Movie Villains Who Suffered A Fate Worse Than Death

At the onset of Batman Begins, Carmine Falcone is living large as a member of Gotham City's underworld, but like all villains of his stature, he wants more power. After going into business with Jonathan Crane and Ra's al Ghul, he helps them move fear toxin into Gotham for Ghul's plot to destroy the city.

After Falcone is put in jail following a tussle with the Bat, he tries to blackmail Crane and ends up getting dosed with an insane amount of fear toxin. He's left in Arkham Asylum muttering "Scarecrow" over and over. There's no way to know if the toxin will ever wear off, which means that Falcone's going to spend the foreseeable future living in terror.

In Death Becomes Her, there exists a magic potion with the ability to keep its user young forever. The potion turns people into their best-looking selves, but it also creates monsters who can fall apart and perish time and time again without ever really passing on. It essentially turns its users into living, breathing members of the undead.

Helen Sharp waffles between protagonist and antagonist in this dark comedy, but once she and her frenemy Madeline are turned onto the potion, they'll stop at nothing to remain beautiful forever - including using spray paint and epoxy to fix themselves up whenever they fall apart.

As the film ends, both women attend the funeral of an ex who lived a happy life, and after leaving the church, they trip down its stairs and fall apart. The women are left arguing about where they parked their car as their disembodied heads roll across the sidewalk.

After spending much of his professional career lusting after the Space Stone, Red Skull is presumed dead after being sucked through a wormhole, but his fate was much worse. Rather than perish in the vastness of space, Red Skull is brought to Vormir, where he's given the job of guarding the Soul Stone.

When the audience catches up with Skull in Avengers: Infinity War, he's been on Vormir for 70 years and is tortured with the knowledge that he can never attain the Soul Stone because he can't love anyone other than himself. He doesn't age; he doesn't perish - he just exists alone on the planet.

After Thanos sacrifices Gamora to gain the stone, Red Skull is finally freed from his curse. It's not clear if he dissipates into the universe or is brought back to his guardianship of the stone once Tony Stark sacrifices himself to undo Thanos's snap.

The Fly II is a hard watch, especially if you're an animal lover. The fate of nasty corporate science villain Anton Bartok hinges on the fact that he abuses a dog that Martin, the son of Seth Brundle, makes friends with by mutating it in a duo of telepods and studying it.

When Martin discovers what's happened to his dog, he puts the poor creature out of its misery before exacting his revenge on Bartok. Rather than just do away with Bartok, Martin goes through the telepods with him, transferring his fly DNA into Bartok and taking his normal genes. This leaves Bartok as a hideous monster, and rather than throw him in a furnace or jettison him into space, Martin locks the Bartok-creature in the same cage as the dog-monster so he can be studied.

This isn't just revenge - it's some kind of ultra-revenge that's a little over the top. As bad as Bartok is throughout the movie, he didn't deserve to be turned into a science experiment, but he did mess with Martin's dog and that's just not something that you do to someone. 

Batman has never been known to be especially kind to his rogues' gallery, but in Batman Forever, he dishes out his most hellacious punishment to the Riddler of all people. Throughout the film, the Riddler goes out of his way to ruin the Dark Knight's life, but that's just what the villains of Gotham do (that and wear thematic outfits).

After a fight against Riddler and Two-Face on Claw Island, Two-Face is apprehended by the authorities, but Riddler is hooked up to a giant brainwave receiver that shoves all of the knowledge of Gotham City into his frontal lobe. As he is wont to do, Batman destroys the brainwave machine, but the malfunctioning creation zaps the Riddler and turns his mind to mush.

Following his defeat on Claw Island, Riddler is doomed to spend the rest of his life in Arkham Asylum living out the fantasy that he's Batman. Kept alive by the staff at Arkham, there's no telling how long Riddler will spend carrying on as Batman, going on adventures from the privacy of his padded cell.

Agent Smith actually gets what he wants at the end of The Matrix Revolutions. He not only defeats Neo, but he also gains the ability to become sentient. It turns out that by "winning," he actually loses big time.

After consuming Neo and getting rid of the anomaly in the Matrix, Agent Smith realizes that he doesn't have a purpose and that now he has to be deleted along with his enemy. Smith is destroyed by his own actions, but he's still in the system, even if it's only his mind (or whatever a mind is digitally). Smith now has to spend eternity thinking about how he did himself in - or at least until the Matrix restarts again.