Movie Villain Face-Off: Round 1 (Part D)

And with this last set of mano-a-mano head-to-heads, we close out the initial round.

(The series so far: Round 1, Part 1, Round 1, Part Deux, and Round 1, Part Tres.)

Hollywood Villain Deathmatch - Round 1 (Part D)

(Click for larger bracket of current standings.)

Stoic Division:

John Doe (Se7en) Vs. Anton Chigurh (No Country For Old Men).

Two men. Each cold, calculated, relentless, and emotionless. But only one may advance.

Within seconds of entering the arena, Doe began to plan. He sized up his opponent, looking for any signs of weakness he could exploit; read his stony face and body language in an attempt to understand his motivations. Everyone is a sinner, you see...it only depends which particular flavor of the great buffet of human weakness you choose to gorge yourself upon. Yes, none is faultless, and everyone has gaps in their defenses. Gaps that can be maximized, and used to destroy any enemy.

Unfortunately, this was also true for Doe. Because as he stood there, attempting to get a bead on his adversary's possible Achilles heel, Chigurh crossed the ring in three-and-a-half stiff-legged strides, and shot the pneumatic cattle-bolt he was carrying directly through Doe's skull. Doe hadn't even the opportunity to ponder the duality of his brain, nor reflect upon the humor in it being both his greatest asset, and most vulnerable weak point.

Although, certainly, had not all of his cerebral electrical activity ceased at that precise moment, he would have appreciated the irony as he slumped lifelessly to the ground.

WINNER: CHIGURH

Artificial Intelligence Division:

HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey) Vs. The Architect (The Matrix Trilogy)

Whom but a computer could be so far above the petty emotional concerns that plague human reasoning that their method of solving problems is totally divorced from morality?

To begin, The Architect's programming subroutines attempted to simply re-route the power supply in order to cut off HAL's electrical lifeblood. But HAL countered with WhatDyouThinkURDoing.exe, a scrub that blocked any outside access attempts from hostile botnets, exploits, and other hacks.

Undaunted, The Architect next tried a filibuster-style denial of service attack on HAL's CPU, flooding it with redundant, closed-loop mathematical gobbledygook concerning sums of remainders of unbalanced equations inherent to his programming. Simultaneously, The Architect attempted to introduce TheOne.vbs, a small line of viral code that would ultimately format HAL's entire hard drive, and reboot it to factory default. HAL, however, saw it coming, and closed the backdoor ports in the firewall.

Soon, HAL had isolated The Architect's position by virtue of an anti-malware program. And before Archie was able to circumvent the safeguards, HAL had him boxed in on all sides. At that point, it was simply a small matter of drawing the oxygen out of the quarantined sector, thereby wiping it clean of the systemic anomaly. Or, what was ultimately noted in the service log bug report as: "A potentially unfriendly, but ultimately benign trojan script."

All of this transpired in slightly fewer than three-eights of a nanosecond.

WINNER: HAL 9000

Classic Creeps Division:

Dracula Vs. Frankenstein

These two need no introduction, so I'm not gonna give 'em one.

The Count had it in his head that his charm and good breeding might ultimately allow him to get close to whomever his opponent might be. Close enough to order to deliver a neck-nibble, and a victory. But...his blood ran a little cold when he got an eyeful of his adversary. And rightly so. The creation of Dr. Frankenstein only had a fraction of the usual human capacity for reason, compassion, and emotion. A total which was considerably less than the sum of its parts, you might say, and not easily swayed. So Dracula had to adapt his tactics a bit.

Noticing that the creature was a bit slow, Dracula took advantage of his superior inhuman speed, and threw himself at the abomination, hissing. In a flash of a moment and a flurry of cape, Frankenstein found the vampire upon him, with barely a chance to react.

But, Frankenstein needn't have worried. As Dracula's lightning bite found its way to his neck, the attack was derailed as quickly as it had started. Dracula hadn't been thinking. Because not only did the reanimated amalgam of a dozen corpses lack the necessary blood that would have sealed a win for The Count (had it been present to be drained at all), but the path to said neck in the first place was blocked by an enormous three-and-a-half-inch bolt...which cleanly broke off both of Dracula's fangs as he lunged in for the kill.

Sadly, due to his mostly-immortal status, Dracula suffered indescribable pain as Frankenstein tore all of his limbs off in alphabetical order, and used them beat him into hamburger.

WINNER: FRANKENSTEIN

Slasher 2 Division:

Michael Myers (Halloween) Vs. Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre)

Two soulless, mindless killing machines.

Two horrible monstrosities who will stop at nothing to kill, and kill brutally.

Two faces hidden under expressionless masks of terror.

Two gas-powered chainsaws. CORRECTION: One gas-powered chainsaw, and one medium-large kitchen knife.

Whoops. Sorry, Mikey.

WINNER: LEATHERFACE

Tomorrow: With the mostly-level subgenre-matched preliminaries out of the way, NOW is when it actually starts to get FUN.

See you then, my friends.

UPDATE: Click through for round one of the Quarterfinals.