in that franchise. They were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (week 184), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (week 310), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (week 310).
• The Friday the 13^th films were also mentioned. I’ve covered Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning (week 46), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (week 85), and Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (week 294).
• Star Wars got a quick mention. Two Star Wars movies have been featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, though they weren’t part of the nine film Skywalker saga. The first was The Ewok Adventure (week 287) and the other was Star Wars: The Clone Wars (week 377).
• I also brought up the Halloween movies. I once covered Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (week 48).
• Mannequin: On the Move was directed by Stewart Raffill, who directed Mac and Me (week 125) and The Ice Pirates (week 128).
• Michael J. Anderson made an appearance in Mannequin: On the Move. He had previously shown up in Tiptoes (week 28) and Warriors of Virtue (week 88).
• John Casino returned from Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (week 32) to appear in Mannequin: On the Move.
• Mannequin: On the Move starred William Ragsdale, who was in Road House 2: Last Call (week 200).
• You might have recognized Stuart Pankin, the voice of Earl in Dinosaurs, in Mannequin: On the Move. He showed up in Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls (week 208).
• Finally, Mannequin: On the Move featured Kurt Leitner from Movie 43 (week 243).
• Have you seen Mannequin: On the Move? Do you think the villain was memorable at all? What other villains did I miss? I didn’t even mention the Bond movies with people like the diamond face guy from Die Another Day (week 153), or Sinbad’s character in Jingle All the Way (week 160). Tell me what I missed on Twitter or in the comments.
• If there’s a movie that you want to suggest for me to watch for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies post, let me know in the comments or on Twitter. I’m open to any suggestions, and I’m always looking for more movies that would fit into the overall feel of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Take a look at Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for pictures and videos related to the blog and the movies within.
• Things are going to get religious over the next week with the Sunday “Bad” Movies. Fresh of the heels (two months later) of Last Ounce of Freedom (week 369), I’m diving into the world of religious films once again. This time, I’m going back to David A.R. White and checking out his 2012 flick, Brother White. I’ve already seen it as I’m finishing this post and it is wild. I’ll tell you what I thought next week. See you then.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) and Prequels in the Sunday "Bad" Movies

Sequels have been around since nearly the dawn of movies. They are a way to continue a story so that audiences can enjoy more time with the characters they have grown to love. Or a sequel can continue the story with a bunch of other characters to help flesh out a world that people enjoyed seeing the first time around. But there are times when a sequel isn’t enough. People want to know how the world got to the point that it was prior to one of the franchise entries. Thus, the prequel exists.

Prequels help fill in the backstory of events that people have witnessed in other movies. It could be the events that caused those events. It could be the earlier years of a character’s life that made them the character that audiences know. A prequel could simply be a story in the same world set before the story that was already shown. Or it could be in between some of the movies, filling in a timespan that was previously unseen. No matter what, a prequel takes place before at least one entry of the franchise that was released before it.

The Star Wars franchise is no stranger to prequels. Ignoring the vast number of books in both the legends and canonical lines, there are six prequel films and four prequel television series that I know of. The prequel trilogy of films (The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith) took place in Anakin Skywalker’s younger years as he transformed into the Darth Vader character from the original trilogy (A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi). The Clone Wars was a theatrical animated film that took place between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, which served as a pilot episode to a Clone Wars series that chronicled that war. There was another Clone Wars animated show at one point, as well. Star Wars: Rebels took place between the prequels and original trilogy, as did the films Rogue One and Solo. Finally, there’s The Mandalorian, which is a prequel to the newer trilogy of films (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker).

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the movie from 2008, might be the most interesting of the prequels. It was a theatrical animated movie meant to set up a television series. It came out four years after the prequel trilogy concluded, making it a prequel to one of the prequels. Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) was assigned a new padawan, Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein). Together with Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor), they had to stop Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) and save the son of Jabba the Hutt (Kevin Michael Richardson).

The animated film was not good. The relationships between the main characters of Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka never felt fully formed. In the case of Ahsoka, that could have been that she had just met the two Jedi. The banter between the characters didn’t work because those relationships weren’t where they needed to be. The standalone story, though having some stakes in the overall turning of the Clone Wars, felt a little light. The Jedi had to get the baby and take it home. At no point did it feel like they were in any real danger of failing their mission. Then there was the comedy. The jokes throughout the film were mostly about how dumb the B1 Battle Droids were. They usually fell as flat as the many droids that fell off cliffs.

But what made Star Wars: The Clone Wars interesting was its placement within the timeline. The prequel trilogy of films was meant to show Anakin’s turn to the dark side as he became Darth Vader. It was a trilogy designed to give background to the villain of the original films. Within that story, a new part of the Star Wars world was shown. The Jedi Council came to life on the screen. The senate was debating the issues of the galaxy. Within that world, and a big reason that things shifted from the Republic to the Empire, were the Clone Wars. The animated series, and the theatrical pilot, would help shed some light on the events of the Clone Wars and show how important they were to the state of the galaxy.

Going away from the Star Wars franchise, there have been other prequels featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies. There have been three, in fact. For two of them, they were prequels because there needed to be an entirely new cast. They were direct-to-video movies and didn’t have the budget to get the original, star-studded cast back. For the other prequel, it was because there wasn’t much more story to tell after the events of the first film, so they went to a time before those events.

Death Race 2 and Death Race: Inferno were two direct-to-video prequels to the 2008 Death Race reboot. Death Race 2 was about the implementation of the Death Race competition. The original competition was a Death Match, which was a futuristic gladiatorial fight. It would soon be switched to a race in which the drivers tried to kill each other while attempting to win their freedom. The main character took on the role of Frankenstein, a racing persona that would be taken up by the main character of the 2008 Death Race. Death Race: Inferno saw that same driver plan his escape from prison and pass his racing persona onto someone else.

The idea behind the Death Race prequels, story wise, was to build the history of the race and the history of the Frankenstein persona. Frankenstein was more than a driver. He was a hero to the people who watched the races. But he was also a mask. Anyone could be behind that mask. The prequels established the early versions of the race and built Frankenstein into the mythical racer that he was at the beginning of the 2008 original.

The other prequel to be featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies was Transmorphers: Fall of Man, the prequel to Transmorphers. The original Transmorphers was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of Transformers. Yet the stories were way different. Transmorphers was set in the future with an underground military colony putting together their last stand against an invading alien robot army. The only similarity it had to Transformers was the alien robots.

Transmorphers: Fall of Man was set in the present day and showed the initial invasion of the alien robot army. People were being attacked. Communities were in danger. One man and one woman did whatever they could to survive. It was giving the background of the invasion to better inform what happened in the original. Transmorphers was the end of the alien robot army attack on Earth. Transmorphers: Fall of Man was the beginning.

Prequels can be seen all through film. The Insidious films got a couple sequels. The Conjuring universe is filled with prequel spin-offs. The First Purge was a prequel to all the other Purge films. Marvel is even getting in on the prequel business by putting out Black Widow this year. Sometimes a franchise needs to go to a time before what has already been shown in order to better inform the stories that people know and love.

A good way to fill in the backstory of a character or the events of a film is to make a prequel. Sometimes people want to know more about the stories they watch. They don’t want a simple continuation. They want to see how things ended up the way they ended up. Where sequels can present the beloved characters in a new story, or a continuation of the same story, prequels can bring some backstory to what unfolded. Whether sequels or prequels, one thing remains the same. The audience gets to revisit a world they enjoyed the first time around. That’s franchise filmmaking for you.

There are a few notes for this one, so hold on to your butts:

• Death Race (week 9), Death Race 2 (week 9), DeathRace: Inferno (week 9), Transmorphers (week 130), and Transmorphers: Fall of Man (week 130) were mentioned in this post.
• Ian Abercrombie provided his voice for Star Wars: The Clone Wars. He was featured in a handful of other Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were The Ice Pirates (week 128), Sextette (week 141), Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman (week 159), and Wild Wild West (week 296). That means he’s officially in the Five Timer’s Club.
• Kevin Michael Richardson voiced Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. He also did some work on Mortal Kombat (week 140).
• James Arnold Taylor returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies this week. He was previously featured in Foodfight! (week 143).
• Nika Futterman has voiced two Sunday “Bad” Movies characters. One was in Delgo (week 148) and the other was in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
• Dee Bradley Baker made a second appearance with Star Wars: The Clone Wars. His first appearance was in Furry Vengeance (week 162).
• Christopher Lee voiced Count Dooku in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. He also had a role in The Stupids (week 188).
• Anthony Daniels voiced his most famous character, C-3PO, in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. He was featured in the film I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle (week 203).
• Corey Burton returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies this week, after previously appearing in Dudley Do-Right (week 336).
• Finally, Matthew Wood made a quick Sunday “Bad” Movies turnaround. He was recently featured in The Emoji Movie (week 373).
• Have you seen Star Wars: The Clone Wars? What did you think? Did you like the movie? Did you like the series? What do you think of prequels in general? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
• Twitter and the comments are also places where you can find me if you want to suggest a movie for me to watch. I’m always on the look out for movies that would fit with the Sunday “Bad” Movies. Let me know about them if you have any.
• Guess what? There’s a Sunday “Bad” Movies account on Instagram that you should be checking out. Go take a look.
• There’s one last note before everyone heads out. Of course it’s a look forward to what’s coming up. I could have saved next week’s movie for a franchise week and watched it with the movie that came before it. But I didn’t want to. I wanted it to get its own post. I’ll be checking out Mannequin: On the Move, the second Mannequin movie. That’s next week. I’ll see you then with the post.