Best Star Trek Villains Star In A Horror Movie That Took 40 Years To Make
The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine villains Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo) and Adami Winn (Louise Fletcher) became signature roles in the actors’ respective careers. While DS9 was their first screen collaboration most could’ve seen, it wasn’t the first time they worked together. In 1983 they were both in the cast of Grizzly II: Revenge — a horror flick with a surprisingly long list of future celebrities attached — but in spite of principal photography completing on the film ten years before DS9 premiered, Grizzly II didn’t hit theaters until 2020.
Grizzly II: Revenge was meant to be the sequel to 1976’s horror thriller Grizzly, the original film being a prominent coattail-rider on the previous year’s Jaws. The sequel gives us a series of deadly bear attacks leading up to a huge rock concert in Yellowstone National Park. Future Star Trek villain Fletcher plays Eileene Draygon, the superintendent of the area in which the concert is being held, while Alaimo plays the relatively minor character of Luke.
Marc Alaimo and Louise Fletcher, who played recurring villains on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, first worked together on Grizzly II: Revenge – a film shot in the early 1980s that wasn’t released until 2020.
Ironically, the actors who would later achieve the most amount of fame of anyone in the Grizzly II cast play pretty small roles in the film. George Clooney (Michael Clayton), Charlie Sheen (Two and a Half Men), and Laura Dern (Jurassic Park) all play camping teens attacked by the massive bear. Meanwhile the future dwarf warrior of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, John Rhys-Davies, plays a world famous grizzly bear expert from the Great White North.
As The Ringer chronicled in 2020, there were a number of factors that left Grizzly II in limbo for decades, but according to most the chief reason seems to be the shady producer John Ford Proctor. In spite of pledging to finance the film, he allegedly ditched the production without a word and left his co-producer Suzanne C. Nagy in the lurch with stacks of unpaid bills on location in Hungary.
[T]here were a number of factors that left Grizzly II in limbo for decades, but according to most the chief reason seems to be the shady producer John Ford Proctor.
Per MovieWeb, it wasn’t until 2018 that Nagy began looking to finally release Grizzly II, and two years laters fans finally got to see the very late release of the sequel. Fittingly, it’s currently streaming on Paramount+, where you can also see the work of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine villains who appear in the sequel.
Marc Alaimo And Louise Fletcher In DS9
If you’re a fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, then it’s practically mandatory for you to agree that Gul Dukat and Adami Winn were two of the greatest villains in the series — and in the Trek franchise as a whole. Dukat is a recurring antagonist who starts off as a power-hungry warlord, devolves into a vengeful madman, and eventually allows himself to be possessed by malevolent beings known as the Pah-wraiths.
Louise Fletcher’s Adami Winn is initially the more subtle of the two Star Trek villains. An ambitious member of a Bajoran religious order, Winn eventually becomes Kai — Bajor’s religious leader — but even that is not enough for her.
While both these memorable Star Trek: Deep Space Nine characters are villains, they’re enemies until the show’s final season. Disguising himself as a Bajoran, Dukat seduces Adami and wins her over to the side of the Pah-wraiths.
Louise Fletcher — who is perhaps even better known as the manipulative Nurse Ratched of 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — passed away last year at the age 88.
