The Top 5 Chuck Norris Movie Villains

A few weeks ago, when I was writing up a review of the Chuck Norris action flick Forced Vengeance for my other column here at 411, The Gratuitous B-Movie Column, I started wondering about who were the best villains that went up against big Chuck in his thirty-plus year, and thirty plus movie, career. The villain in Forced Vengeance, Stan Raimondi (Michael Cavanaugh), is pretty badass. I mean, Cavanaugh isn’t a martial artist, and yet, in the movie, his Raimondi kicks Norris’s Josh Randall’s ass. Raimondi doesn’t win the final fight, of course, because Chuck Norris is the star and Forced Vengeance is a Chuck Norris movie, but who the hell thought, when watching Forced Vengeance for the first time, that big Chuck would get his ass handed to him by, well, anyone who wasn’t Bruce Lee or an unstoppable killer of some sort? I know I didn’t.

But, amongst the various villains that Chuck’s characters have faced off against over the years, Cavanaugh didn’t make the top five. Top ten? Absolutely. But the upper tier villains? If there were “honorable mentions” for the actual honorable mentions, Cavanaugh’s Raimondi would be there, no question. So then who, exactly, are in the top five? Which villains make the cut and are the cream of the crop?

As I said, I wondered about it while writing up the review for Forced Vengeance, and then, after finishing that review, I jotted down which villains I thought were in the top five. In the ensuing weeks since then, I’ve changed the list exactly once, moving one villain out and replacing him with someone else. And now, with this Dumpster Fire issue, I’ve decided to write up, for posterity, who the heck is on the Top 5 Chuck Norris Movie Villains list.

And now, without any more what have you, the Dumpster Fire of the Week: The Top 5 Chuck Norris Movie Villains Edition.

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Up first, the honorable mentions:

5-Morgan Canfield- An Eye for an Eye: Regardless of who you happen to be as an actor or performer, if you ever face off against Christopher Lee, Christopher Lee absolutely has to appear on the list. I mean, come on, it’s Christopher goddamn Lee. And Lee’s Canfield, while not a physical match for Norris’s badass, revenge fueled ex-cop Sean Kane, sure as hell provides an uneasy and darkly sleazy to the proceedings in An Eye for an Eye. Canfield is a TV station editor who just so happens to be the leader of a massive drug running operation that operates out of San Francisco, which makes him, in many ways, the scum of the Earth, but since he’s played by Christopher Lee, on top of the unease and sleaze there’s also a kind of elegance to Canfield. It isn’t that shocking to find out that he’s the movie’s bad guy, but, at the same time, a TV station editor is running drugs? How the hell did that happen? And kudos to Canfield for having the great Professor Toru Tanaka as one of his top henchmen. You can’t really go wrong with that choice. The man is a monster. Sleazy as fuck, too.

4-Rawley Wilkes- Lone Wolf McQuade: As played by the now late but always great David Carradine, Wilkes is a fucking piece of shit gun runner who likes to show off just how smooth and sophisticated he thinks he is. Rawley really isn’t either of those things. The reality is he’s just a mega rich thug who uses his money and power to get what he wants, and he will do absolutely anything to get what he wants, including killing or assaulting innocent people (like JJ McQuade’s daughter Sally, played by Dana Kimmell). And think about what Wilkes does to Barbara Carrerra’s Lola Richardson, killing her family and forcing her to be his lover (see what I mean? Wilkes is a piece of fucking shit). Rawley Wilkes is just a terrible person.

Now, on top of all of that, Wilkes is a martial artist of some sort and, early on, wants to fight Norris’s badass Texas Ranger JJ McQuade. McQuade demurs (he knows he would kick Rawley’s ass, but he didn’t want to do it in front of Rawley’s “friends” and whatnot. McQuade just isn’t that kind of guy). McQuade does eventually face off against Rawley at the end of the movie in one of the best fights in Norris’s cinematic career. Chuck Norris vs. the star of Kung Fu. It’s not Chuck vs. Bruce Lee, but, hey, “close enough,” right? Anyway, Wilkes starts off the big fight doing some kind of wavy hand shit, and, yeah, dude ended up getting owned because of it. You just don’t do that kind of shit fighting Chuck Norris.

And I’m willing to say it: no one deserved a hand grenade more than Rawley Wilkes, at least not in 1983.

3-Colonel Yin- Missing in Action 2: The Beginning: As portrayed by the now late but always great Soon-Teck Oh, Colonel Yin is the sadistic head of a prisoner-of-war camp in North Vietnam that’s filled with various American POW’s, one of them Chuck Norris’s Colonel James Braddock. Yin, along with his main henchmen (one of them is Professor Toru Tanaka), tortures the prisoners physically and mentally (he forces them to engage in back breaking work toiling in opium fields as the Colonel essentially runs a side business of supplying raw materials for drug makers, and he burns up letters from home for the POWs and tells them they’ve been abandoned by their country and families). And if that wasn’t bad enough, Yin isn’t one of those “I’m just following orders” guys. Yin actually enjoys being a mean-spirited, torturing rat bastard. Look at what he does to that one guy’s pet chicken. Colonel Yin eventually gets his big comeuppance, fighting Braddock in a hand-to-hand contest that he loses. He then dies via remote control explosion, something he oh so richly deserved.

2-John Kirby- Silent Rage: As played by Brian Libby, John Kirby is one of the scariest slasher killers of the 1980’s. Most people don’t consider Kirby a slasher killer or Silent Rage a slasher movie, but I ask those of you who think it isn’t a slasher movie to go watch it again. Silent Rage is a slasher movie. Before he becomes an unstoppable killer due to various science experiments, Kirby is basically a guy with serious mental issues who just snaps one day and kills a bunch of people at random with an axe. Norris’s sheriff Dan Stevens shows up and basically beats the guy to near death (well, Kirby gets shot a bunch of times, too. I bet that shit hurt). When the scientists (one of them played by a conflicted Ron Silver, and one played by a not very conflicted at all Steven Keats)work on Kirby and bring him back from brain death, Kirby is unstoppable; he can’t be killed, he has a healing factor of some sort, and he seems to have what amounts to super strength. After the new Kirby kills a bunch of people, including his deputy Charlie (played by Kent “Flounder” Dorfman hisself Stephen Furst), Sheriff Dan goes at Kirby once again. This time, though, Dan can’t kill Kirby, he can maybe fight him to a draw. Now, we all know that Chuck Norris isn’t going to lose the big final fight and that, somehow, he’s going to beat Kirby because he’s Chuck Norris, but there’s a real sense in Silent Rage that Chuck could lose. Kirby can’t be killed, so how do you defeat that guy? How do you fight him “to a draw?”

You knock him out and then throw him down a deep, deep well and hope he doesn’t find a way to crawl out.

It’s a damn shame that we never got a Silent Rage 2. I really wanted to see if John Kirby ever got out of that well, and how the hell he did it. Maybe that can happen one of these days soon? Chuck is still alive and, as far as I know, so is Libby. I bet people would pay money to see it.

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And the 411 Dumpster Fire of the Week: Chuck Norris Movie Villains Editiontop spot goes to:

1-Mikhail Rostov- Invasion U.S.A.: As portrayed by the now late but always great Richard Lynch, Rostov is a loonbag Commie that creates a multi-national terrorist gang that infiltrates the United States and engages in various terrorist activities in the hope that the United States falls. Rostov also wants to kill CIA badass Matt Hunter (Chuck) because he sees Hunter in his nightmares. Rostov almost does both. He attacks Hunter at his Florida “home” (he kills Hunter’s Indian buddy), and then he starts killing people and blowing shit up all over the southeastern United States. U.S. authorities have no idea how to stop Rostov, so they bring Hunter out of retirement and let him do whatever he needs to do in order to stop the terrorists. And that’s exactly what Hunter does. While Hunter is doing that, Rostov is watching a lot of TV, continuing with his big plan, shooting a guy in the balls (it’s one of Rostov’s favorite moves, sticking a handgun down a guy’s pants and banging off an entire clip), and trying not to shit his pants in fear because Hunter is on the case and, maybe, very soon, it will be “Time to die” (that’s what Hunter always told him).

Lynch is fucking demonic as Rostov. He’s so committed to destroying Hunter and America he will do almost anything in order to do it. He doesn’t succeed (he’s going up against Chuck Norris so how the hell could he succeed?) but, man, he sure does his Commie scumbag best. The man never smiles (in happiness, I mean), never laughs, always has a snarl on his face, and is perpetually on edge. He allowed a bunch of immigrants in a boat get machine gunned to death. He blew up a bunch of suburban homes with a rocket launcher. The man is just diabolical.

Hunter destroys Rostov at the end of the movie with a LAWS rocket launcher. Blows that motherfucker up big time. And he deserves it, for all of the shit he did and allowed to happen. If only Hunter could blow him up a second time. Fucking scumbag.

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