The hard luck club

Economy got you down? Feel like the world’s turned against you? Take heart, and thank the Lord you’re not one of these poor saps… Time Out presents a list of the most mistreated, ill-fated, generally put-upon movie characters

Antiochus Wilson (Rock Hudson) in ‘Seconds’ (1966)
It’s the old, old story: man tires of patterned suburban lifestyle, engages a mysterious corporation to fake his death and reboot his entire existence; things go south and he ends up strapped to a gurney with a bone-saw closing in on his temple. The midlife crisis movie to end them all, John Frankenheimer’s uncompromisingly bleak examination of Madison Avenue’s airbrushed ideal of suburbia and its equally vacant bohemian opposite paints a scabrous portrait of a post-Kennedy America in which there are no real winners, only victims; no true originals, only ‘seconds’. Hudson is revelatory as the granite-jawed hero whose moral courage betrays him at every turn, leaving both him and us with a butcher’s bill that we can never, ever hope to pay.
Read our original review of 'Seconds'
Watch the trailer for 'Seconds'

Dean Halsey (Robert Sampson) from ‘Re-Animator’ (1985)
When your day starts with getting brutally murdered and goes downhill from there, you know you’re in trouble. Poor old Halsey, respected dean of a prestigious East Coast seat of learning, gets a raw deal in Stuart Gordon’s witty gorefest: first he’s bumped off by a walking corpse, then reanimated by mad scientist Herbert West’s magic serum. After being lobotomised by an old friend and forced to kidnap his own daughter, Halsey ends his day watching that same beautiful daughter being sexually molested by a man with no head. Gutted – quite literally.
Read our original review of 'Re-Animator'
Watch the trailer for 'Re-Animator'

Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) in ‘Trading Places’ (1983)
A critique of bourgeois entitlement to rival Renoir’s ‘La Règle du jeu’, John Landis’s proto-yuppie peril parable grinds down its smug fall guy with undisguised glee. Winthorpe is Philadelphia’s most ruthless commodities broker, but penury, shame and degradation are swiftly visited upon him as he witnesses his whole life handed over to street-smart badass Billy Ray Valentine and feels the jackboot of reality nudging his talcum-fresh heiny. Drugs, prostitution and cack-handed gunplay mark Louis’s descent into a gross parody of everything he once despised. He does, admittedly, get to sleep with Jamie Lee Curtis…
Read our original review of 'Trading Places'
Watch the trailer for 'Trading Places'

Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) from ‘Blue Velvet’ (1986)
Feminist groups were incensed by the ignominy Lynch’s saddest heroine was subjected to, and whether or not you buy his assertions of sympathy there’s no doubting the fact that poor Dorothy gets a royally raw deal. Before the film even starts she’s had her husband and child kidnapped, and is being forced to act as mother figure and sex slave to Dennis Hopper’s legendarily bonkers Frank Booth. Things begin to turn around when she finds a bumchinned perv fumbling in the closet, but there’s still time to get slapped around, wander the streets naked and be menaced by a creepy-looking animatronic garden bird.
Read our original review of 'Blue Velvet'
Watch the trailer for 'Blue Velvet'

Chas (James Fox) in ‘Performance’ (1970)
East End gang enforcer and all-round Face, Chas is living the life of Riley until he suddenly finds himself on the run from both his employers and the law. His life in tatters and his options slim, Chas takes the most rational measure his reeling mind can muster: he paints his hair red and moves in with Mick Jagger. But this is just the start of Chas’s problems as his mind is turned inside out by the bohemian excesses of the west London art-rock scene and a generous dose of mushrooms. A couple of days earlier he’d been trading cockney aphorisms in the back room of a Mile End drinker, now he’s sitting a bathful of cold wee and bewilderment while Jagger strips him of his identity and murders him… or he kills Mick and takes over his life – it’s hard to tell. Either outcome, we think you’d agree, represents a fairly bad day at the office.
Read our original review of 'Performance'
Watch the trailer for 'Performance'

Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) from ‘The Exorcist’ (1973) and ‘The Exorcist III’ (1990)
Hangdog God-botherer Karras suffers the torments of Job in Friedkin’s original ‘Exorcist’. First his mother, confined for years in a grotty NYC old folks home, pops her clogs. Then the devil comes to town in all his spewing, foul-mouthed glory, threatening Karras’s already frail faith. The chance for redemption comes at a high price – Karras takes the demon in and hurls himself out of a second-storey window down a flight of pretty solid-looking concrete steps. But it doesn’t end there: in author Blatty’s under-appreciated sequel we learn that Damien’s dying corpse has been, ahem, repossessed, this time by the ghost of Brad Dourif. He ends his days in a mental asylum being yelled at by George C Scott, before facing up to an eternity in hell. Bless him.
Read our original review of 'The Exorcist'
Watch the trailer for 'The Exorcist'

Capt John Yossarian (Alan Arkin) ‘Catch-22’ (1970)
Some actors just attract it: from his role as a deaf-mute in ‘The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter’ to a forlorn turn as Ed Harris’s prank monkey in ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’, King of Calamity Arkin has done nothing but suffer. But nowhere is he more terminally put-upon than in Mike Nichols’s masterly adaptation of the ultimate wartime tragicomedy ‘Catch-22’. The only sane man in the Mediterranean theatre, Yossarian is put through the existential ringer by a combination of the ludicrous popinjays in command and the scheming, complicit scoundrels that make up his fellow grunts. The mounting absurdity would sink a lesser man, but Arkin just about manages to keep his nose above the Plimsoll line regardless of whatever woes are piled upon him.
Read our original review for 'Catch-22'

The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) from ‘The Terminator’ (1984)
Okay, so he’s a genocidal walking death machine from the future, but have a heart for Big Arn’s original Terminator: no one asked him if he wanted to be sent back in time, beaten, stabbed, shot, made to replace his own eye, blown up, burned, beaten again and finally crushed with industrial machinery. Did anyone ever try to talk to the poor lad, to get to the root of his problems? Did they hell.
Read our original review of 'The Terminator'
Watch the trailer for 'The Terminator'

I you can think of any characters that have had a tougher time than any of the above, suggestions gratefully received below.

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