I am seriously laughing so hard right now that it’s kind of hard to stop, but I’ll give it a go. To start off with this clip is hilarious just for the fact that someone came up with the idea of the Villain Pub. Second, of course Pennywise is going to be there, I mean he’s one of the creepiest horror monsters in all of cinema at this point. But why then don’t the villains ever win? It seems like there’s always a moment when they could simply slaughter their enemies, heroes or civilians, and yet something happens at the last second that ends up messing up the bad guy and allowing the protagonist to survive by escaping or smacking the living hell out of the monster. It’s seriously a weird phenomenon.
Should we prove it just a little?
Okay, let’s start with the Joker. In the early version with Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton, the Joker had so many chances to simply spread death and madness throughout Gotham on a wide scale that he could have had a huge portion of the city under his thumb before Batman had even suited up for the final fight. Why didn’t he? He had set the stage and play with his victims first.
Freddy Krueger wasn’t a prankster or a joking character in the first film, he was just a straight up killer. But once again, the bad guy has to play with his victims before he kills them, and this gave Nancy the chance to prepare and take him out finally. He took everyone else out fairly quickly, but for some reason left Nancy alone until the end.
The queen alien had a knockdown drag out fight with Ripley, but could have easily killed her, Newt, and Bishop the moment they touched down in the Sulaco. So why didn’t she? For a killer alien it seems like she picked the wrong moment to get aggressive.
And as for Pennywise, he has what you could call a built-in weakness. He NEEDS the kids to be scared of him in order to feed. There’s no doubt that if gets desperate he could possibly feed off of a child with little trouble, but the fear is what makes them tastier apparently, and so he scares the living daylights out of them before feasting. But obviously we know now what happens when the kids are no longer scared. He begins to starve and eventually loses the potency he once had.
The bad guys are in many ways their own worst enemies. Palpatine kept Vader around even when he knew the former Jedi would want to eliminate him at some point. The Terminator didn’t take out Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese when he had the chance, Jason is, well, just Jason. Michael Meyers is deadly but insanely slow-moving, and the children of the corn are for the most part just backwards hicks that don’t seem to understand that their own religion is what’s bound to kill them. Well, that and whatever’s in that corn field.
So if you want an excuse as to why Pennywise loses to the kids, it’s because he kind of trips himself up at the metaphorical finish line.
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