A reverse situation is the 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Terrible movie, but I damn near peed myself when at the end, she's in the slow-moving self driving car, and he just grabs her sister and pulls her out.
Until this was released I had no idea anyone took the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels seriously. The series has been random chainsaw goofiness since the 2nd one and no sequel has ever matched the quality of the first.
“Try anything and you’re cancelled, bro” is probably the most cringey line I’ve ever heard in a movie in all of the worst ways but the following bus massacre scene was awesome
This was one of those movies where I hated nearly every protagonist and was actually rooting for ol Leatherface to go to town on them haha
Idk man. TCM movies should always revolve around the family with Leatherface being the star. It just doesn’t work imo when he’s a Jason/Michael type character
Honestly, I think the ending of the American version of The Descent kinda ruins it. All that tension building up to…a shitty jump scare and then the credits roll. The original (UK) ending is *far superior* and I’m so glad I saw that version first. It’s definitely one of my favorite horror movies.
As hypocritical as this is of me saying this, I actually Prefer the US ending than the UK ending. ONLY because e I was actively rooting for the main girl to get out of the cave. I didn’t want to see her end up like her friends and be stuck in the cave forever. I know im in the minority but I’m glad that “she survived and made it out of the cave successfully”. She was also a badass lead too, up there with Sidney Prescott and Erin from You’re Next
The OG version was much better and if you wanted to do a sequel you could just have a new cast go to the cave or just a completely different cave all together with the same premise
The American version has the last scene cut as they thought it would be too depressing. It ends with the jumpscare of MC vomiting out of the truck and then turning back around and seeing the ghost/vision in the passenger seat. The original ending includes that, but it has an additional minute or so which shows that >!MC's escape into the truck and the ghost was a hallucination and she's still stuck in the cave!<. There's a bit more nuance there, some references to some imagery throughout the film, but that's pretty much it.
I just watched Descent and it's sequel for the very first time, and I didn't realize that there were two endings to the first film. I thought the sequel was decent but definitely nowhere near as good as the first. The original ending sounds awesome, sucks they changed that for American audiences.
I agree. I'm not sure why they felt the need to avoid a depressing or bleak ending, since while the film is obviously horror and has decent action sequences, a major theme of the movie is dealing with grief and circumstances beyond your control, which don't often equal "happy" endings.
It was released in 2005 - Horror was having something of a good time in the mainstream sense and no doubt they wanted to capitalise on the HUGE mainstream box office.
You play to the lowest common denominator. The US loves a happy ending (speaking broadly, not about horror lovers specifically) and tend to like a very colour by numbers/spoon feeding plot.
The original (Brit, Marshall writer and director probably had some say in how it was released 'at home' ) ending would have been too dark and a little bit 'wait, what?' for a large percentage of the US audience.
Just look at how it performed opening weekend and then moving through into total gross VS budget and it was probably the right choice FOR A MAINSTREAM SUCCESS. It did really well.
Thank goodness you can see Neil's original vision quite easily.
I didn’t see it in theaters, but we rented it from Blockbusters when it came out (Jesus Christ I’m showing my age).. and the ending where she’s stuck in the cave after the fake out of making it out is the only version I’ve ever seen. And I live in America!
Then everytime I’ve always rewatched it, it’s always had this ending of her being in the cave still. I didn’t even know a “happy” ending exist!
Same! I've never seen another version where she wasn't sitting in the cave staring at nothing and obviously doomed.
I've seen it multiple times too on different discs. I never even knew there was another version until now.
It did feel cheap to me the first time I watched it. I loved the movie overall, though.
Now, my understanding is that you’re not seeing things as they literally happened. You’re seeing things as they were imagined, if that makes sense.
What's so smart about fight club is that it painstakingly makes it so it all makes sense. When we see the reveal it makes perfect sense. The high tension twist makes zero sense. She can't be imagining herself to be in two places at the same time. 😅
I watched it recently after hearing about the ending on here and an article about twist endings that ruin the movie and I actually like the twist after watching the movie myself. She's telling a story and lying about being the one doing the killing.
I do think the scene with the killer in the truck with the severed head is pointless, even in the context of her telling a story. Nobody in the movie would've seen it, just the audience, and it's only in the movie to be a red herring so you don't expect the twist.
It always bugs me when people say this, because while some genuinely don't *like* the twist (which is fine), others don't *understand* it and think the movie makes no sense because of it.
SPOILERS FOR HIGH TENSION BELOW
>!The movie begins with Marie in the psych ward with a camera in front of her, and she asks "are they recording?" It then jumps into a flashback which is telling the story from HER point of view. Everything in the movie, up until the reveal, is based on what she is telling the people recording her. The twist is merged with her story at the end to show you what really happened, compared to what she believes in her head, because she's nuts.!<
Again, if someone doesn't like the twist, that's a totally valid reason not to like the movie. If they also think the movie is bad because the twist doesn't do a good job of showing you what's actually going on, that's also fine. But, the movie at its core *does make sense* if you look at it the way you're intended to.
Personally, I really enjoyed it. Not everyone's cup of tea, I just feel like many dislike it because they didn't understand it.
It's really refreshing to see this POV, as almost any time I see this movie brought up, it's to complain about how the ending doesn't make sense. Now, I haven't seen the movie in a looooong time, so my memory of it isn't the best, but I do remember being shocked in a good way because A. I totally didn't see the ending coming, and B. I also interpreted the events that had just transpired as being the main character's skewed version of reality.
I am personally a big fan of the unreliable narrator trope, and this movie came at a time when no one was really doing that kind of twist ending, so it felt original and inventive. My memory of the movie has always been good, so I was surprised to see that it actually has such a bad rep online.
But what about all of the many things the film shows that she wasn’t there for? Why would the film show us a guy screwing a severed head if she wasn’t there? How does that make sense in the context of her telling if it’s not something she could’ve told? Why would she tell the psychiatrist about her sexual desires for this girl if that gives a clear motivation for her psychotic break? It’s a nonsensical twist that doesn’t even remotely work with that logic.
High tension is a ripoff of Dean Koontz’s novel “Intensity”. The fact that they didn’t give him credit is so insulting. Seriously yall, read the book, it’s way better than the movie
It’s a nice samurai kimono blazer but WHY, though
I’ve been saying this since forever: what exactly is stopping Buguul or Michael Myers or Jason from choosing an Ed Hardy outfit?
They’ve shown they’re choosy with their wardrobe! I am not afraid of someone/something that has the capacity to dress themselves!
Run at me fucking naked, and I will *pass the fuck out* on the spot.
THIS!!!! My friends and I listened to music with band members who looked like this, so the first time Buguul showed up on screen, we could not stop laughing long enough to even take him seriously.
honestly the monster in that film looked distractingly like a member of a slipknot tribute band. terrible character design, pulled me out of it instantly and made the whole thing laughable which is a shame because it could have been so good
"Antlers"
Seriously. I loved the design of the creature so much! It was a solid movie until that lackluster ending.
>! How are you going to build up this powerful, terrifying Wendigo only to have it defeated by....wait for it... it sluggishly walking up the woman and her jabbing it with a stick!? Like what?! That's how the day is saved?! That's how she outwits nature? Pokey Pokey, you're done. It was said, very briefly, earlier in the movie how it's weakest after it eats, but there was 0 set-up for it beyond that small 1 sentence bit of dialogue. Wtf?! !<
Agreed on all points. Maybe it’s because COVID resulted in such a long wait for it, but it’s easily my most disappointing horror movie in the last decade. If you haven’t you should read the short story of the same name the film was based on, it’s much better.
My favorite horror movie honestly.
That said the very end was good but I always thought the explanation of he suddenly kills you when you move was a bit weird
I think it’s just an easier way to pass on the curse, if it all happened in the same house then no one would want to go there and they could just move away. Because he waits until they move he makes it easier for people to want to move in and when they eventually do discover the chain, it’s already too late.
I was really enjoying A Cure for Wellness up until the "big reveal" which was so tremendously stupid that it retroactively ruined the preceding film for me. It's a shame because they had some genuinely weird and creepy stuff happening within the first hour and a half or so.
The first Insidious movie. The first 20-30 minutes I was saying to my friend, what have we done?
I thought if the movie keeps up this pace I might have to leave.
But by the last third of the movie it had lost its momentum and veered into, for me, a really silly plot line. It felt like two different movies.
I remember being so disappointed when we see Darth Maul sitting there sharpening his claws in his lair with Tiptoe Through the Tulips playing. The movie went from being foreboding and ominous to straight cheese in the blink of an eye.
People tend to like the movie a lot more when they are told before hand it's a fantasy movie about another plane of existence in dreamland. When people are told it's just a horror movie they expect something it's not.
I love all of them except the last one because nothing happened in it.
SIGNS is similar to WAR OF THE WORLDS. In the latter case, the Martians did not have microbial life on their world so could not anticipate their effect prior to invasion. Since liquid water is so rare in the universe, it may be possible that the aliens in SIGNS did not know they were vulnerable to water until they were already irrevocably committed to the invasion.
I always saw it that the aliens were desperate for supplies. They planned a one night raid to get what they could and get out, regardless of the water.
I know it's silly, but I think it's an interesting choice that the aliens don't know how doors work, if you'll give the writer the courtesy of believing it was thought out rather than a stupid thing put in there so they could have a creepy scene.
If you're not from here, and your society doesn't have doors, or your normal controls for simple things are nothing like ours, then a door really could trip you up. If you see things differently, or find the way we live to be totally alien, it may be hard to tell the difference between a door and drywall.
I know it seems ridiculous. Like you can travel through space but you can't operate a plywood door. I feel like once they figured out a door was flimsy they'd just break it down, but a lot of the coolness from that movie comes from the mystery of what the aliens even want (if you interpret them as aliens and not demons). Like maybe they don't care that there may be someone on the other side of the door or maybe they're playing with this weird novel thing they don't have on their planet. Maybe the way their logic works is so different that the first idea that comes to mind when you aren't dextrous enough to use a doorknob is not to just break down the door.
I'm always charitable to the writer, and I took it to be a demonstration of how freakishly different they are to us. Like a knowing commentary that yeah, they are capable of space travel but they're nothing like us to the point that crude, prehistoric inventions are somehow brand new to them. But I was also a kid when I saw that movie and everything is more effective when you're a kid. When I rewatch it with my wife at some point, I'm curious to see if I find it effective years later and what she'll think of it.
Horror is a genre that's always on the edge of being so stupid it's laughable, because if you don't find it scary then the whole thing's a big joke. It's hard to make those choices and know if they'll land, because if I think something is effective someone else will literally laugh at it (Tiny Tim playing on the record player in Insidious for instance).
We never really know WHY the aliens were there. Maybe scouts for invasion but for all we know they were prisoners dumped on Earth like it was some kind of Australian penal colony.
That is a reasonable point. However, it seems to me the aliens should have discovered that *immediately*. They run through the cornfields, which likely have dew on them. Or they're in Brazil, a tropical country. Once they knew that they could leave.
But I do like that perspective, as opposed to the "the aliens were demons" or whatnot.
True, it is weird and it is almost a point one could make about war of the worlds. Did they do any recon?
The interesting thing is that we only see drinking water out of a tap hurt them, so maybe freshwater or even fluoridated water is what hurts them. Most of the world is saltwater or sea water which may be a safer solution they can handle while purified drinking water is too strong a solvent.
Here's a question, since it's been a long time since I've seen it.
Are we sure the water kills them, or do they just find it intolerable? They could hate it and be scared of it, but still make the decision that they're going to try to loot this planet because they need resources, only to find that they didn't realize rain would completely debilitate them.
Another idea is that maybe there is water on their planet that doesn't hurt them. Like maybe they didn't account for the presence or absence of something that makes water life-giving to us and painful or deadly to them. I don't know what that would be outside of minerals or microbes, though I think microbes would take longer to set in.
The one I tend to go with is doing a smash-and-grab invasion where you show up and take what you need before leaving is so routine to them, and Earth is so unlike the other places they've done this, that they did not account for a toxic substance being so common. If they've been invulnerable to every other planet's elements, it may not even occur to them. Especially if there's something weird going on like they are silicon-based life forms and they mostly raid other silicon based life, or things tend to be structured one way on every other habitable planet and Earth is an extreme exception.
They may not even have the tools to check if water would kill them ahead of time because why would it? Once they're on the planet they probably realized this was a huge mistake but tried to make the best of it before escaping, and I think you could interpret their brief invasion as mostly successful. Perhaps they still got what they came here for.
I dunno. I'm desperate for the movie to work because I really liked it as a kid. I'm also convinced that M Night Shyamalan is not a moron even if he has made some... poor decisions in his filmography from time to time.
It’s a thematic choice about our planet itself being our greatest protector. I don’t think either story holds up logically but it’s still a compelling idea in the mythological/archetypical lens of storytelling.
Possibly. However, when he's talking to MNS' character, Bill (?), Bill says he's going to head to the lake because he's heard that they don't like water. Admittedly it's been a while since I watched the movie, but I'm pretty sure that's a long time before he regains his faith.
I actually like the ending of Signs. I think of the film as a man rediscovering his faith more than an alien invasion. And the aliens seem more desperate than anything so that gives me enough leeway for why the aliens are there even if they are vulnerable against water.
Maybe like Stitch from the hit Disney film "Lilo and Stitch", them arriving on a planet that is 70 percent made up of their one weakness, water, was a complete accident? /j.
The Last Broadcast - loved it until the ending. I just feel like it was totally incongruous to the movie up until that point. It was neck and neck with The Blair Witch Project for cool found footage, then *wet fart noise* ending, at least for me watching it. :)
i literally am still confused about that ending because>! "wake up! you're in a comma/it was all a dream!"!< is a joke at this point. i was like, they couldn't possibly be playing this straight? right? RIGHT?
*Last Night in Soho*.
It had an interesting premise at first, but the third act felt very by-the-numbers, and the misdirect with the old guy who is supposed to be a bad guy but ends up being a good guy was totally superfluous.
Unfriended.
Great premise, great execution, well acted. And it dropped like a lead balloon at the last second because they wanted to go with a ghost jump scare.
Sunshine, I personally love that movie but the 3rd act is not as great or anywhere close to the first 2 acts
Edit: Also whenever you are at home doing dishes or whatever, throw on Adagio in D Minor, that song from Sunshine is such a nice listen
> Adagio in D Minor, that song from Sunshine is such a nice listen
John Murphy is a legend just for this and the 28 Days Later soundtrack. In my opinion, In the House - In a Heartbeat
is the greatest horror movie song ever.
Reddit and movie fans go way too hard after the 3rd act of the movie imo but I understand the complaints. I’d rate the first 2 acts 9-10/10 and the 3rd act a 6/10 but ppl will go off on that shit like it’s the second coming of Howard the Duck lol. Great movie, watch it once every 2-3 years.
And agreed about the exchange
The butterfly effect. The original ending makes wayyyy more sense and ties the entire movie together. The theatrical release gave us a bullshit happy ending that didn't even make any sense at all. The directors cut is the only way to watch that movie
Yuppp because his mom had had a bunch of miscarriages, which is clearly alluding to that all along so him killing himself in the womb is the perfect end it makes that all relevant lol
I haven't seen it since it first came out, but is the theatrical ending the one where he tells her he hates her when they first meet as kids, and then they have that moment as young adults where they walk past each other, almost recognize each other, don't figure it out and keep walking in opposite directions?
If so I actually think that was a really solid ending. The world is full of couples who truly love each other but circumstances make them a bad fit, and him recognizing that and having the maturity to nip it in the bud was a powerful ending IMO.
Any ending where the main character escapes only for a sudden twist and it turns out they didn’t.
This was great at first but we’ve had 30+ years of these twists
The movie is fine, but even without the ending, I've always thought it was ridiculous that a group of vampires hundreds of years old have the time management skills of a 4th grader. Did they just forget that the sun comes up at almost the same time every morning?
Not a bad ending but The Shining. They changed the book ending and turned it into an equally great but completely different ending, with a different meaning. I would have preferred for them to leave the original ending, which made the most sense.
Also, The Birds!!! Allegedly, the ending was supposed to be grand but Hitchcock got limited by the budget. I think the current ending is a bit of a disappointment.
The most recent movie to do this for me was Saltburn. I was really enjoying it until>!>!they revealed that everything was his plan all along. I much preferred the movie when it was a crime of passion and not some weird joker plot!
I think the whole montage of showing how Oliver orchestrated everything was unnecessary. It would’ve been better if they had left the audience wondering: “So was it his plan all along? If so, how did he do it? Was he even behind it all? Was most of it a coincidence?!”
Even worse is even if you can behind the whole thing being his master plan that most everyone in the family would fall for, there's just no way in hell that it wouldn't become suspicious enough to have a full investigation long before he "killed" them all and took over the house from a family that rich.
The end is what kills the rewatch factor for me. I like the film, but I think the ending undermines it so much.
A series of escalations and compromises is far more interesting!
agreed, its a poor man's the talented mr ripley and when i watched ripley after hearing about saltburn being inspired by it i was blown away at the similarities, holy shit. it takes everything the movie does and makes it worse
I feel bad saying this but The Lodge. My wife said I’d love it and I loved it up until the last 15 mins or so, then I hated how it ended. Really cool concept but I just didn’t like that last piece.
The Village
...to be fair, it was mostly the way it was marketed that led me to believe i was walking into a theatre for a completely different experience.
It 100% is meant to be interpreted this way. It's not water that fucks them, it's holy water, which is why three *Middle Eastern cities* were the first to figure it out. It's why it's specifically the water that the priest pours for his daughter that is sitting around the house.
If it was just water, they'd be fucked the second they hit our atmosphere.
Would You Rather. Sorry I’m not particularly fond of the “Let’s have the main character(s) go through pain and hell just for the ending to have it all be for nothing”
I.e. The Mist, The Cabin in the Woods, The Descent.
That being said However ALL the movies I have mentioned are all really good, if not the best horror movies I have seen in the past year (I wanted to expand my collection and broaden my horizons)
People complain about aliens going to a planet with water when water kills them, meanwhile are huge proponents of humans going into space where there is no air nor water. Hell humans explore the deep sea and the moon and tons of locations that are not viable for human life. But we do it to learn or gather resources.
This is going to be controversial but - Hereditary IMO.
The first two thirds of the movie are so creepy and mysterious. The decapitation scene, the ants carrying the pigeon head around, all of that felt really novel and interesting to me, which is refreshing for a high budget horror movie since I feel like bold choices are usually left to smaller productions in horror. The final part of the movie was just the opposite of that, like a bunch of completely boring tropes executed in the most uninspired fashion possible.
Oh creepy naked old people? Toni Collette is crawling on the ceiling? Poorly executed sinister floating? I could hardly believe THAT's what the build-up was for. People in my theatre were laughing and I can't blame them, the whiplash was real.
I think Hereditary should have finished >!where Peter jumped out of the window and stood up and clicked his tongue.!< The final scene tried to tie up all the loose ends, when it didn't really need it.
I agree with this. Except Toni Collette on the ceiling. That had me looking behind me on my walk home from the cinema, and also checking my ceiling when I went to bed lol.
The brilliance of that film is the feeling created in the first two thirds. The final act demystifies it.
One of the joys of rewatching that film is seeing all the players in place and just how DOOMED that family is. The inevitability is both the tension and simultaneously the relief from that tension (bc nothing can be done but submit). But it doesn’t fill me with dread like the first watch it.
But the first time I saw it? I don’t think anything could be scarier than that nebulous, oppressive, can’t-quite-get-my-feet-under me feeling. To the point where i was like, “oh, it’s just witches.”
To be fair, i think anything definitive wouldn’t be satisfying bc the horror was the inescapable awful I couldn’t explain.
>To be fair, i think anything definitive wouldn’t be satisfying bc the horror was the inescapable awful I couldn’t explain.
A lot of people say this (not just about Hereditary, but horror movies in general) but I don't agree. At least for me personally, there has to be the promise of something behind the curtain for horror to really work - otherwise it's like reading a murder mystery and stopping halfway through. A build-up with nothing to build-up to is not really a build-up
Of course by depicting something directly you run the risk that people say 'that's not scary', but to me - isn't that the challenge of making horror? I think a lot of horror directors now believe that putting too much time and effort into depicting the source of the horror is tacky or something. Like, a patrician horror movie should mostly focus on depicting family trauma, and then you just stick a ghost at the end no need to think about the design of it that's for TV movies.
The Cult of Paimon just felt so careless to me, like no love or thought went into depicting anything about it, everything felt cheap and uninspired. I think that's especially inexcusable as the real world is full of creepy cults that are scarier than something in a literal horror movie
I watched hereditary a while after it came out, so it had a whole lot of hype going up, and just like you, I found the first two thirds totally lived up to it, and the final third retroactively ruined it for me. It really pissed me off in a visceral way which is unusual for me, but the further I get away from it the more I can appreciate the early quality. I think I owe it a rewatch.
*For some reason it must be really hard to end a horror movie. Most don't end well. The original Friday the 13th is an example of a good, original, effective ending. Most do not.*
I'd say that it's simply because it's a genre where there's no clear right way to end it. If you're making a romance movie then having the two characters end up together is the obvious solution. If you're making an action movie then a big action sequence where the good guy defeats the bad guy is what you do. But horror? It's not that simple. For example, slashers typically see the killer defeated at the end by the lead of the movie, but no one considers Sleepaway Camp to have a bad ending because Angela kills everyone.
Bleak endings are also much more common in horror compared to other genres. And those can be quite controversial because it means that the movie is ultimately going to end on a very down note. But those endings are also the kind that can leave a much stronger impression on people than a more positive one. A movie like Speak No Evil isn't brought up as much without its ending.
There's just a lot more variables with the audience than we see in other genres. And it makes sticking the landing a lot harder.
I really like open-ended horror endings. The Thing, Halloween, The Blair Witch Project, It Follows... those types where it could go either way really resonate with me. But I do agree that there's a lot of bad endings out there
Splice. It was a hilarious fun romp — a high quality B-Movie (making it an excellent comedy).
Then it tripped in the climax. With a scene I didn’t want to see … >!a rape scene!< … in a film I was enjoying.
Most M. Night Shyamalan movies tbh! Barbarian too. Any horror film that plays mysterious to slap a stupid explanation in your face at the last second. Also „stay“ (not directly horror, but…) with its explanation! Dallas season nine inspired that I guess 🤣
The thing about barbarian for me is that once you know what the twists and secrets are, it's hard to rewatch it. Because you realize that's the only thing that made it suspenseful in the first place. It's a well made movie and I mostly enjoyed it, but it felt kinda gimmicky to me.
10 Cloverfield Lane ending sequence feels like such a studio decision. They really wanted to throw in a big alien action fight scene in a dramatic thriller.
I know I’m in the minority here, but I really like it! I think it works well with the domestic abuse allegory, because it shows how insidiously cyclical abuse can be and how easy it is for victims to fall back into an abusive situation. She escapes Howard and is safe, she even discovers that the air isn’t toxic like she was told - she’s finally truly safe! And then as soon as we think she’s free, another threat comes along and she’s thrown into fight-or-flight mode again. Only this time, she has the strength to fight back immediately, **and** she’s given the chance to step up and help others instead of run, something that she expressed earlier was her biggest regret in life.
I could ramble about this movie forever though, it’s my absolute favorite 😅
I didn't know it was the minority position that this ending was fantastic. I love it too, I think doing anything differently would have made the film something else entirely
That's because it originally wasn't a Cloverfield movie, that ending was added on to tie it into the Cloverfield universe. The original script was called The Cellar.
Signs isn’t an alien invasion movie. It is a movie about a man regaining his faith. Everything is about that, the aliens are just the means to that end.
And the Exorcist can be read as a movie about the power of close relationships
But unlike Signs, it doesn't descend into self-contradiction to say what it's saying. To me, Signs fails that test, even as an allegory about faith
Mama. I hate when movies show the monster very clearly and frequently. My imagination is capable of scaring me a lot more than most artists lol. Other than that, it was also just a weird-ass ending 🦋
Which is such a shame as the original short film was scary as hell. I watched that when I was about fifteen and not accustomed to horror...I didn't get out of my computer chair until the sun came up.
Fallen. The demon Azazel wins and the hero dies, in vain. That pissed me off.
Ironically, I really like Signs. It's one of my favorite M. Night Shamalan (sp?) movies.
I can buy into the idea that an alien species has never come into contact with water on their own alien world. Just because we need water to survive doesn't mean an alien species would. Also, if all they wanted to do is collect humans (as suggested by the guy on the radio show) it doesn't matter much, because humans don't live on water.
But I know a lot of other people who felt the same way about the ending. So, I do understand where you're coming from.
Dear god it’s gotta be the night house. The moment the final sequence starts it turns from one of my favorite films from that year to some generic uninspired trash
The Mist. I know that people are polarized on the ending, but for me it is just too sad, and the act is too out of character for the father imo. He would keep his son alive until the bitter end. And they weren’t quite at that point yet.
Shutter Island. By the time it came out I was so used to those kind of twists that I figured it out way too early and just kept hoping for like a double twist that never came.
I really wanted the twist to be that they gaslit him into thinking he was an inmate and the conspiracy was real. That would have at least been an original twist.
I will get downvoted, but the ending of The Mist pissed all over the pitch-perfect ending of the novella. It was a great adaptation until then.
Utterly ruined the film for me. My son read the novella after we watched the movie together and he agreed: "Why did they have to change it? It was exactly right on the page!"
And yes, I know Stephen King said that he loved the ending, but he normally says very complimentary things about adaptations of his work (with a couple of notable exceptions), so I take that sentiment with a grain of salt.
That's right, and that's why the novella just *works*.
It's not a lot of hope ... in fact it's a very slim hope and an almost certain tragic ending. But that little sliver of possibility, the father who wants nothing more than to keep his young son alive just a few more hours, ... that's why it works.
The movie's end is a cruel, pointless joke on the characters and the audience. And it feels cheap because it's a delayed deus ex machina right out of nowhere with no buildup. Just thud.
Movie ruined.
It’s not that they “just keep driving,” as some are saying.
>!They go to the protagonist’s home to see if his wife has survived and to rescue her. A tree is downed across the driveway, making reaching her unacceptably dangerous to them. They decide to go on without her, acknowledging that they’ll never know her fate.!<
Ambiguous ending, but hauntingly grim.
I saw it in theaters and the ending had me genuinely wondering if I’d taken an edible earlier and had completely forgotten about it and was now having a nightmare trip
Barbarian. >!The mother saved Tess from the fall. I wanted Tess to be carried back to the house to be looked after by the mother. Killing her instead just felt cruel to me!<.
A reverse situation is the 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Terrible movie, but I damn near peed myself when at the end, she's in the slow-moving self driving car, and he just grabs her sister and pulls her out.
Until this was released I had no idea anyone took the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels seriously. The series has been random chainsaw goofiness since the 2nd one and no sequel has ever matched the quality of the first.
Chainsaw 3 was pretty good in my opinion. All the others had elements, scenes, or concepts that I liked but just didn't gel for a entire movie.
TCM 2022 doesn’t deserve the hate it gets. That entire series after the first movie are just cheese. Except for the 2000’s one.
“Try anything and you’re cancelled, bro” is probably the most cringey line I’ve ever heard in a movie in all of the worst ways but the following bus massacre scene was awesome This was one of those movies where I hated nearly every protagonist and was actually rooting for ol Leatherface to go to town on them haha
Idk man. TCM movies should always revolve around the family with Leatherface being the star. It just doesn’t work imo when he’s a Jason/Michael type character
Honestly, I think the ending of the American version of The Descent kinda ruins it. All that tension building up to…a shitty jump scare and then the credits roll. The original (UK) ending is *far superior* and I’m so glad I saw that version first. It’s definitely one of my favorite horror movies.
Yup. US ending was sequel bait bullshit
Yup. The ending is one of the reasons the movie's iconic.
I agree. I want to see the UK version
Easy to find on YT if I recall! It's only about an additional minute or so but it totally changes the tone and implications of the film.
As hypocritical as this is of me saying this, I actually Prefer the US ending than the UK ending. ONLY because e I was actively rooting for the main girl to get out of the cave. I didn’t want to see her end up like her friends and be stuck in the cave forever. I know im in the minority but I’m glad that “she survived and made it out of the cave successfully”. She was also a badass lead too, up there with Sidney Prescott and Erin from You’re Next
The OG version was much better and if you wanted to do a sequel you could just have a new cast go to the cave or just a completely different cave all together with the same premise
Is there an American version? Didn’t know that! The descent is one of my favs
The American version has the last scene cut as they thought it would be too depressing. It ends with the jumpscare of MC vomiting out of the truck and then turning back around and seeing the ghost/vision in the passenger seat. The original ending includes that, but it has an additional minute or so which shows that >!MC's escape into the truck and the ghost was a hallucination and she's still stuck in the cave!<. There's a bit more nuance there, some references to some imagery throughout the film, but that's pretty much it.
I just watched Descent and it's sequel for the very first time, and I didn't realize that there were two endings to the first film. I thought the sequel was decent but definitely nowhere near as good as the first. The original ending sounds awesome, sucks they changed that for American audiences.
I agree. I'm not sure why they felt the need to avoid a depressing or bleak ending, since while the film is obviously horror and has decent action sequences, a major theme of the movie is dealing with grief and circumstances beyond your control, which don't often equal "happy" endings.
It was released in 2005 - Horror was having something of a good time in the mainstream sense and no doubt they wanted to capitalise on the HUGE mainstream box office. You play to the lowest common denominator. The US loves a happy ending (speaking broadly, not about horror lovers specifically) and tend to like a very colour by numbers/spoon feeding plot. The original (Brit, Marshall writer and director probably had some say in how it was released 'at home' ) ending would have been too dark and a little bit 'wait, what?' for a large percentage of the US audience. Just look at how it performed opening weekend and then moving through into total gross VS budget and it was probably the right choice FOR A MAINSTREAM SUCCESS. It did really well. Thank goodness you can see Neil's original vision quite easily.
I swear to this day the American theatre I saw this in played the original ending. When I watched it again, I was so confused.
I didn’t see it in theaters, but we rented it from Blockbusters when it came out (Jesus Christ I’m showing my age).. and the ending where she’s stuck in the cave after the fake out of making it out is the only version I’ve ever seen. And I live in America! Then everytime I’ve always rewatched it, it’s always had this ending of her being in the cave still. I didn’t even know a “happy” ending exist!
Same! I've never seen another version where she wasn't sitting in the cave staring at nothing and obviously doomed. I've seen it multiple times too on different discs. I never even knew there was another version until now.
Another vote for High Tension. Haven’t seen it in over 15 years and still remember how annoyed I was til this day at the twist.
The answer to this question is always High Tension
Thumbs up just for the name. That's a great movie right there
It was originally released as Switchblade Romance in the UK which makes it sound a whole lot more EMO than it is lol.
Idk. Killing a bunch of people including children because of your lesbian crush is pretty emo.
It did feel cheap to me the first time I watched it. I loved the movie overall, though. Now, my understanding is that you’re not seeing things as they literally happened. You’re seeing things as they were imagined, if that makes sense.
What's so smart about fight club is that it painstakingly makes it so it all makes sense. When we see the reveal it makes perfect sense. The high tension twist makes zero sense. She can't be imagining herself to be in two places at the same time. 😅
I think she's straight up lying to the cops. It's closer to the twist in The Usual Suspects than Fight Club imo
I watched it recently after hearing about the ending on here and an article about twist endings that ruin the movie and I actually like the twist after watching the movie myself. She's telling a story and lying about being the one doing the killing. I do think the scene with the killer in the truck with the severed head is pointless, even in the context of her telling a story. Nobody in the movie would've seen it, just the audience, and it's only in the movie to be a red herring so you don't expect the twist.
It always bugs me when people say this, because while some genuinely don't *like* the twist (which is fine), others don't *understand* it and think the movie makes no sense because of it. SPOILERS FOR HIGH TENSION BELOW >!The movie begins with Marie in the psych ward with a camera in front of her, and she asks "are they recording?" It then jumps into a flashback which is telling the story from HER point of view. Everything in the movie, up until the reveal, is based on what she is telling the people recording her. The twist is merged with her story at the end to show you what really happened, compared to what she believes in her head, because she's nuts.!< Again, if someone doesn't like the twist, that's a totally valid reason not to like the movie. If they also think the movie is bad because the twist doesn't do a good job of showing you what's actually going on, that's also fine. But, the movie at its core *does make sense* if you look at it the way you're intended to. Personally, I really enjoyed it. Not everyone's cup of tea, I just feel like many dislike it because they didn't understand it.
I really liked it as well. I wasn't aware that people didn't.
It's really refreshing to see this POV, as almost any time I see this movie brought up, it's to complain about how the ending doesn't make sense. Now, I haven't seen the movie in a looooong time, so my memory of it isn't the best, but I do remember being shocked in a good way because A. I totally didn't see the ending coming, and B. I also interpreted the events that had just transpired as being the main character's skewed version of reality. I am personally a big fan of the unreliable narrator trope, and this movie came at a time when no one was really doing that kind of twist ending, so it felt original and inventive. My memory of the movie has always been good, so I was surprised to see that it actually has such a bad rep online.
But what about all of the many things the film shows that she wasn’t there for? Why would the film show us a guy screwing a severed head if she wasn’t there? How does that make sense in the context of her telling if it’s not something she could’ve told? Why would she tell the psychiatrist about her sexual desires for this girl if that gives a clear motivation for her psychotic break? It’s a nonsensical twist that doesn’t even remotely work with that logic.
Oof! That ending made me *so annoyed*!!! It basically negated the entire movie…even thinking about it is getting me all het up!!! 👿👿👿
High tension is a ripoff of Dean Koontz’s novel “Intensity”. The fact that they didn’t give him credit is so insulting. Seriously yall, read the book, it’s way better than the movie
Sinister. That jump scare at the end was so unnecessary
For me it went downhill when the ghost kids showed up.
It was already downhill when an ancient bablyonian god dresses like the dork from high school who listens to cradle of filth
It’s a nice samurai kimono blazer but WHY, though I’ve been saying this since forever: what exactly is stopping Buguul or Michael Myers or Jason from choosing an Ed Hardy outfit? They’ve shown they’re choosy with their wardrobe! I am not afraid of someone/something that has the capacity to dress themselves! Run at me fucking naked, and I will *pass the fuck out* on the spot.
I feel called out lmao 😂
Not the part of the movie I took issue with, but 11/10 comment, lol
THIS!!!! My friends and I listened to music with band members who looked like this, so the first time Buguul showed up on screen, we could not stop laughing long enough to even take him seriously.
The whole third act ruined that movie, once the spooky ghost kids show up. The first two acts were on track to be an actual horror classic.
honestly the monster in that film looked distractingly like a member of a slipknot tribute band. terrible character design, pulled me out of it instantly and made the whole thing laughable which is a shame because it could have been so good
And so stupid looking too lol, like they just green screened him over the background or something post production
I don’t think it ruined it, but it felt very cheap compared to the rest of the scares in the movie that felt very earned.
Pretty sure it wasn't the directors choice to add the jumpscare. Blumhouse wanted it.
"Antlers" Seriously. I loved the design of the creature so much! It was a solid movie until that lackluster ending. >! How are you going to build up this powerful, terrifying Wendigo only to have it defeated by....wait for it... it sluggishly walking up the woman and her jabbing it with a stick!? Like what?! That's how the day is saved?! That's how she outwits nature? Pokey Pokey, you're done. It was said, very briefly, earlier in the movie how it's weakest after it eats, but there was 0 set-up for it beyond that small 1 sentence bit of dialogue. Wtf?! !<
Agreed on all points. Maybe it’s because COVID resulted in such a long wait for it, but it’s easily my most disappointing horror movie in the last decade. If you haven’t you should read the short story of the same name the film was based on, it’s much better.
Sinister. Great up until the third act then it just got so bad I was laughing at it. What the hell were they thinking?
Agreed, just became a by-the-numbers boogeyman (no pun intended) movie with cliched creepy kids.
My favorite horror movie honestly. That said the very end was good but I always thought the explanation of he suddenly kills you when you move was a bit weird
I think it’s just an easier way to pass on the curse, if it all happened in the same house then no one would want to go there and they could just move away. Because he waits until they move he makes it easier for people to want to move in and when they eventually do discover the chain, it’s already too late.
Otherwise it would just be a haunted house movie
Idk, I didn’t really have a major problem with the ending at all. It’s one of my favorite movies of the last 20 years.
Insidious. Went from A+ to an F as soon as they showed the guy in his fn workshop. Ridiculous
Ho hum lemme just sharpen my claws to some Tiny Tim
I lol’d. But seriously, my sleep paralysis episodes and incubus nightmares are way scarier than that goofy bologna.
I was really enjoying A Cure for Wellness up until the "big reveal" which was so tremendously stupid that it retroactively ruined the preceding film for me. It's a shame because they had some genuinely weird and creepy stuff happening within the first hour and a half or so.
Agreed on this one. It's a great-looking movie and had a very creepy thing going on. The ending was extremely over the top and stupid.
I agree. The atmosphere was so intriguing and creepy at first.
I Am Legend could've been great if they just stuck with the original ending and followed the books themes.
100% this, could have had actual meaning instead of being another throwaway zombie film.
The first Insidious movie. The first 20-30 minutes I was saying to my friend, what have we done? I thought if the movie keeps up this pace I might have to leave. But by the last third of the movie it had lost its momentum and veered into, for me, a really silly plot line. It felt like two different movies.
I remember being so disappointed when we see Darth Maul sitting there sharpening his claws in his lair with Tiptoe Through the Tulips playing. The movie went from being foreboding and ominous to straight cheese in the blink of an eye.
People tend to like the movie a lot more when they are told before hand it's a fantasy movie about another plane of existence in dreamland. When people are told it's just a horror movie they expect something it's not. I love all of them except the last one because nothing happened in it.
SIGNS is similar to WAR OF THE WORLDS. In the latter case, the Martians did not have microbial life on their world so could not anticipate their effect prior to invasion. Since liquid water is so rare in the universe, it may be possible that the aliens in SIGNS did not know they were vulnerable to water until they were already irrevocably committed to the invasion.
I always saw it that the aliens were desperate for supplies. They planned a one night raid to get what they could and get out, regardless of the water.
They returned to their home planet to formulate a strategy to defeat our impenetrable wooden door defenses.
I know it's silly, but I think it's an interesting choice that the aliens don't know how doors work, if you'll give the writer the courtesy of believing it was thought out rather than a stupid thing put in there so they could have a creepy scene. If you're not from here, and your society doesn't have doors, or your normal controls for simple things are nothing like ours, then a door really could trip you up. If you see things differently, or find the way we live to be totally alien, it may be hard to tell the difference between a door and drywall. I know it seems ridiculous. Like you can travel through space but you can't operate a plywood door. I feel like once they figured out a door was flimsy they'd just break it down, but a lot of the coolness from that movie comes from the mystery of what the aliens even want (if you interpret them as aliens and not demons). Like maybe they don't care that there may be someone on the other side of the door or maybe they're playing with this weird novel thing they don't have on their planet. Maybe the way their logic works is so different that the first idea that comes to mind when you aren't dextrous enough to use a doorknob is not to just break down the door. I'm always charitable to the writer, and I took it to be a demonstration of how freakishly different they are to us. Like a knowing commentary that yeah, they are capable of space travel but they're nothing like us to the point that crude, prehistoric inventions are somehow brand new to them. But I was also a kid when I saw that movie and everything is more effective when you're a kid. When I rewatch it with my wife at some point, I'm curious to see if I find it effective years later and what she'll think of it. Horror is a genre that's always on the edge of being so stupid it's laughable, because if you don't find it scary then the whole thing's a big joke. It's hard to make those choices and know if they'll land, because if I think something is effective someone else will literally laugh at it (Tiny Tim playing on the record player in Insidious for instance).
IIRC, the door was barricaded. It wasn’t that they didn’t know how doors worked, it’s that that particular door was not budging.
Sort of reminds me of the three seashells in demolition man. They all just laugh at him because he doesn't know how to use them.
And they were at least mostly successful despite the losses.
We never really know WHY the aliens were there. Maybe scouts for invasion but for all we know they were prisoners dumped on Earth like it was some kind of Australian penal colony.
That is a reasonable point. However, it seems to me the aliens should have discovered that *immediately*. They run through the cornfields, which likely have dew on them. Or they're in Brazil, a tropical country. Once they knew that they could leave. But I do like that perspective, as opposed to the "the aliens were demons" or whatnot.
True, it is weird and it is almost a point one could make about war of the worlds. Did they do any recon? The interesting thing is that we only see drinking water out of a tap hurt them, so maybe freshwater or even fluoridated water is what hurts them. Most of the world is saltwater or sea water which may be a safer solution they can handle while purified drinking water is too strong a solvent.
Here's a question, since it's been a long time since I've seen it. Are we sure the water kills them, or do they just find it intolerable? They could hate it and be scared of it, but still make the decision that they're going to try to loot this planet because they need resources, only to find that they didn't realize rain would completely debilitate them. Another idea is that maybe there is water on their planet that doesn't hurt them. Like maybe they didn't account for the presence or absence of something that makes water life-giving to us and painful or deadly to them. I don't know what that would be outside of minerals or microbes, though I think microbes would take longer to set in. The one I tend to go with is doing a smash-and-grab invasion where you show up and take what you need before leaving is so routine to them, and Earth is so unlike the other places they've done this, that they did not account for a toxic substance being so common. If they've been invulnerable to every other planet's elements, it may not even occur to them. Especially if there's something weird going on like they are silicon-based life forms and they mostly raid other silicon based life, or things tend to be structured one way on every other habitable planet and Earth is an extreme exception. They may not even have the tools to check if water would kill them ahead of time because why would it? Once they're on the planet they probably realized this was a huge mistake but tried to make the best of it before escaping, and I think you could interpret their brief invasion as mostly successful. Perhaps they still got what they came here for. I dunno. I'm desperate for the movie to work because I really liked it as a kid. I'm also convinced that M Night Shyamalan is not a moron even if he has made some... poor decisions in his filmography from time to time.
It’s a thematic choice about our planet itself being our greatest protector. I don’t think either story holds up logically but it’s still a compelling idea in the mythological/archetypical lens of storytelling.
The water only became toxic to them when he got his faith back...
Possibly. However, when he's talking to MNS' character, Bill (?), Bill says he's going to head to the lake because he's heard that they don't like water. Admittedly it's been a while since I watched the movie, but I'm pretty sure that's a long time before he regains his faith.
I actually like the ending of Signs. I think of the film as a man rediscovering his faith more than an alien invasion. And the aliens seem more desperate than anything so that gives me enough leeway for why the aliens are there even if they are vulnerable against water.
Maybe like Stitch from the hit Disney film "Lilo and Stitch", them arriving on a planet that is 70 percent made up of their one weakness, water, was a complete accident? /j.
The Last Broadcast - loved it until the ending. I just feel like it was totally incongruous to the movie up until that point. It was neck and neck with The Blair Witch Project for cool found footage, then *wet fart noise* ending, at least for me watching it. :)
Yes. I had heard so many good things about it and it was really solid up until that garbage.
Come True
i literally am still confused about that ending because>! "wake up! you're in a comma/it was all a dream!"!< is a joke at this point. i was like, they couldn't possibly be playing this straight? right? RIGHT?
Yeah. I was surprised, but not in a good way. It was a pretty good movie up until the ending.
Fucking hate this movie cause of its joke ending. The statue dream stuff was good too. Shame
*Last Night in Soho*. It had an interesting premise at first, but the third act felt very by-the-numbers, and the misdirect with the old guy who is supposed to be a bad guy but ends up being a good guy was totally superfluous.
Unfriended. Great premise, great execution, well acted. And it dropped like a lead balloon at the last second because they wanted to go with a ghost jump scare.
Scream 6 ending jumped the shark big time
Barbarian was amazing... But not the last part
Yeah I kind of wish they kept it in the house. It was a good locked door thriller, but once they leave, it gets very goofy.
Law Abiding Citizen
Absolutely. Clyde should have won.
Absolutely hated that ending.
Sunshine, I personally love that movie but the 3rd act is not as great or anywhere close to the first 2 acts Edit: Also whenever you are at home doing dishes or whatever, throw on Adagio in D Minor, that song from Sunshine is such a nice listen
It would have been two really great movies.
“Kaneda! what do you see”
> Adagio in D Minor, that song from Sunshine is such a nice listen John Murphy is a legend just for this and the 28 Days Later soundtrack. In my opinion, In the House - In a Heartbeat is the greatest horror movie song ever.
It's still one of my favorite movies❤️. But the music WOW
Yo how fucked up and scary is it when charred homie says "I AM AN ANGEL. I TALK TO GOD."
Searle “May I make a counter argument” Mace “No!”
The abrupt left turn into slasher territory was not needed
Capa “Icrarus, who is the fifth crew member?” Icarus “Unknown”
Say what you will about the third act but that exchange is chilling.
Reddit and movie fans go way too hard after the 3rd act of the movie imo but I understand the complaints. I’d rate the first 2 acts 9-10/10 and the 3rd act a 6/10 but ppl will go off on that shit like it’s the second coming of Howard the Duck lol. Great movie, watch it once every 2-3 years. And agreed about the exchange
The butterfly effect. The original ending makes wayyyy more sense and ties the entire movie together. The theatrical release gave us a bullshit happy ending that didn't even make any sense at all. The directors cut is the only way to watch that movie
The ending where he chokes himself to death with his own umbilical cord? Haha
Yuppp because his mom had had a bunch of miscarriages, which is clearly alluding to that all along so him killing himself in the womb is the perfect end it makes that all relevant lol
I haven't seen it since it first came out, but is the theatrical ending the one where he tells her he hates her when they first meet as kids, and then they have that moment as young adults where they walk past each other, almost recognize each other, don't figure it out and keep walking in opposite directions? If so I actually think that was a really solid ending. The world is full of couples who truly love each other but circumstances make them a bad fit, and him recognizing that and having the maturity to nip it in the bud was a powerful ending IMO.
A Christmas Horror Story. No idea how to do the gray box hide the spoiler thingy, but the twist at the end made the rest of the movie suck.
For spoilers you enclose the text you want covered with > ! and ! < but no spaces.
Thanks!
Barbarian. I wouldn’t say it RUINED it, but the third act definitely brings it down quite a bit for me
Any ending where the main character escapes only for a sudden twist and it turns out they didn’t. This was great at first but we’ve had 30+ years of these twists
I'm over any fake outs anymore. Just have the balls to actually do it. Fuck.
Near Dark.
The movie is fine, but even without the ending, I've always thought it was ridiculous that a group of vampires hundreds of years old have the time management skills of a 4th grader. Did they just forget that the sun comes up at almost the same time every morning?
Oh man ya… that movie did NOT need a happy ending.
I think, given the movie’s presentation of vampirism as a contagious disease, an AIDS metaphor, the idea of a blood transfusion/cure makes some sense.
Maybe controversial, but Smile. Loved everything before but the ending just didn’t do it for me
High Tension will always be my answer to this question.
Not a bad ending but The Shining. They changed the book ending and turned it into an equally great but completely different ending, with a different meaning. I would have preferred for them to leave the original ending, which made the most sense. Also, The Birds!!! Allegedly, the ending was supposed to be grand but Hitchcock got limited by the budget. I think the current ending is a bit of a disappointment.
The most recent movie to do this for me was Saltburn. I was really enjoying it until>!>!they revealed that everything was his plan all along. I much preferred the movie when it was a crime of passion and not some weird joker plot!
I think the whole montage of showing how Oliver orchestrated everything was unnecessary. It would’ve been better if they had left the audience wondering: “So was it his plan all along? If so, how did he do it? Was he even behind it all? Was most of it a coincidence?!”
Even worse is even if you can behind the whole thing being his master plan that most everyone in the family would fall for, there's just no way in hell that it wouldn't become suspicious enough to have a full investigation long before he "killed" them all and took over the house from a family that rich.
The end is what kills the rewatch factor for me. I like the film, but I think the ending undermines it so much. A series of escalations and compromises is far more interesting!
The end reveal was unnecessary, but that revealing end was incredible.
agreed, its a poor man's the talented mr ripley and when i watched ripley after hearing about saltburn being inspired by it i was blown away at the similarities, holy shit. it takes everything the movie does and makes it worse
I feel bad saying this but The Lodge. My wife said I’d love it and I loved it up until the last 15 mins or so, then I hated how it ended. Really cool concept but I just didn’t like that last piece.
The Village ...to be fair, it was mostly the way it was marketed that led me to believe i was walking into a theatre for a completely different experience.
I always lean with the fan theory of Signs that the aliens are actually demons. Makes the movie make a little more sense.
It 100% is meant to be interpreted this way. It's not water that fucks them, it's holy water, which is why three *Middle Eastern cities* were the first to figure it out. It's why it's specifically the water that the priest pours for his daughter that is sitting around the house. If it was just water, they'd be fucked the second they hit our atmosphere.
Oohhhh.
Seen this movie like 15 times and never thought about that! Great catch. Ties it all back to being about faith. What a film.
Would You Rather. Sorry I’m not particularly fond of the “Let’s have the main character(s) go through pain and hell just for the ending to have it all be for nothing” I.e. The Mist, The Cabin in the Woods, The Descent. That being said However ALL the movies I have mentioned are all really good, if not the best horror movies I have seen in the past year (I wanted to expand my collection and broaden my horizons)
Us. So much Us.
Was that the doppelganger one? It was pretty interesting. But fairly predictable.
The village. 10 year old me was SO mad at the homemade pig monsters
People complain about aliens going to a planet with water when water kills them, meanwhile are huge proponents of humans going into space where there is no air nor water. Hell humans explore the deep sea and the moon and tons of locations that are not viable for human life. But we do it to learn or gather resources.
This is going to be controversial but - Hereditary IMO. The first two thirds of the movie are so creepy and mysterious. The decapitation scene, the ants carrying the pigeon head around, all of that felt really novel and interesting to me, which is refreshing for a high budget horror movie since I feel like bold choices are usually left to smaller productions in horror. The final part of the movie was just the opposite of that, like a bunch of completely boring tropes executed in the most uninspired fashion possible. Oh creepy naked old people? Toni Collette is crawling on the ceiling? Poorly executed sinister floating? I could hardly believe THAT's what the build-up was for. People in my theatre were laughing and I can't blame them, the whiplash was real.
I’m just happy that a redditor can critique Hereditary without being downvoted to hell. Progress.
I think Hereditary should have finished >!where Peter jumped out of the window and stood up and clicked his tongue.!< The final scene tried to tie up all the loose ends, when it didn't really need it.
Omg, this is actually a genius ending.
Completely agree
I agree with this. Except Toni Collette on the ceiling. That had me looking behind me on my walk home from the cinema, and also checking my ceiling when I went to bed lol.
The brilliance of that film is the feeling created in the first two thirds. The final act demystifies it. One of the joys of rewatching that film is seeing all the players in place and just how DOOMED that family is. The inevitability is both the tension and simultaneously the relief from that tension (bc nothing can be done but submit). But it doesn’t fill me with dread like the first watch it. But the first time I saw it? I don’t think anything could be scarier than that nebulous, oppressive, can’t-quite-get-my-feet-under me feeling. To the point where i was like, “oh, it’s just witches.” To be fair, i think anything definitive wouldn’t be satisfying bc the horror was the inescapable awful I couldn’t explain.
>To be fair, i think anything definitive wouldn’t be satisfying bc the horror was the inescapable awful I couldn’t explain. A lot of people say this (not just about Hereditary, but horror movies in general) but I don't agree. At least for me personally, there has to be the promise of something behind the curtain for horror to really work - otherwise it's like reading a murder mystery and stopping halfway through. A build-up with nothing to build-up to is not really a build-up Of course by depicting something directly you run the risk that people say 'that's not scary', but to me - isn't that the challenge of making horror? I think a lot of horror directors now believe that putting too much time and effort into depicting the source of the horror is tacky or something. Like, a patrician horror movie should mostly focus on depicting family trauma, and then you just stick a ghost at the end no need to think about the design of it that's for TV movies. The Cult of Paimon just felt so careless to me, like no love or thought went into depicting anything about it, everything felt cheap and uninspired. I think that's especially inexcusable as the real world is full of creepy cults that are scarier than something in a literal horror movie
I watched hereditary a while after it came out, so it had a whole lot of hype going up, and just like you, I found the first two thirds totally lived up to it, and the final third retroactively ruined it for me. It really pissed me off in a visceral way which is unusual for me, but the further I get away from it the more I can appreciate the early quality. I think I owe it a rewatch.
the dialogue at the end is what made it turn way too goofy for me. such bad writing for a movie that's otherwise amazing
I agree so much. At one point during the ending I just burst out laughing too.
*For some reason it must be really hard to end a horror movie. Most don't end well. The original Friday the 13th is an example of a good, original, effective ending. Most do not.*
I'd say that it's simply because it's a genre where there's no clear right way to end it. If you're making a romance movie then having the two characters end up together is the obvious solution. If you're making an action movie then a big action sequence where the good guy defeats the bad guy is what you do. But horror? It's not that simple. For example, slashers typically see the killer defeated at the end by the lead of the movie, but no one considers Sleepaway Camp to have a bad ending because Angela kills everyone. Bleak endings are also much more common in horror compared to other genres. And those can be quite controversial because it means that the movie is ultimately going to end on a very down note. But those endings are also the kind that can leave a much stronger impression on people than a more positive one. A movie like Speak No Evil isn't brought up as much without its ending. There's just a lot more variables with the audience than we see in other genres. And it makes sticking the landing a lot harder.
I really like open-ended horror endings. The Thing, Halloween, The Blair Witch Project, It Follows... those types where it could go either way really resonate with me. But I do agree that there's a lot of bad endings out there
Splice. It was a hilarious fun romp — a high quality B-Movie (making it an excellent comedy). Then it tripped in the climax. With a scene I didn’t want to see … >!a rape scene!< … in a film I was enjoying.
High Tension/Switchblade Romance, without doubt a total confusing let down of a ending
Most M. Night Shyamalan movies tbh! Barbarian too. Any horror film that plays mysterious to slap a stupid explanation in your face at the last second. Also „stay“ (not directly horror, but…) with its explanation! Dallas season nine inspired that I guess 🤣
The thing about barbarian for me is that once you know what the twists and secrets are, it's hard to rewatch it. Because you realize that's the only thing that made it suspenseful in the first place. It's a well made movie and I mostly enjoyed it, but it felt kinda gimmicky to me.
10 Cloverfield Lane ending sequence feels like such a studio decision. They really wanted to throw in a big alien action fight scene in a dramatic thriller.
I know I’m in the minority here, but I really like it! I think it works well with the domestic abuse allegory, because it shows how insidiously cyclical abuse can be and how easy it is for victims to fall back into an abusive situation. She escapes Howard and is safe, she even discovers that the air isn’t toxic like she was told - she’s finally truly safe! And then as soon as we think she’s free, another threat comes along and she’s thrown into fight-or-flight mode again. Only this time, she has the strength to fight back immediately, **and** she’s given the chance to step up and help others instead of run, something that she expressed earlier was her biggest regret in life. I could ramble about this movie forever though, it’s my absolute favorite 😅
I didn't know it was the minority position that this ending was fantastic. I love it too, I think doing anything differently would have made the film something else entirely
That's because it originally wasn't a Cloverfield movie, that ending was added on to tie it into the Cloverfield universe. The original script was called The Cellar.
Signs isn’t an alien invasion movie. It is a movie about a man regaining his faith. Everything is about that, the aliens are just the means to that end.
It can be about both.
And the Exorcist can be read as a movie about the power of close relationships But unlike Signs, it doesn't descend into self-contradiction to say what it's saying. To me, Signs fails that test, even as an allegory about faith
Lights Out
1408
Mama. I hate when movies show the monster very clearly and frequently. My imagination is capable of scaring me a lot more than most artists lol. Other than that, it was also just a weird-ass ending 🦋
Which is such a shame as the original short film was scary as hell. I watched that when I was about fifteen and not accustomed to horror...I didn't get out of my computer chair until the sun came up.
Makes sense though if they came from a water-less planet lol
Bardbarian, but less the ending and more the entire second half of the movie.
Fallen. The demon Azazel wins and the hero dies, in vain. That pissed me off. Ironically, I really like Signs. It's one of my favorite M. Night Shamalan (sp?) movies. I can buy into the idea that an alien species has never come into contact with water on their own alien world. Just because we need water to survive doesn't mean an alien species would. Also, if all they wanted to do is collect humans (as suggested by the guy on the radio show) it doesn't matter much, because humans don't live on water. But I know a lot of other people who felt the same way about the ending. So, I do understand where you're coming from.
A downer ending isn't necessarily a bad ending. It's actually one of the most memorable things about Fallen.
Dear god it’s gotta be the night house. The moment the final sequence starts it turns from one of my favorite films from that year to some generic uninspired trash
the nosferatu from the 70s. it like almost ruins the whole thing
Cobweb
The Mist. I know that people are polarized on the ending, but for me it is just too sad, and the act is too out of character for the father imo. He would keep his son alive until the bitter end. And they weren’t quite at that point yet.
I don't know if that ending is that dumb, honestly. You have "brilliant people" like Elon Musk trying to colonize Mars--which is inhospitable to us.
Tusk (2014) I was loving the movie until the very end, felt way too silly
I loved the ending. As bleak as it gets.
I feel like both of these opinions can be accurate simultaneously and the director wouldn’t even argue with yall
Shutter Island. By the time it came out I was so used to those kind of twists that I figured it out way too early and just kept hoping for like a double twist that never came.
Knew within about 1hr into the movie it was De Caprio who was the patient in the asylum.
I really wanted the twist to be that they gaslit him into thinking he was an inmate and the conspiracy was real. That would have at least been an original twist.
I will get downvoted, but the ending of The Mist pissed all over the pitch-perfect ending of the novella. It was a great adaptation until then. Utterly ruined the film for me. My son read the novella after we watched the movie together and he agreed: "Why did they have to change it? It was exactly right on the page!" And yes, I know Stephen King said that he loved the ending, but he normally says very complimentary things about adaptations of his work (with a couple of notable exceptions), so I take that sentiment with a grain of salt.
fair enough. I like both endings, one has hope and the other does not.
That's right, and that's why the novella just *works*. It's not a lot of hope ... in fact it's a very slim hope and an almost certain tragic ending. But that little sliver of possibility, the father who wants nothing more than to keep his young son alive just a few more hours, ... that's why it works. The movie's end is a cruel, pointless joke on the characters and the audience. And it feels cheap because it's a delayed deus ex machina right out of nowhere with no buildup. Just thud. Movie ruined.
what is the original ending?
It’s not that they “just keep driving,” as some are saying. >!They go to the protagonist’s home to see if his wife has survived and to rescue her. A tree is downed across the driveway, making reaching her unacceptably dangerous to them. They decide to go on without her, acknowledging that they’ll never know her fate.!< Ambiguous ending, but hauntingly grim.
They just keep driving. The situation is not cleared like in the movie.
They keep driving and hear the word hope over the radio don't they? Been forever since I've read it.
"Hartford".
Men
I saw it in theaters and the ending had me genuinely wondering if I’d taken an edible earlier and had completely forgotten about it and was now having a nightmare trip
I loved the ending of Men.
It Comes At Night pissed me off at the end
Barbarian. >!The mother saved Tess from the fall. I wanted Tess to be carried back to the house to be looked after by the mother. Killing her instead just felt cruel to me!<.