Cautionary Women

Leena Klammer, 33, has hypopituitarism, a congenital defect that makes her proportionally dwarf. Her incredible talent in painting and music is taller than she is short however.  You might think Leena triumphed over adversity by nurturing such talents. Yet her condition has made her unable to attract men her age, leaving her grandly off her rockers. She was later admitted to the Saarne Institute in her native Estonia. She escaped and, exploiting her situation, committed to a life of passing herself off as a little girl. With the right makeup and Bo Peep clothes, she faked her identity as young Esther from Russia.  Eventually she was able to fool a family in the US into adopting her. When the father spurned her seduction, Leena killed the entire kin and burned their house. Her reign of terror broke ground in America.  Leena is extremely proficient in manipulating the paintbrush as much as people. Like the blacklight paint that she is so skilled in using, Leena is ...

Fox Kids got it right in the 90s. First, there was the highly popular X-Men animated series. A little later, they filled every child's morning with  Mighty Morphin Power Rangers , the Americanized version of  Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger . Rita Repulsa is both versions' first baddie, the regent of an empire controlled by her later love interest Lord Zedd. Known in the original Japanese series as Bandora, Rita Repulsa had been locked in an extraterrestrial dumpster for many millennia alongside her groveling henchmen, only to be freed by unwitting astronauts. Repulsa tried to conquer Earth throughout the season by way of powerful sorcery but met opposition each time from the Power Rangers. Their constant meddling was a constant source of literal headache for this space witch. In 2006's Power Rangers: Mystic Force , Rita was revealed to have turned to the good side. She had become the Mystic Mother, who trafficked in benevolent magic. Japanese thespian Ma...

Miss Anne Marie Wilkes Dugan, RN lives beyond the first degree of unhinged. Annie is an obsessed fan of Paul Sheldon, author of a series of period romance novels starring Misery Chastain, whom Wilkes dangerously empathizes with. These are just novels within a novel however. Wilkes' disturbed mind is the propeller of the conflict in Stephen King's Misery , a claustrophobic novel about a novelist held captive by an obsessive fan. Wilkes is sane enough to act cherubic and retain a job but insane enough to push her father off the stairs and kill babies. The only giveaways are her unhealthy obsession with the Misery Chastain novels and her tendency to swear like a child ("He didn't get out of the cockadoodie car!"). Wilkes is as terrifying onscreen as on the pages of King's book. For her teeth-rattling portrayal of the postal Wilkes, Kathy Bates won the Best Actress Oscar in 1990 and posted the character on the American Film Institute's top 20 villains of ...