So there are the obvious collection of unhinged characters in cinema, the fictional characters names that trip of the tongue such as Norman Bates and Patrick Bateman or the collection of RAVs (Russians, Arabs, Villains) that number out henchmen line ups and sinister plotters in most Bruce Willis movies or indeed the more elite deranged characters of Bond movies. Here is my choice of those that may not be obvious choices, but do rank amongst those that you don’t want around in a crisis or possibly, at all, ever.

6. Steely Determination

We start off mildly enough, with concerned mother Shirley McClaine taking her daughters medical carers to task in ‘Terms of Endearment’ in a scene only 30 seconds long yet she gets her point across.

Find the clip here

See also: The restrained putdown of Kevin Spacey in ‘Swimming with Sharks’

5. Jewish Neurosis

Descending down the ranks of stability, I’ve transcribed some dialogue from Woody Allen’s ‘Annie Hall’. Neurotic self deprecation, the kind of which keeps therapists in business.

There’s an old joke - um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ‘em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly. The… the other important joke, for me, is one that’s usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud’s “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,” and it goes like this - I’m paraphrasing - um, “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.” That’s the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.

Woody Allen IMDB

4. The psychotic mob boss

Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, No explanation required:

See also: Over willingness to pull a gun - Honourable Mentions - Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) in Lethal Weapon, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) in The Big Lebowski

3. The Jack Nicholson Type

Whether bearing a hatchet or a dildo, there is just no getting away from the lunacy of Jack Nicholson’s characters - bring out the rebeliousness in the mentally ill (One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest), avoiding pavement cracks in ’As Good as it Gets’, or earning himself one of the largest single incomes ever made by an actor by hamming it up and asking for a cut in profits in ‘Batman’.

See also: The Gary Oldman type

2. The Fanatic

So determined is Kathy Bates to have an in-house novelist, she will not waste the opportunity of accommodating a novelist loosely based on Stephen King played by James Caan, after a road accident, nurse him back to care, set him up and encourage him to commit words to paper again and then bash his legs in with a sledge hammer to keep him confined to bed.

See also: Robert DeNiro (The Fan) and if you feel it necessary The Bodyguard

1. Pacifist Liberators

Now, I do use bad language, I avoid using it here on the blog and being some sort of a relic of an age I was never born in I cringe when I hear girls turn the air blue. Imagine then my feelings on watching Gandhi drop the C-bomb with reckless abandon as well as commiting many other affronts to the language. His stare alone here in ‘Sexy Beast’ would have me running. (Please be aware the language is strong)