worst plot twists in movie history, a repository

Rule #1: Do not read thread if you aren't ok with having hundreds of movies spoiled for you
Rule #2: No M Night Shyamalan - we know all of those already and there's a thread for it
Rule #3: No High Tension. duh, we know.
Rule #4: have fun.

uhh so I think Identity's is one of the worst ("all of these characters are different personalities in the mind of someone who has DID"), especially given how it basically undoes all of the tension up until that point.

what else

Also, Identity's twist was obvious from the commercial.

Memento. Plot twist - that character who was clearly established early in the movie as having a specific form of memory impairment that you do not have? Different enough that your story arc could not exist if you had his form of disability, and his story arc could not exist if he had yours? He's actually you! I'm still pissed about that.

Identity was the one I immediately thought of. Pretty incredible that the joke twist in Adaptation got used so soon afterwards.

Monster a Go Go - suddenly "a cosmic switch got pulled" and none of it ever happened

that jon stewart movie where red staters turn out to be pretending in order to get attention

Serenity - matthew mcconaughy is an AI of jodie foster's dad or something

When I watched The Usual Suspects I did do under the illusion that it contained 'the best twist ever'. When the 'twist' actually happened I felt like everyone in the world owed me five quid

vertigo

is she? isnt she?

who cares this is rubbish

I'm feeling benevolent enough not to FP you for that but I shd've

did you? didn't you?

who cares this is etc

Love Hitchcock, never liked Vertigo.

Hate the end of Arlington Road — it’s pretty standard unhappy ending twist, but it’s the sense of the director’s smugness at being sooooo much smarter than you idiot moviegoers, that really grates.

I hated that last-minute “just when you think everyone’s safe, the heroine dies in the last second of the movie” thing that was obligatory in every misogynist horror movie of the ‘00s

idk if you'd call it a twist because it was kind of the whole movie but Shutter Island's entire "conceit" was extremely frustrating esp given how beautifully made the movie was

I had an animated discussion the other day after watching Red Dragon because I felt that the entire structure that held up the first two narratives (Manhunter, Red Dragon, Silence) comes crashing down with the "twist" that seemingly any individual (incl. any protagonist) can be turned into a serial killer given the correct suggestions and circumstances. It's not just a twist, it sours any previous events/revelations... I had no patience for the Hannibal series for this reason

The ending of Drag Me To Hell wasn't misogynistic ffs, it was great

Or at least it was a fine rendering of the trope idk

A sled? Give me a break!

Simply Irresistible (1999) - a magic crab gives sarah michelle gellar the ability to bake feelings into her food

this is the elevator pitch. it happens like 10 minutes into the movie.

When I watched The Usual Suspects I did do under the illusion that it contained 'the best twist ever'. When the 'twist' actually happened I felt like everyone in the world owed me five quid

A high concept premise is not a twist! xp

The way it was sold to me was "the twist at the end will make you want to watch the movie again!", but when I saw it I was like, OK that's a twist, but no.

cant agree with shutter Island which is so lush and silly and fun that the twist is pure panto laughs

The Boy: there's a monster in the walls
The Boy II: the doll has an alien in it question mark

loooooool, I opened the thread with the express intention of lambasting Identity. Solid opening salvo.

Frailty: psycho killer dad was right all along, god really does want him to kill people

lol I kind of like that one. I'm a big fan of the non-twist twist, where exactly what you think is happening is what happens. "House of the Devil" and "Rosemary's Baby," films like that.

Never seen it, but remember this (iirc zero star) review:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-life-of-david-gale-2003

We need better terminology to distinguish between a twist in the middle of a movie, and something that happens in the last 15 seconds to change your perception of what you've just seen. To me they're very distinct phenomena; in the latter case, it's often like the filmmakers are saying, "we wanted to make this story darker, but couldn't figure out how to integrate it, so we'll leave you dejected in the cheapest way possible".

How about that Josh Hartnett movie where he abstains from sex only to have his ex girlfriend tie him to the bed and rape him, which everyone proceeds to get mad at him about

This was a comedy by the way

idk if this counts as a "twist", but considering it's one of my favourite horror films, the original double twist ending of The Descent is 100% great, perfect ending to a perfect film. The "audience feedback" ending that reduced it to a single twist for US release is awful terrible

I might be in the minority that I usually give the benefit of the doubt to twists that swing for the fences. Good or not, they'll usually end up getting lambasted by people who resent having the rug pulled out from under them.

A sled? Give me a break!

setting up a mystery as the whole premise and then not resolving it would have made that era's audiences rather uneasy or angry. otoh, the bathetic sentimentality of it didn't seem to bother them. seems like overall it was a wise choice -- for back then. for now? not as successful.

A friend's son recently had to watch "Citizen Kane" over the course of a couple of days in school, and they ran out of time like 15 minutes before the ending.

I was, of course, kidding...not really even a plot twist, just the answer to a riddle.

No one's mentioned The Crying Game, I guess because that's considered a very effective plot twist (which for an observant person, probably was obvious anyway). Don't want to end up repeating stuff from another thread, but there was a lot of back-and-forth on the plot twist in The Conversation: many people consider that a cheat.

Coppola's _The Conversation_

Re rule #1, might be worth mentioning that ppl could still use the hidden tags if they want to go into detail, then everyone can decide for themselves whether they want the bad twist spoiled

I didn't hate it myself, but I remember cries of anguish about the twist ending of The Mist.

I can’t really think of good egs although I’ve seen umpteen bad dtv (at least in spirit) that contain a dumb (usually telegraphed) twist, but those are just bad movies

Xp I was just about to bring up the mist! I love that ending

I remember seeing The Mist in a theater and thinking it was the perfect ending.

Re rule #1, might be worth mentioning that ppl could still use the hidden tags if they want to go into detail, then everyone can decide for themselves whether they want the bad twist spoiled

― ok what the fuck is happening in the uk (rain) (wins), Saturday, February 19, 2022 1:10 PM bookmarkflaglink

I'm amenable to this idea. Rule #1 amended!

Yeah, the only Mist ending I know is a good bummer.

There have got to be a mess of terrible "it was all a dream" twists. Or "you've been in hell the whole time" twists.

Like the bizarre and incredible story of The Man Who Lived in The Box!

I remember thinking the end of the burton planet of the apes was a funny attempt to top the original, so kind of goodbad (like a lot of these) - can’t remember what the twist actually is tho

Only sort of on topic but (& I might have posted this in shockingly old) I learned a couple of years ago that in the source novel for Soylent green it is NOT people, it is just soy + lentil as the name suggests

The ending of The Mist is terrible - 9th grade "write an O. Henry homage" shit.

More “write a tales from the crypt stinger” tbh

the twist in The Machinist is so lame it barely counts as a twist

are twists like the old canard about stories, there's only about 7 of them?

reckon there's about 4

- it didn't really happen and other metatextual japes
- the goodie is a baddie (or vice versa)
- DEATH COMES
- sled

As someone who didn’t grow up with the twilight zone I knew most of the famous twists through osmosis from parodies by simpsons et al but there is one that even tho I had encountered in parody form I still found both genuinely shocking and laugh-out-loud stupid

(xpost) - has a penis

the twist in The Machinist is so lame it barely counts as a twist

― I have a voulez-vous? with death (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 19 February 2022 20:53 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ha, yes. It's one of those endings that's so signposted and so obvious if you've seen any other film like this, but the reveal is so drawn out that you start to think maybe there's something else coming. But there isn't!

Monster A Go-Go is notoriously one of the lamest ever, but at least it's funny in how stupid it is. The Last Broadcast annoyed me more as it was actively insulting to the intelligence of anyone who had actually sat through all that dreck to find out what was going on, and they obviously thought it was really clever. Must have been 20 years since I saw it but it still irritates me thinking of what waste of time it was.

Haven’t seen machinist but god yeh the excruciating protracted reveal of the thing everyone figured out ages ago

wow I haven’t thought about the one season of westworld I watched in about a decade

btw a shout-out to the movie Source Code, which has just about every stupid twist conceivable, to the extent where all the stupid twists put together almost create something quite elegant

If anything was going to be a paradox, it would be Nebula killing the version of herself who traveled forward in time, but since the established rules were that time travel forks off new branches of reality rather than modifies existing branches, the time-traveling Nebula had already diverged from the timeline that created modern antihero Nebula and her existence was no longer necessary for antihero Nebula to survive.

Then how does he end up back in the original timeline as an old man?

I think we're all overthinking this.

Silence has a pretty lousy plot twist too iirc, when the voice of Jesus says “step on my face, you cocksucker”

i was a bit shocked when Jesus told Andrew Garfield to go home and get his fucking shinebox

To go back to the Mist, I don't think a twist ever made me so angry. I loved the book which left it open ended, but it really bothered me that the guy has his kid and they just give up and he shoots his kid. WTF. That's not what would happen. A person with his kid would not do that. The ONLY reason that happens is for the sake of the twist which is what pissed me off about it. And then the army literally shows up 3 minutes later? GTFO with that. It's mean spirited for no good reason.

idk that it's that absurd, the whole group had collectively decided to commit suicide because of the fear of trying to survive in a world of indestructible monsters and watch your family and friends get slaughtered each day. and if the dad didn't shoot his son, but shot himself first, he'd have to worry about the kid screwing it up and getting devoured painfully by monsters, all by himself. for less altruistic reasons, there are lots of IRL examples of familial murder-suicides where the father killed the kid for reasons they believed were mercy.

the army showing up 3 minutes later, that one I won't argue, that's a definite rug-pull.

mean spirited for no good reason

That's what I thought of Time Bandits killing the boy's parents in the final minute of the film.

was really mad when Cameron's Titanic let most of the passengers die, he should have allowed them all to escape to shore imo

"it doesn't improve on the Masahiro Shinoda version tho and probably isn't as good"

the full movie is on youtube with english subs, might watch this later.

nah I agree with Cow Art, the Mist ending was really stupid. idk if a father would murder his son in that situation (I will let you know if and when that happens to me) but yeah to have all the monsters miraculously disappear right after was incredibly dumb, and iirc not how the book ended

father viewed it as a mercy killing, and he was about to do himself next, so he wouldn't really be feeling guilt for very long. it's just that...he didn't get to.

oh wait, forgot he was out of bullets, I think he was just going to get out of the car and let the monsters kill him.

this is all really obvious tbh

i mean the term 'murder' in particular is some nonsense

honestly though I love mean-spirited endings. Bambi shoulda been darker IMO

yes

the von trapp children shouldnt have made it

the kid's parents in Time Bandits were dicks, fuck 'em

in fact iirc it's not even a downer, it's liberation

yeah that's how it felt

Liked the Time Bandits ending, although it stunned me when I saw it in the theater as a kid.

James's parents being killed by a rhino seemed gratuitous imho.

Any narrative that has a patricide or a filicide gets a thumbs-up from me

need some more. preferably terrible ones from movies I'll never watch.

Any narrative that has a patricide or a filicide gets a thumbs-up from me

Well, in Time Bandits, Sean Connery is the idealized father figure/king (who's there when the boy's parents die); it's hardly dismantling patriarchy.

speaking of james, the ending of The Witches (the book) where the kid decides to live the rest of his life as a mouse, was pretty WTF (and good) to child me.

yeah turning him back into a boy was maybe the worst thing about the very bad film adaptation

I love the ending of "Time Bandits," especially because it's so mean. A lot of kids movies (this one included) hinge on getting the parents out of the picture, often via on- or offscreen death, so that young audiences can identify with being independent. The thrill, the adventure, etc. That this movie reunites Kevin with his shitty parents at the end and then just immediately dispatches these (yes, very Dahl like) twits both prolongs the fantasy but also subverts it by adding an edge of be-careful-what-you-wish-for to it.

As for "The Mist," what I remember is that the monsters weren't just horrifying, they also killed you in really horrifying, horrific, painful ways. Like, latching onto your head and slowly dissolving your face with acid and stuff like that. If that were your fate, you'd probably consider another way out, too. Like Vasquez and Gorman in "Aliens." They know they can't win, but they also know what losing on the alien's terms looks like.

Also the monsters disappearing is as implausible as their appearing

Due to some unexplained stuff presumably happening offscreen, some things that cannot logically exist in this world show up, literally just come out of some mist / due to some unexplained &c presumably &c they suddenly stop existing in this world, literally as the mist just subsides

(In both cases there is a hint of an explanation in the form of “the military or something I guess who cares”)

For me the best part of the ending is that beautiful scene of just the foot of whatever lovecraftian thing that might be passing above them & it just sinks in how fucked they are, that there is no surviving in this world. Of course you’d off the boy ffs! & then the cruel joke of the end is like this final awful absurdity; I have the instinctive certainty that had he not used the bullets, the mist would not have rolled back, cause this universe operates on something akin to roger rabbit’s “only when it’s funny” rule

Then again

For me, it's just a whole "why did you even bother, trying only made it worse, everything you do is futile, just when you think death is an escape here's something even worse, hahahaha" bummer ending. I adore that. But for other people, it's apparently more of a "you should have stayed believing in hope until the end" kind of thing. A punishment for giving up. That to me completely sucks and I hope it isn't what was intended.

movie would have been improved by one of the soldiers popping his head out of a tank and saying "ay mate, have ya tried SHOOTING at these monsters?", winking, and driving off

My ideal Mist ending, aside from the novella version, would have been them running out of gas, Mickey Mantle pulls out the revolver and opens the cylinder, camera pans to each face, oh shit rounds left +1, cut to black.

It's as dark as the GOTCHA LOL ending but not cheap.

Are there any parents here who think the dad would have shot his son in that situation?

Because I think you would go until there were no more options. You run out of gas, there's no more food, there are monsters directly attacking you, etc. Otherwise there's hope and if you are taking care of your kid you do anything to keep them safe.

To derail the thread, I started watching the Good Place with my 12 year old and we got to the end of the first season, which has one of the BEST plot twists and it blew her mind all of the place. So much "WHAT? NO!!!! WHAT? NO!!!!"

ive just been in a restaurant with a two year old and right now id have shot the kid before the monsters started appearing tbh

Just remembered the reveal in Angel Heart that De Niro's character's name is...LOU CYPHER! Geddit??

I mean really, for fuck's sake.

.

Not sure if it's a twist, but Blofeld's "No, I am your half-brother" was like just the groaniest of all groans.

The Time Bandits ending is shocking (and great IMO) because it's such a mischievous and sudden change in tone from the rest of the movie. I remember not feeling very sad about the parents exploding, but the boy being left alone at the end is crushing.

Did anyone mention Rey is a Palpatine yet?

The Time Bandits ending is shocking (and great IMO) because it's such a mischievous and sudden change in tone from the rest of the movie. I remember not feeling very sad about the parents exploding, but the boy being left alone at the end is crushing.

― Chuck_Tatum, Sunday, February 27, 2022 6:23 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Oh man, I remember feeling really sad about that too, and confused by the whole thing

Bible, Jesus not really dead.

Clearly setting up a sequel ffs

Yeah, but Jesus destroyed the world in the epilogue. Ruined the character for me.

Better Call Paul

Breaking Bread: The New Adventures of the Early Church

Anyway my answer is Fat Girl. Not funny, not clever, not liberating, just cretinous.

i learned of that twist via this thread!

what the complete fuck

makes me never want to see it

Promising Young Woman #onethread

No one's mentioned The Crying Game, I guess because that's considered a very effective plot twist (which for an observant person, probably was obvious anyway).

― clemenza

lol no seriously cis people are not "observant" even these days, in 1991 or whatever? no. people weren't gonna notice that dil was played by a cis man (jaye davidson is a cis gay man, though he's very much a femme).

so yeah i have, like, opinions on this plot twist and it's definitely one of the worst plot twists ever but not in the same way this thread is talking about them

first off it overshadowed the entire rest of the movie, like the movie wasn't about dil's gender identity, and jordan puts this twist in the film and nobody cares about the rest of the film. like he's a good filmmaker, he makes good films, but he fucked around with shit he didn't really understand. like he's not a queer filmmaker, he's an _irish_ filmmaker, _the crying game_ isn't a queer movie.

nah it's bad becaues he doesn't understand transness, to the best of my knowledge _still_ doesn't understand transness, and this film was one of the two that defined what people (like, not just cis people, i'm also talking _me_ here) thought about trans people for several decades afterwards.

like the twist of the movie as i learned it wasn't "dil has a penis" but "the woman" (women don't get names) "in the crying game is really a man". i don't think the movie explicitly says that (i'm not gonna watch-it again to double-check), but the whole story is centered around Fergus' point of view. We're supposed to sympathize with Fergus the _trauma_ dil showing him her dick causes him. it's so fucking hard on him that he goes into the other room and vomits. that's what people took from _the crying game_. if you find out someone is a trans woman, the appropriate response is to vomit. and the vomiting got more and more performative. like, what everybody remembers is _ace ventura_. and tom shadyac, i mean, this is someone i definitely very much detest (jim carrey i'm cool with, you know, none of us knew any better and he seems to have learned that the whole trans thing in that movie was fucked up), but the vomiting doesn't come from _ace ventura_, it comes from _the crying game_. which again to my knowledge is a good film. i haven't seen that one. i saw _the butcher boy_ which i thought was a very fucking good film.

oh the other thing that makes it bad is that... neil. neil neil neil. i'm sorry but hardly any trans woman is going to _assume_ that a cis guy _knows_ she's trans and just get her kit off and just _show_ the guy her dick. i'm not gonna say it _never_ happens. i heard about one local trans woman doing that. specifically i heard of it happening during the murder trial of the man who killed her. since it was, like, 2019 and we're really progressive around here, the judge refused to accept his "trans panic" defense and the jury convicted him. in 1991 i don't think he would've been convicted.

so yeah i'd say it's a terrible twist, it undermines the movie artistically to the point of having eclipsed the entire rest of the film, hell, the entire rest of jordan's _career_, and on top of that, while jordan wasn't _overtly_ bigoted the film had a _terrible_ impact on trans people for decades following. to the best of my knowledge jordan still doesn't understand how much his film hurt trans people. that's pretty terrible imo.

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anyway more on point i found the speed racer film plot twist to be hilarious. i'm gonna spoil it because nobody should care, there are no dramatic stakes. which is the first reason it's a stupid plot twist, for a plot twist to work somebody has to give a fuck. anyway the central "mystery" of the film is "who is racer x", and speed spends the whole movie as a racer x truther, believing that racer x is secretly rex racer, his allegedly dead brother. then halfway through the movie racer x takes off his mask and DUN DUN DUN it's not rex under the mask! but then at the end of the movie DUN DUN DUN it turns out that rex got FACIAL SURGERY so he DOESN'T LOOK LIKE HE USED TO

i mean i'm a "everything the wachowski sisters have done is trans" truther and i do think this movie is aesthetically VERY FUCKING TRANS but as much as i stretch i can't make this plot twist anything but stupid and meaningless. nobody cares. i don't care who rex racer _really_ is. i mean that's the plot twist here, speed stop trying to clock racer x as your dead brother, it's fucking rude, just let racer x be racer x. daaaaamn bro.

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you know what's a _good_ plot twist, actually? mrs. dr. girlfriend is a cis woman. i watched the first season of that and originally i was a little, uh... had a little trepidation about that, but oh she's actually a cis woman? cool. i haven't seen "bob's burgers" but apparently it's the same way with tina belcher? i know trans women love tina belcher.

tho im actually a sucker for it tbh, as referenced above mcconaghey communicating ~~~~~~somehow~~~~~~~ through a wardrobe, a space rift, a watch and morse through time to spell out ******something******* is and always will be absolute piss

I hated that twist with my entire heart

Don't have one but my new favorite thing is when closed captions spoil a plot twist.

I.E. a movie keeps secret throughout who Jimmy's long lost father is. Guy who has featured in movie but hasn't spoken yet appears on screen and talks, captions appear

JIMMY'S DAD: HI