Superbad

The banality of evil? The James Bond movies have never heard of it. Applicants for the job of Bond villain have to be larger-than-life lunatics. You need to dream big, scheme big in fact, it helps if you're called Mr. Big.

Minimum requirements include:

A) A grandiose plan (preferably for world domination);

B) A pathological need to explain that grandiose plan to Bond before you try to kill him; and

C) A bizarre physical trait. Added points if you have a prosthesis that can be turned into a weapon. Oh, and it also doesn't hurt to keep exotic pets, like a white Persian cat or a pool full of man-eating sharks.

However, that could all change with the new Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, opening Friday, Nov. 14. In it, French actor Mathieu Amalric plays a bad guy who, in the words of director Marc Forster, is like the guy next door. Translation: no steel teeth that can bite through tram cables, no eye that weeps blood not even a kinky gold fetish. But thankfully, he does have a grandiose plan.

Here is a dossier of Agent 007's more memorable adversaries, both the evil geniuses and their trusty (or not-so-trusty) henchmen.

The prototypical Bond villain: Dr. No

Technically, the original Bond bad guy is Le Chiffre in Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale, the book that introduced the world to 007. However, the titular mad man in the first feature film, 1962's Dr. No, has come to represent everything we expect in a Bond adversary. Dr. Julius No is brilliant, urbane and ruthless, with a crazily ambitious scheme (intercepting U.S. missiles) and a cool hideaway (his own island in the Caribbean). He also has some lethal prostheses: a pair of powerful but slippery metal hands that prove to be his undoing. Canadian actor Joseph Wiseman played him with, in retrospect, admirable restraint.

Introduced in 1963's From Russia with Love, Blofeld was so supremely vile that his evil had to be spread over six films (seven if you count the unofficial Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again). The head of the international crime organization SPECTRE, Blofeld built on Dr. No's toxic template, gleefully plotting global chaos while stroking his Persian cat.

Blofeld was just a voice and a pair of hands in From Russia and Thunderball (1965). We first saw his face slashed with a hideous scar in You Only Live Twice (1967), when he was embodied by bald British actor Donald Pleasence (later of Halloween fame). Telly Savalas, pre-Kojak, took on the role for On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969). Charles Gray gave Blofeld a full head of silver hair and a Wicked Queen persona in 1971's Diamonds Are Forever probably the most homophobic of the Bond films. (Gray went on to inspire even more hisses as the creepy narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) The great Max von Sydow did Gray one better, giving Blofeld a beard as well, in 1983's Never Say Never Again.

The character hasn't appeared in the official series since 1981, when a bad guy who looked suspiciously like Blofeld was killed in the opening sequence of For Your Eyes Only. (Given his cat-like resilience, he may well be back again.) In the meantime, he lives on in spoof form as the diabolical Dr. Evil of the Austin Powers comedies.

Leaving behind a dead beauty painted head to toe in gold how do you top that for a warning? Shirley Eaton was the Bond girl who got the gold shellacking in 1964's Goldfinger. Gert Frbe, as "the man with the Midas touch," also found other uses for the shiny stuff, as in thisclassic exchange with Sean Connery's Bond.

Bond's fiercest female foe: Rosa Klebb

A SPECTRE agent with a Sapphic streak and a heart as cold as Siberia, Klebb almost got the better of Bond at the climax of From Russia with Love. Her secret weapon? Poisoned knives in her shoes. She was played to flesh-creeping perfection by legendary Austrian singer Lotte Lenya, wife of composer Kurt Weill. (After this prominent role, Lenya claimed that people who met her would always glance at her footwear.)

Bond villains with the freakiest physical traits: Scaramanga and Le Chiffre

Turns out Francisco Scaramanga, a.k.a. the Man with the Golden Gun, is also the man with the third nipple. Christopher Lee bares that physical anomaly as the sharp-shooting assassin in 1974's The Man with the Golden Gun. Freaky by Bond standards, maybe, but for Lee, a veteran of the Hammer horror factory, an extra areola was surely no big deal. (Amusingly, a gene responsible for breast development has been named after Scaramanga.)

Even weirder is the infirmity suffered by Mads Mikkelsen's gambling addict in the second Casino Royale (2006). His Le Chiffre has a damaged left eye that weeps blood, usually at inopportune times like when he's playing a life-or-death poker game opposite Daniel Craig's Bond. It's hard to bluff when you're bleeding on your tux.

Long before Yaphet Kotto starred in TV's grittily realistic Homicide: Life on the Street, he was 007's cartoonish nemesis in Live and Let Die. He also suffered the most cartoonish death of all the Bond bad guys. Roger Moore shoves a compressed air pellet into his mouth and... well, let's just say the results wereexplosive.

Bond villain with the craziest master plan: Elliot Carver

This is a tough one they're all crazy. ButCarver, the media Machiavelli played by Jonathan Pryce in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), gets the prize for the scheme with the nuttiest payoff. It involves taking out the Chinese government with a stolen cruise missile and replacing it with a puppet regime, so he can have "exclusive broadcasting rights in China for the next 100 years!" Rupert Murdoch, eat your heart out.

Most unlikely Bond villain: Woody Allen

Yep, the Woodman plotted against 007, albeit not in an official Bond film. He played the jittery Jimmy Bond, a.k.a. Dr. Noah, in the 1967 spoof version of Casino Royale. His vertically challenged villain planned to release a bacillus that would destroy all men over four feet, six inches tall.

Some unforgettable henchmen (and women):

Every self-respecting evil genius needs henchmen to do his bidding. Bond has had to tangle with all sorts of nasty second bananas. Among our favourites:

Oddjob in Goldfinger: A Korean butler with a razor-edged bowler hat that can decapitate a statue or a secret agent at 50 paces. He was played by Olympic weightlifter Harold Sakata.

Bambi and Thumper in Diamonds Are Forever: Two fun-loving gals with cute Disney monikers, Bambi (Lola Larson) and Thumper (Trina Parks) are a pair of killer gymnasts who almost leave Bond on the mat.

May Day in A View to a Kill: Disco queen Grace Jones stopped nightclubbing long enough to lend her Amazonian presence to the last of the Roger Moore Bonds. As the lover-cum-henchwoman of microchip mogul Max Zorin (Christopher Walken), she mixes some wicked martial arts moves with a little skydiving parachuting off the Eiffel Tower.

Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun: Tiny Herv Villechaize almost steals the movie from Christopher Lee (a near-impossible feat) as Scaramanga's mischievous servant.

Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker: Richard Kiel's metal-mouthed heavy is another audience favourite and by the end of Moonraker, he has become one of the good guys... though he still has ample time to put thebite on Bond.

Do you have a favourite Bond villain? Leave a comment below.

Quantum of Solace opens Nov. 14.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.