The 10 Worst Movie Twists

Filmmakers, and, concurrently, the movies they create, live and die by the always crucial “ending.” You know, the final moments before audience members rise up from their seats and applaud, groan, excitedly provoke heated debates and conversations, or speed home to angrily bombard the IMDb message boards with vitriol. And we can sympathize with those cyber haters. There’s nothing worse than realizing that you’ll never get back those 90-plus minutes that a poorly wrapped up movie stole.

Today, there’s a new psychological thriller opening in limited release, called Red Lights, and it’s two-thirds of a solid, creepy exercise in paranormal suspense. Cillian Murphy and Sigourney Weaver headline writer-director Rodrigo Cortes’ flick, which follows a couple of supernatural-debunkers who are determined to prove that a world-famous psychic (played by Robert De Niro) is a fraud.

Be warned, though, because once the truth comes out, and Murphy comes face-to-face with De Niro’s capabilities, Red Lights abandons logic and explains its events with a preposterous resolution. Cortes shouldn’t feel too bad, however—the film’s wannabe shocker of a reveal is dire, but it’s nowhere near as dreadful as those included in our list of The 10 Worst Movie Twists. Spoilers abound, obviously, but, in this case, we’re saving you precious time, not spilling any valuable beans.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

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Movie: The Book of Eli (2010)
Writer: Gary Whitta

For much of its running time, The Book of Eli, the purported comeback film from Allen and Albert Hughes (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents), isn't half bad. There's a very well-executed one-take action sequence set in and around an isolated house that's under serious attack, a few brutal beatdowns issued to multiple victims courtesy of an especially badass Denzel Washington, and the grimy, apocalyptic western cinematography emits a certain beautiful dirtiness.

So why the Hughes brothers and writer Gary Whitta had to go and botch the whole thing in the final act is anyone's guess—as long as said guess is of the pissed-off kind. As it turns out, humorless road warrior Eli (Washington) is blind; the last remaining copy of the King James Bible, which he's been protecting for 30 years, is written in Braille, rendering it useless to Gary Oldman's villain, who wants to use its words to control people. Apparently sightless Eli was aided by the hand of God in all of those brawls and shootouts.

Or perhaps Whitta decided to pull the old bait-and-switch at the last second and never bothered to fill in the resulting plot holes, the hollowness of which is unavoidable whenever you re-watch Eli's fights and ponder how a blind man can take on all comers from all sides and angles.

Movie: Haute Tension (2003; released in the U.S. in 2005 as High Tension)
Writers: Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur

The extremely hardcore French flick High Tension could arguably rank as one of the top three films of the new millennium if not for its asinine twist. Before the proverbial bed gets shat upon, director/co-writer Alexandre Aja and co-scribe Grégory Levasseur prove themselves to be fearless, imaginative masters of shocking carnage.

At a pleasant family's getaway cottage, where college friends Marie (Cécile de France) and Alex (Maïwenn) are shacked up for a weekend of studying, a random, greasy serial killer rings the doorbell in the middle of the night and proceeds to graphically terminate Alex's father, mother, and little brother.

And it's all genuinely disturbing, shot with artistic sure-handedness and a refreshing yet punishing lack of cut-aways. Once Alex gets kidnapped by the murderer and Marie chases after her, High Tension loses some of its gore but ratchets up the airtight tension, but then a bunch of cops show up out of nowhere, look at surveillance video, and see that it's Marie, not the burly madman we've been seeing all along, who's been doing the slaying.

The old "the main character is actually the killer" is one of the oldest and lamest tricks in the screenwriting book, and its use in High Tension nearly derails the entire picture by opening up several narrative holes. That is, until Aja redeems himself by staging an absurdly and gleefully grisly death involving a chainsaw and a car windshield. The twist still sucks royally, but, thanks to the impressive brutality, High Tension ultimately gets a pass.

Movie: Hancock (2008)
Writers: Vince Gilligan and Vincent Ngo

Hancock is one-half a fun, popcorn-ready summer blockbuster and one-half a pretentious, overcooked piece of melodramatic hokum. Let's start with the positive: As its trailers, powered by Ludacris' "Move Bitch," emphasized, Hancock's first half is a blast, allowing Will Smith to be at his snarky best playing an underachieving superhero who cracks wise and irks an uptight guy named Ray (Jason Bateman). An entire movie of that could have been aces. But then the cinematic schizophrenia sets in, and it's all downhill.

Ray's hot wife, Mary (played by Charlize Theron), is, wait for it, also a superhero; in fact, she and Smith's Hancock are both over 3,000 years old and used to be a romantic item. Oh, and whenever they're near each other, their invulnerable powers rapidly deplete, along with all of director Peter Berg's disappointingly uneven movie's humor and life.

Movie: I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)
Writer: Trey Callaway

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, the inferior sequel (imagine that) to the 1997 hit slasher flick I Know What You Did Last Summer, has its many guilty pleasures: Jennifer Love Hewitt sporting a bikini not once but twice, Brandy showing off her surprisingly robust derriere in spandex pants, Jack Black doing a hilariously awful Rastafarian shtick, and horror's lamest karaoke scene. That's almost enough to help make the film's ridiculous title somewhat tolerable. Think about it: Shouldn't it be I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago? Logic fail.

But even the dumb-ass title sounds brilliant when compared to the follow-up's incredibly lazy, overly emphasized, and climactic twist. The plot kicks off when Julie (Hewitt), now a university co-ed, wins a free trip to the Bahamas through a radio contest; once on the tropical island, everyone starts dying gruesomely at the hands of the first movie's killer, fisherman-with-a-hook Ben Willis.

It's all standard hack-and-slash flick procedure, up until one of Julie's friends, Will Benson (Matthew Settle) drops the maddening, fuck-out-of-here-screenwriter bomb on her: He's actually Ben Willis' son, and he orchestrated the whole Bahamas getaway as a trap. And just in case the moronic reveal isn't clear enough, Will hammers it over Julie's pretty little head with, "Will Benson! Get it... Ben's son!" Yes, Trey Callaway, the screenwriter, had all the wit of a 10-year-old who just learned that "level" spelled backward is still "level."

Movie: Boxing Helena (1993)
Writer: Jennifer Chambers Lynch

Let's be clear, writers: The only time the words "it was all a dream" will ever fly are when the Notorious B.I.G. raps them every time we hear "Juicy." Otherwise, avoid that intensely maddening plot twist at all costs; not only is it the easiest one to think up, requiring nothing but a quick scene at a story or film's end that needs no connections to all that preceded it, but it's also a foolproof way to waste the precious time of everyone involved, namely the readers/viewers.

Sadly, nobody told this to Jennifer Chambers Lynch, the daughter of the excellent weirdo filmmaker David Lynch, before she finalized her script for Boxing Helena, which she also directed. The central idea tucked within the film's running time is actually a dementedly clever one: A surgeon named Nick (Julian Sands) becomes stalker-mode obsessed with his gorgeous neighbor, Helena (Sherilyn Fenn), and when she's severely injured in a freak automobile accident, he kidnaps her and amputates both her arms and legs.

Fiendishly twisted and perverse, Boxing Helena shows that Ms. Lynch has a rather creepy imagination, yet it also leads one to believe that she's also unable to fully commit to her wildest ideas. The whole dismembered prisoner section of the film is actually an extended dream sequence, which we learn as Nick wakes up in the hospital after Helena, whom he rescued from the accident's wreckage and rushed to the emergency room, makes it through surgery.

From sick and twisted to sappy and timid—that's never a desirable transition.

Movie: Hide and Seek (2005)
Writer: Ari Schlossberg

For about a decade now, Robert De Niro's penchant for lazily acting in crappy movies has been both sad and infuriating. One of the two-time Academy Award winner's most egregious role choices came in Hide and Seek, the clichéd 2005 genre flick about a father trying to figure out who killed his wife while his young daughter (Dakota Fanning) leads him to believe it's her supernatural/imaginary BFF "Charlie."

To be fair, De Niro does give a strong performance as David Callaway, nearly selling the dad character's desperation to solve his wife's murder, the recent deaths of others around him, and save his little girl from her seemingly malevolent pal Chuck. But a mutant thespian made from the combined DNA of Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis, and James Stewart couldn't help the film's seriously lazy reveal that Charlie has been David all along, and that David and his split personality killed his wife after he caught her cheating on him.

If that sounds familiar, Stephen King and/or Johnny Depp fans, it's pretty much the exact same twist from 2004's Secret Window, based on King's novella Secret Window, Secret Garden. Yes, the twist also sucks in Secret Window, but that film opened 10 months before Hide and Seek, thus giving the latter movie the unfortunate fate of beating an already dead, brain-dead-when-it-was-alive horse further into the ground.

Movie: Color of Night (1994)
Writers: Billy Ray and Matthew Chapman

The first mistake committed by the producers of Color of Night was casting the exceptionally attractive Jane March to play Rose, the hot piece of rump that psychoanalyst Bill (Bruce Willis) starts having hardcore sex with at his own leisure. Unable to look away from March's beauty the entire time, it's even harder for us to look at the teenage "boy" Richie, one of Bill's patients, and not see the resemblance to Rose. It doesn't help matters that Richie wants to be a girl.

When bodies start dropping, Bill takes a deeper look at the situation, and what does he discover? Richie is actually Rose, who, a la Psycho's Norman Bates and his knife-wielding mother, at times plays the part of her long-dead brother, Richie. That's a laughable twist in and of itself, but the fact that a looker like March plays both characters makes it more obvious than jolting.

Movie: Perfect Stranger (2007)
Writer: Todd Komarnicki

It's no secret that after 2001, when she won the Academy Award for her performance in Monster's Ball, Halle Berry's career, save for her limited work in 2003's X2: X-Men United, followed the lead of Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s post-Oscar output. You know it's bad when your best movie in 11 years is the awesomely awful Catwoman. So what's Berry's worst flick since '01? Perfect Stranger, hands down.

It's the caliber of project you'd expect someone like Sharon Stone to sign onto, not a naturally gifted actress hot off an Academy Award victory—kind of like Catwoman, come to think of it. But we digress. In Perfect Stranger, Berry plays Rowena, a feisty reporter who gets caught up in a web of murder as she investigates an advertising executive (Bruce Willis). Murders that, surprise, Rowena committed herself, triggered by the childhood trauma of seeing her mother kill her daddy with a fireplace poker.

Yes, it's another case of the protagonist turning out to be the killer, but in this case the generic reveal's shittiness was amplified by the film's commercials and marketing campaign, which all teased that Perfect Stranger had one hell of a twist. They might as well have also falsely said that Berry got naked again.

Movie: The Forgotten (2004)
Writer: Gerald Di Pego

Talk about a fitting title for movie. Anyone who actually remembers this inept and altogether dismissible thriller deserves a cookie, unless you're a devoted fan of Julianne Moore, to which we'd commend your taste in sexy ginger actresses. Moore's presence in The Forgotten is the film's second unfortunate attribute—the first, regrettably, is its unbelievably ludicrous "surprise."

Moore plays a grieving mother who thinks her you song disappeared in a plane crash, only to find out that, in vintage Twilight Zone style, she never had a son. Or so a few suspect folks say, and, naturally, she's not buying it. Neither was screenwriter Gerald Di Pego when was penning the script, it seems, because once the big twist surfaces, it's as if he decided to start writing a completely different around the page-45 mark.

Switching gears from what's been a dull Lifetime Movie, The Forgotten turns into a preposterous science fiction clusterfuck. The cause: It's revealed that aliens took Moore’s son. Why? Because pinning it on Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster would've been too silly.

Movie: The Number 23 (2007)
Writer: Fernley Phillips

There's nothing one can do but loathe a film that aggressively goes out of it way to explain a totally idiotic plot twist. For an example, get a little masochistic and rent Joel Schumacher's The Number 23, a woefully amateurish thriller made by people who clearly thought they were smarter than they actually were, and also killed any chance of us ever seeing another movie in which Jim Carrey tries to go all dark.

The better-off-comedic actor plays Walter Sparrow, a blue-collar guy whose wife gives him a book called The Number 23 as a birthday present, which causes him to obsess over said number in every facet of his life. The book's author's name is Topsy Kretts, a pseudonym if there ever was one. And, mysteriously, there seems to be a chapter missing after it ends with Chapter 22.

So take a wild guess who Topsy Kretts really is? That's right, it's Walter, and the missing chapter, which Walter finds written all over the wall of a hotel room, is a confession to himself about why he killed a girl back in college and then tried to off himself by jumping off a balcony, much like how the book's main character, Fingerling, stands at a balcony's edge as Chapter 22 concludes.

It's actually even more convoluted than that, and Fernley Phillips' highly illogical script spends at least 30 minutes trying to iron out of the details for audience members. On second thought, don't rent The Number 23. There's probably not enough aspirin in your medicine cabinet to relieve the pounding headache it'll cause.