James Bond is known for his insane gadgets, but also for his totally unglued villains. When it comes to Rube Goldberg schemes, James Bond’s enemies reign supreme. To prove it, we’ve got a clip where Blofeld hypnotizes a woman to love chickens. It’s just one of the most insane James Bond villain plots of all time.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Blofeld’s chicken allegy/virus scheme. What did you just watch? The woman in that clip has just had sex with James Bond, and now she’s being hypnotized to adore chickens. That’s got to be someone’s exact fetish, somewhere on the internet.
Basically, Blofeld, played by Telly Savalas, is pretending to be an allergy doctor, and he’s gathered a whole bunch of beautiful allergic women in bikinis and harem pants. They’re allergic to various things, mostly food items, and Blofeld is curing their allergies with the hypnotic power of his smooth silky Kojak voice. But he’s not just curing their allergies - he’s also brainwashing them to deliver the deadly Omega virus to plants or animals, on his command. The Omega virus causes instant sterility and spreads like wildfire. So, for example, if chicken lady (from the clip) infects her chickens with the Omega virus, we’ll never hatch another chicken again, anywhere in the world. It’ll be like 28 Chickens Later. How does Bond foil this dastardly scheme? I just re-watched this movie, and I’m still not sure. But it involves lugeing. And dancing bears. Best. Bond. Movie. Ever.
Goldfinger
Goldfinger’s nerve-gas-nuclear-gold scheme. The early Bold films often seem to revolve around nukes. For example, Dr. No plans to use a nuclear reactor to deflect American missile launches off course, eventually including the moon rocket, with the help of an evil geologist. (Mwa ha ha ha.) But Goldfinger’s scheme is sheer elegance in its bug-brainedness. He wants to nerve gas all the soldiers guarding the gold depository at Fort Knox, and then set off a nuclear bomb inside the gold reserve, irradiating all the gold and making his own stash more valuable. Mostly, though, he just likes to laser people in the crotch.
You Only Live Twice
Blofeld’s spaceship kidnappings. Blofeld is at it again. This time, the white-cat-loving maniac is launching his own spaceship to space-nap U.S. and Russian spaceships. He also continues the food theme by disguising his liquid oxygen rocket fuel under the label LOX, thus making everyone think it’s smoked salmon. Sheer genius!
Diamonds Are Forever
Blofeld’s spaceship kidnappings. You can’t keep Ernst Stavro Blofeld down. He decides to build a deadly satellite and use it to attack Washington, D.C. Just launching a satellite and building a space-based weapons system would be fancy enough for most supervillains, but not the now-Vegas-based Blofeld. He makes the whole thing out of diamonds. Except for the coolant system, which is platinum. Liberace is his launch technician. Oh, and the satellite is controlled by cassette tape, which is the same way Blofeld controls his chicken-loving women slaves. He loves his Dolby noise reduction.
The Man With The Golden Gun
Scaramanga uses solar power for EVIL. Count Dooku has three nipples. (I just love saying that.) And he’s building a deadly SOLAR GUN which harnesses the power of solar energy. He has a solar reactor, which is like a nuclear reactor, but SOLAR. Too bad Miss Goodnight accidentally makes the solar reactor go critical, which is like a solar flare, only on Earth.
The Spy Who Loved Me
Stromberg’s Atlantis. Stromberg, who doesn’t have a white cat or extra nipples wants to build his own undersea kingdom, in a seabase named Atlantis, in the Spy Who Loved Me. There’s also nuclear submarines and stuff.
Moonraker
The disco flower poison space scheme. Zillionaire Nazi Hugo Drax has crazy disco facial hair, and he wants to create a new master race of perfect blonde people in Speedos. So he builds a ton of space shuttles and finds some rare South American orchid that can be distilled into a poison that he can spray from the air, to commit flowery genocide. That’s the kind of crazy supervillain lateral thinking we like around here.
A View To A Kill
Christopher Walken wants to smash Google. You’d expect Christopher Walken to have a totally derango plan, but his scheme in A View To A Kill is surprisingly dull. He just wants to set off some bombs and cause some earthquakes, destroying Silicon Valley and giving himself a monopoly on the zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Oh sorry. He doesn’t even hypnotize Larry Ellison into deploying an exploding goat at the right moment or anything. Very disappointing.
Tomorrow Never Dies
Rupert Murdoch’s crazy war agenda. Jonathan Pryce plays Eliot Carver, a media baron who wants to start a war between the world’s two great superpowers: China and Britain. To this end, he sinks a British ship in Chinese waters and steals its deadly payload to start an attack against the Chinese government that will eliminate politicians who are opposed to giving his media company broadcast rights. Plus he thinks World War III will be good for ratings.
Die Another Day
Colonel Moon’s solar-power minefield detonator. In the recent Bond films, satellite weapons have figured prominently, including GoldenEye’s EMP weapon. But we don’t get a truly bugfuck satellite scheme until 2002’s Die Another Day, the last Pierce Brosnan film. Colonel Moon, an evil North Korean, disguises himself as a Brit named Gustav Graves, and builds a satellite called Icarus that can harness solar energy and then focus it to help grow crops. (Notice a running theme here: Solar power? Always EBIL.) In reality, Graves wants to use the satellite to blow up a ton of mines in the minefield between North and South Korea, allowing the North Koreans to take over. Because, of course, the minefield is the only thing preventing a North Korean takeover. Genius!
Quantum of Solace
The faux-Gore eco-resort water grab. You know what else is evil, besides solar energy? Water management. In the somewhat muddled Quantum Of Solace, the villain, Greene (Matthieu Amalric), is a fake environmentalist. He builds a fancy Eco-Hotel as a front for his vicious schemes. And he plans to help overthrow the government of a small South American country, in return for an apparently barren piece of land. But then it turns out that land secretly allows him to control most of South America’s water supply.
An earlier version of this article appeared in 2008.