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Greatest Movie Twists, Part 15 |
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Greatest Movie Twists, Part 15 |
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Note: The films that are marked
with a yellow star |
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Greatest Movie Twists, Spoilers and
Surprise Endings |
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| Film Title | Brief Scene Description | Example |
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Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
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This was the third film in Universal's blockbuster series of Pre-Code horror films in the early 30s - it was suggested by Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale; set in 19th century Paris, this semi-blasphemous tale told of "murders in the Rue Morgue" committed by mad side-show Doctor Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) who owned a pet gorilla-ape, Erik (Charles Gemora) - an 'ape with a human brain'; Mirakle's bestial motive was that he was searching for a human female to presumably mate with the ape-monster as a 'bride', or at least to mix their blood in some unholy way, to prove his theories of human evolution; when Mirakle couldn't find suitable or compatible female blood matches (they had 'impurities' due to often being prostitutes?) and they died as a result of the transfusions, he instructed his assistant Janos the Black One (Noble Johnson) to dump their bodies in the Seine River; by the film's exciting ending when Mirakle attempted a final transfusion on sweet 'virginal' ingenue Camille L'Espanaye (Sidney Fox), Erik turned on him, broke his neck and scrambled off with the victim over the rooftops before he was shot and the heroine was saved by her heroic starving artist boyfriend Pierre Dupin (Leon Waycoff (aka Leon Ames)) [Note: the murders in the original literary tale were committed by an orangutan, the escaped pet of a sailor] |
 
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Mystic River (2003)
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The resolution of the murder case was explained by Massachusetts State homicide detective Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) to his boyfriend friend - grieving ex-con and corner grocery-store owner Jimmy Markum (Oscar-winning Best Actor Sean Penn) whose 19 year-old daughter Katie (Emmy Rossum) was murdered; the confessed killers were revealed to have known the victim through a clue on a 911 call tape, and found indirectly by tracing the gun back to its registered owner "Just Ray" Harris and to a previous Looney Liquors hold-up 18 years earlier -- they were identified as Harris' deaf-mute youngest son 'Silent' Ray Harris Jr. (Spencer Treat Clark) - the younger brother of Brendan Harris (Tom Guiry) who was the victim Katie's boyfriend, and another skateboard pal named John O'Shea (Andrew Mackin); the two were playing with a gun that night and only meant to scare her, but during the prank they hit her with a bullet shot; when she knocked them down with her car door and fled, they chased after her and beat her to death in the local zoo/park with a hockey stick; their motive: 'Silent' Ray feared that Brendan was leaving to elope with Katie to Las Vegas and would abandon him; he knew where his father's gun was secretly hidden above the Harris' kitchen ceiling, and used it in the accidental murder; meanwhile, Jimmy Markum had suspected a third boyhood friend as the murderer - a disturbed, violated, and haunted sexual abuse victim Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) who had claimed on the same night that he murdered a pedophile in the parking lot of McGill's bar (where Katie was also seen dancing seductively before her late-night murder), put the bloody body in his trunk, and dumped the body behind the bar - at first, he suspiciously claimed that he got his hand caught in a garbage disposal; Markum forced an innocent Dave to admit he committed Katie's murder after repeatedly threatening: "Admit what you did, Dave, and I'll let you live" - and then knifed him in the stomach, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the Mystic River - only a few hours before the real killers were identified (Jimmy: "If only you had been a little faster"); Dave was killed in the same location where Jimmy had shot and killed "Just Ray" Harris for ratting him out and sending him to jail for two years. |  
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The Narrow Margin (1952)
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In this noirish crime-drama, incorruptible hard-boiled Det. Sgt. Walter Brown (Charles McGraw) was escorting dislikable, widowed gun moll and grand jury witness Mrs. Frankie Neall (Marie Windsor) to Los Angeles on a cross-country train (Brown: "You make me sick to my stomach" Neall: "Well, use your own sink. And let me know when the target practice starts!"); he was charged with protecting her from two hitmen aboard the moving, confining transcontinental Golden West Limited train (from Chicago); it was revealed in a surprising character/identity twist that Mrs. Frankie Neall was actually a decoy -- a policewoman from Internal Affairs named Sarah Maggs; the real Mrs. Neall was Brown's love-interest who was also on the train - she was a golden-haired, sweet-natured mother named Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White) who also had her precocious son Tommy (Gordon Gebert) in tow; at one ironic point in the film, Sinclair was mistakenly held hostage by mob hitman, and Brown used the reflection of another train's window to gun him down without compromising her safety; it was also learned that the payoff list that the mobsters wanted had already been mailed to the Los Angeles DA's office: (Brown: "I've been played for a sucker!"); Brown's loyalties were being tested by the DA via the decoy to see if he would accept the bribes offered by the hitmen to give up his witness: (Ann: "It's an investigation into grafts and payoffs, remember?") |
  
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Never Talk to Strangers (1995)
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In this psycho-sexual thriller (similar in part to The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Basic Instinct (1992)), brilliant, cool blonde criminal psychologist Dr. Sarah Taylor (Rebecca DeMornay) was revealed to have a multiple personality disorder, with one part of her alter-ego completely homicidal; her illness stemmed from an abusive childhood from her despised father Henry (Len Cariou) (who committed incest with her) during which time she murdered her mother to satisfy Henry and cover up the crime; although it appeared that she was being stalked, she was actually sending herself frightening things: threatening phone messages, dead flowers, her own newspaper obituary, and her dead cat; long-haired Latino stranger Tony Ramirez (Antonio Banderas), with whom she shared vigorous kinky thrills, was revealed to be a police officer and surveillance expert investigating the disappearance of Sarah's ex-fiancee a year earlier; in the end, Sarah's homicidal alter ego killed both Tony and her father, and then convinced the police that Tony murdered her father and that she killed Tony in self-defense |
  
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Night of the Living Dead (1968)
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After a gruesome night of death in rural Western Pennsylvania in the fight against an army of undead - including the deaths of Harry and Helen Cooper (Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman) and their daughter Karen (Kyra Schon) and the young teenaged white couple Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judith Ridley) - strong-willed black protagonist Ben (Duane Jones) had survived the night in the basement; but the next morning there was no happy ending -- he was distressingly and shockingly shot in the head by a redneck mob when he peered out of a broken window; he was mistaken for one of the living dead, and his body was thrown into a pile of ghoul corpses and set on fire |
 
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No Way Out (1987)
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In this suspenseful political thriller, the major twist was that Pentagon naval attache Lt. Cmdr. Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner), while innocent of murdering high-class mistress-escort Susan Atwell (Sean Young), was really a KGB sleeper agent named Yuri who had infiltrated the Pentagon; the murder was committed during a jealous rage by Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman) who then instigated a top-secret cover-up -- he blamed on a bogus, never-seen Russian mole code-named "Yuri" for the crime; throughout the film, Farrell furiously raced against time to prove his innocence during an investigation that would have implicated himself as Atwell's killer; when Farrell successfully exposed Brice as the actual killer, Brice committed suicide; the entire film was told as a flashback during his debriefing with his Soviet superiors who had commissioned him to seduce Atwell in order to blackmail Brice - revealed at the end; the film concluded with a claustrophobic spy satellite-view of Farrell getting into his car and driving off |
  
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The spy named 'George Kaplan' midway into the film was revealed to be a fictional US agent, as explained in a long expositionary dialogue by the Professor (Leo G. Carroll) in a room full of agents: "We didn't invent our non-existent man and give him the name of George Kaplan, establish elaborate behavior patterns for him, move his prop belongings in and out of hotel rooms for our own private amusement. We created George Kaplan and labored successfully to convince Vandamm [James Mason] that this was our own agent hot on his trail for a desperately important reason...If we make the slightest move to suggest that there is no such agent as George Kaplan, give any hint to Vandamm that he's pursuing a decoy instead of our own agent, then our agent working right under Vandamm's very nose will immediately face suspicion, exposure and assassination, like the two others who went before"; although the Professor was aware that innocent businessman Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) had been mistaken for a non-existent agent (created to protect the identity of a genuine agent in the employ of the CIA -- Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint)!), Roger had become a useful decoy and there was nothing that could be done to protect him |
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The Notebook (2004)
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It was revealed gradually - although it could be readily guessed - that elderly and frail heart patient "Duke" (James Garner) and nursing home patient Allie Hamilton (Gena Rowlands), who was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, were the two young lovers that "Duke" was reading about in 'the notebook'; she was a young, privileged and pretty Southern teen debutante named Allie (Rachel McAdams), and he was an earthy mill worker named Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling) when they first met and fell in love as teens, but they were unable to consummate their relationship due to their different social classes and interference from her parents; in the final scenes after it was revealed that Allie could only remember the story of their love for a few minutes, Noah would repeatedly attempt to rekindle their love by re-reading from her old faded notebook diary (written by Allie as a present to Noah years earlier, with the handwritten dedication: "Read this to me, and I'll come back to you"); in the film's conclusion, she remembered him as they held hands, fell asleep in the same bed, and passed away together |
  
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Obsession (1976)
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In this convoluted and suspenseful Brian De Palma film that reworked Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), New Orleans real estate developer Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) was happily married to wife Elizabeth (Genevieve Bujold) with a nine year-old daughter named Amy - when suddenly, both were kidnapped and held for $500,000 ransom; a botched rescue attempt (and substitution of paper for the real cash ransom) resulted in their deaths after a car chase; sixteen years later on a business trip to Florence Italy, Michael met and fell in love with young, French-accented restoration artist Sandra Portinari (Genevieve Bujold again) - a doppelganger who resembled his former wife; he brought her back to New Orleans where he worked to transform her into the image of his beloved Elizabeth; in the long (and slightly preposterous) conclusion, on their wedding night after marrying Sandra (in a dream sequence), she was kidnapped with another identical-looking ransom note -- during this second ordeal, he learned that family friend and business partner "Uncle Bob" Robert LaSalle (John Lithgow) was trying to financially ruin him and take over his business with an exorbitant ransom - so he stabbed LaSalle to death in retaliation; believing that Sandra was LaSalle's accomplice, Michael ran to the airport terminal to kill his wife with a gun; as Sandra was attempting to escape, it was revealed in a flashback that she was actually his daughter whom he'd believed had been killed in the first kidnapping; she had been brainwashed by LaSalle to believe that her father didn't love her because he hadn't provided a cash ransom; depressed, Sandra attempted to commit suicide and was wheeled off the plane; as Courtland approached her, the ransom money in his briefcase was spilled out -- as Sandra shouted out: "Daddy, you brought the money!"; he slowly comprehended, during a soft-focus, overexposed, minute-and-a-half arc shot during an embrace, that she was the daughter he thought was killed many years earlier - as she tearfully called him "Daddy" repeatedly |
  
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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge/La Rivière du Hibou (1962, Fr.)
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This classic 28 minute film which won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject was based on Ambrose Bierce's 1886 short story first published in 1891; it aired on American television in late February 1964 as the last episode of Rod Serling's original anthology series The Twilight Zone; in the story, innocent Civil War Confederate soldier Peyton Farquahr (Roger Jacquet) escaped his hanging when the rope broke and he floated downriver; he was able to flee through a forest toward his beloved wife (Anne Cornaly) and child at his home - when he stretched out his arms to her for an embrace, he suddenly screamed and arched backwards; he never actually escaped death -- the entire film was a fantasy he experienced in the few seconds of life he had during his execution just before his neck was broken in the noose; Rod Serling ended the segment with the voice-over narration: "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in two forms: as it was dreamed and as it was lived and died; this is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination, the ingredients of The Twilight Zone" |
   
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(alphabetical by film title)
Intro
| Part 1 | Part
2 | Part 3 | Part
4 | Part 5 | Part
6 | Part 7 | Part
8 | Part 9 | Part
10 | Part 11 | Part
12 | Part 13
Part 14 | Part
15 | Part 16 | Part
17 | Part 18 | Part
19 | Part 20 | Part
21 | Part 22 | Part
23 | Part 24 | Part
25
Created in 1996-2008 © by Tim Dirks. All rights reserved.
Greatest
Movie Twists, Spoilers, and Surprise Endings: Avid filmgoers often
speak about seeking rare movie surprises in the movie-going experience,
such as discovering films that have cunning plot twists, a shocking
surprise ending, a surprise revelation about a particular character,
or some other unknown or unsuspected narrative element. Compiled here
in this comprehensive collection is a detailed set of films with the
greatest movie twists, spoilers, and surprise endings.
are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the 
