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Greatest Movie Twists Part 7 |
 are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the "100 Greatest Films". |
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.
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Greatest Movie Twists Part 7 |
are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the "100 Greatest Films". |
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(alphabetical by film title) - Part 7 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 |
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| Film Title | Brief Scene Description | Example |
District 9 (2009)
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Neill Blomkamp's gritty science-fiction film was part-apartheid allegory, mock documentary and tense action thriller; it told about the arrival of a large space ship that hovered above Johannesburg, South Africa, and was found to contain sickly prawn-like alien creatures (bi-pedal and taller than humans, with facial tendrils); the extra-terrestrials were segregated in District 9 within the city, a heavily-guarded and militarized slum-internment camp that had existed for 20 years, after which plans by the MNU (Multi-National United) were underway to move the 1.8 million oppressed aliens to a new camp (District 10) over 200 kilometers away, with enforcement provided during the eviction by sadistic mercenary Colonel Koobus Venter (David James); the operation to peaceably evict the prawns was headed up by bumbling, incompetent, bureaucratic field operative Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who accidentally sprayed himself with black liquid from a canister (a fuel cell) found in the shack of intelligent alien Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope) - he infected himself with a virus, and began a harrowing experience of slowly mutating into one of the aliens (his left hand developed a claw). When Wikus was apprehended by the MNU and they learned he could operate powerful, non-human weaponry, they were determined to perform experimental surgery upon him and "harvest" everything from his partially-mutated body, and in the process kill him: "This body represents hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars worth of biotechnology. There are people out there, governments, corporations, who would kill for this chance." (Wikus also discovered that they had been performing illegal, secret operations on aliens for years, used the aliens as targets, and wanted to commandeer the other-worldly weaponry-technology for profit.) He resisted and became a fugitive from the nefarious MNU, after they published a falsified news report claiming that Wikus had raped one of the aliens and contracted a disease. He sought refuge in the shack of Christopher Johnson and his young son, and found himself losing his hair, nails, and teeth, and that he liked prawn 'cat food.' Wikus found out that the mysterious liquid in the canister had been gathered over 20 years, and could power a submerged command module shuttle to return to the mother ship hovering dormant over the city, and allow it to be reactivated. In the film's exciting conclusion, Wikus and Christopher retrieved the canister from MNU, fought off a Nigerian warlord and his gang of armed men within District 9 who wanted Wikus' powers (through animistic cannibalism!), and evaded MNU forces led by Colonel Koobus. Although seriously wounded, beleaguered Wikus remained behind (encased in a massive mechanical metal battle suit) to sacrificially allow Christopher (and his son) to escape in the downed command module and return to the reactivated mother ship (and then leave Earth). The prawns came to Wikus' rescue and viciously tore off the head of Koobus and ripped him apart as he was about to kill Wikus. However, the twist was that it would take 3 years for Christopher to journey to his home planet and then return to reverse Wikus' genetic transformation and cure him. As the mother ship departed, questions were pondered: Would Christopher Johnson return? Was he simply escaping, or would he effect a rescue plan for the alien refugees in their new camp, and/or wage war against humanity? In the film's epilogue, more interviews with various people revealed that Wikus had disappeared - had he been recaptured by MNU or by another government, or by "some shady government agency and is actually being held in captivity"? Wikus' co-worker had exposed MNU's "illegal genetic research programme," and District 9 was demolished after the alien resettlement operation was completed. Wikus' wife Tania (Vanessa Haywood) discovered a small metal flower on her front door step (similar to ones Wikus used to make) and wondered if her husband was still alive ("My friends say I should just throw it away because it's just a piece of rubbish. And it couldn't possibly come from him. I know it's true"). On a trash heap in District 10 (now with 2.5 million aliens), an alien with a bandaged left hand was seen holding up a flower out of metal - was Wikus still alive?! |         
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D.O.A. (1950) |
This classic noir detective story opened with an unlikely and innovative shocking premise -- the protagonist hero accountant-notary public Frank Bigelow (Edmond O'Brien) was already dead; he had been "murdered" by having his drink in a San Francisco jazz club doctored by a lethal dose of glow-in-the-dark "luminous toxin" (radiation poisoning by iridium); he entered a police station where he told the captain in charge: "I want to report a murder" - and when asked about who was murdered, he replied: "I was"; the remainder of the film was the investigation of the doomed and dying man into why he was murdered -- it was learned that he was killed because he inadvertently and innocently notarized a bill of sale for stolen iridium: ("All I did was notarize a bill of sale, but that piece of paper could have proven that Phillips didn't commit suicide - he was murdered; and that's why Halliday poisoned me") - if the bill of sale surfaced, it could discredit an apparent suicide and convict Mrs. Phillips (Lynn Baggett) and her lover Halliday (William Ching) of having actually killed her husband Stanley Phillips (Henry Hart) by pushing him off a balcony to his death: (Mrs. Phillips: "you could have proved there was a bill of sale, that my husband had no reason to commit suicide"); the film ended with Bigelow falling dead to the floor in the police station after solving his own murder case, with the police captain responding to a question about making out a report: "Better make it 'dead on arrival'" |
  
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Donnie Darko (2001) |
This mystifying cult film was filled with unusual ideas, such as time-travel through time portals used as gateways between universes, wormhole theories, a conservative self-help guru warning about fear who secretly had a child pornography dungeon, a PTA book-banning protest, a 6 foot-tall rabbit named Frank (James Duval) who predicted doomsday in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds, an elderly/senile character named Grandma Death (or Roberta Sparrow) (Patience Cleveland) who wrote a book titled "The Philosophy of Time Travel," and liquid spears or tubes of fluid light emanating from people's chests. The main character was a disturbed teenager with paranoid schizophrenia named Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhall). The film's premise was voiced by the 'new-girl-in-town' Gretchen Ross (Jena Malone) - Donnie's girlfriend, who told him: "What if you could go back in time, and take all those hours of pain and darkness and replace them with something better?" In an earlier part of the film, on October 2, 1988, Donnie was saved from death when a detached jet engine crashed into his second-story bedroom while he was out sleep-walking and called by Frank onto a golf course. Midway through the film while on a date with Gretchen at a Halloween Frightfest showing of "The Evil Dead," Donnie saw the rabbit Frank remove his mask - revealing a teenager with a bloody right-eye wound (a foreshadowing); at the end of the film as Donnie and his sister Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal) were holding a celebratory Halloween party at their parents' house, Gretchen was accidentally run over outside Grandma Death's house and killed by a red car driven by Elizabeth's boyfriend Frank (James Duval) - wearing the rabbit costume. Angered, Donnie shot Frank in the eye and killed him, using his father's gun. Above town, Donnie saw a time tunnel portal forming in the sky -- and according to the time travel theory, the plane's vessel (his mother's flight returning from Los Angeles from a "Star Search" competition with his dancer/sister Samantha (Daveigh Chase)) enabled Donnie to will the Earth to reverse itself from October 30 to October 2nd to change the course of history and tie two universes together - and save Gretchen from death (and Frank also). Donnie also revealed the contents of a letter written to Grandma Death: "Dear Roberta Sparrow, I have reached the end of your book and there are so many things that I need to ask you. Sometimes I'm afraid of what you might tell me. Sometimes I'm afraid that you'll tell me that this is not a work of fiction. I can only hope that the answers will come to me in my sleep. I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to." The plane's jet engine crashed into the Darko house - a second time - but this time, Donnie was in his bedroom sleeping and perished in the disaster. In the final scene, Gretchen rode her bike by Donnie's house and waved to his distraught mother Rose (Mary McDonnell). The film's last line was a young boy named David asking Gretchen whether she knew Donnie or not: "Did you know him?" with her reply: "No"
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Don't Look Now (1973) |
Although foreshadowed by earlier events, it was still a shocking death scene when art restoration expert John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) had his neck slashed by a murderous, red-raincoated dwarf in a dark Venetian alleyway - he had mistakenly believed that she was his recently-drowned daughter |
 
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| In the conclusion of Kubrick's apocalyptic dark comedy, mad German scientist Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers) became ecstatic over the total annihilation of the Earth and his 100 Year Plan (including his mine-shaft proposal that suggested having 10 fertile women for every male survivor), as the Doomsday Machine was triggered - he "resurrected" himself, miraculously regaining his ability to walk when his mechanical, robot-like body rose out of his wheelchair, and he cried exultantly in the War Room: "Sir! I have a plan. Heh! (He realized he was standing up amidst everyone) Mein Fuehrer, I can walk!" A climactic chorus of H-bomb mushroom clouds spread as multiple explosions detonated around the world, annihilating and causing oblivion by bringing radioactive fallout to millions of people, as the popular, comforting WW II tune We'll Meet Again Some Sunny Day played in incongruous juxtaposition |
 
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Dream Lover (1994) |
Upon meeting the beautiful and sensual Lena Mathers (Madchen Amick), successful architect and recent divorcee Ray Reardon (James Spader) was spellbound by her beauty after sex and dream dates and soon married her after a storybook romance; however, soon afterwards, his mysterious wife's past became questionable and suspicious - and he realized that he had been duped by the femme fatale; she had deliberately gotten close to him to hastily marry him and acquire his money; the increasingly-paranoid and distrustful Ray was soon accusing her of being a perpetual and deceitful liar ("If the things you tell me aren't true, then what is true?") regarding her identity, her friends, the bruises on her leg, her afternoon disappearances to conduct an affair with friend Larry (Frederic Lehne), and her past; he accused her of stealing his house, his children, and of being a psychopath; after he slapped her, she was able to have him committed in an institution - where he faked insanity and sedation, while he was scheming with Larry's wife Elaine (Bess Armstrong) to find revenge; in the film's twist ending, he strangled Lena while she visited him at the institution, claiming that since he had been declared insane, he couldn't be held accountable for her death |
  
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Dressed to Kill (1980) |
In this film's early horrific murder sequence in Brian DePalma's ripoff/homage of Psycho (1960), sexually-unfulfilled Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) was slashed to death in the enclosed space of an elevator of a high-rise apartment building (where she has just had adulterous sex and forgotten her wedding ring and panties, and probably contracted VD); she was presumably murdered by a mysterious black-coated woman wielding a sharp razor (seen in the elevator's convex mirror); later, the killer also threatened to kill blonde prostitute Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) - a witness to Kate's murder; it was revealed that Kate's trans-sexual psychologist Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) was the homicidal murderer with a split personality - he literally was 'dressed to kill' as "Bobbi" by wearing a blonde wig and dark glasses; the film ended with another nightmarish sequence in which Liz dreamed that the insane and vengeful doctor had escaped from a mental hospital after strangling a nurse, and wore the nurse's shoes as disguise; he killed her with a sharp razor blade after she had stepped out of a shower -- similar to a violent rape/sex fantasy scene in the film's opening - however, Liz woke up screaming to end the film |
     
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One of the first unexpected events in this film was the bludgeoning death of drunken lawyer George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) in his sleeping bag during the dark of night by unknown attackers; this foreshadowed the completely unexpected, anti-climactic and quick ending -- the shotgun-blast deaths of cross-country bikers Billy (Dennis Hopper) and then Captain America/Wyatt (Peter Fonda) by a redneck in a truck on a country road, after Billy flipped off the driver and Wyatt investigated; Wyatt's American flag-decorated bike exploded in flames (metaphorically?), but his body didn't appear in the scene; the film ended with the pull-back helicopter view of the winding river alongside the highway |
  
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Eddie and the Cruisers (1983) |
By film's end, it was revealed that the band manager Doc Robbins (Joe Pantoliano) of the 60's rock band Eddie & The Cruisers was the one who was hunting for the missing master tapes (of the Cruisers' unheard second album titled A Season In Hell after the record company refused to release it and the band broke up in 1964) - featuring charismatic lead band singer Eddie Wilson (Michael Paré); the famous twist ending revealed that long-lost Eddie was still alive (he had faked his own suicidal death by driving his Chevy convertible over the side of the South Jersey Raritan Bridge almost two decades earlier, although his body was never found) - he was seen (with a beard) in a TV store window display's reflection as the last spectator left watching the credits roll in a documentary tribute to himself on a bank of TV sets |
  
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Election (1999)
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By the end of director Alexander Payne's satirical dark comedy about an Omaha, Nebraska high school election and its personal and political ramifications, all of the Carver HS characters were profoundly affected (often they narrated their thoughts in voice-over): the three candidates were ruthlessly ambitious, aspiring senior class president Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) with a win-at-any-cost mentality, and Tracy's competition -- a nice-guy, earnest, simple-minded quarterback named Paul Metzler (Chris Klein), and Paul's lesbian-minded sister Tammy Metzler (Jessica Campbell) who called the election 'stupid'; the election was supervised by conscientious civics teacher and student government advisor Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick); also affected by events at the school were McAllister's best friend and math teacher Mr. Novotny (Mark Harelik) who had a career-ending and marriage-ending affair with Tracy, and the two women in Jim's domestic life: his nursing school student/wife Diane (Molly Hagan) and divorced neighbor Linda Novotny (Delaney Driscoll); pitting himself against Tracy's annoying overachieving dominance, Jim attempted to sabotage and fix the close election (and cause Tracy's defeat) by discarding two of her ballots into a wastebasket that were discovered by the disgruntled custodian - McAllister was caught and forced to resign; at the same time, he was in the midst of an extra-marital affair with Linda, who informed his wife Diane about their motel rendezvous plans and precipitated an immediate divorce; Jim was forced to move to New York where he took a job in the Natural History Museum's Education Department as a guide, and found a new co-worker/girlfriend named Jillian (Jillian Crane); in Washington DC, he happened to see up-and-coming post-grad Georgetown University student Tracy in the company of a Nebraskan congressman; rage-filled misfit Tammy forced her own transfer to a girl's Catholic private school called Immaculate Heart, where she found another soulmate girlfriend named Jennifer (Kaitlin Ferrell); and Paul was elected homecoming and prom king in his senior year |     
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Electra Glide in Blue (1973) |
In this mid-70s counter-culturally themed action/crime film representative of the New Hollywood of the 70s, Robert Blake starred as John Wintergreen - a short-statured, virile, honorable and tactful rookie motorcycle patrolman (and ex-Vietnam Vet) on the desert roads of Northern Arizona riding an Electra Glide Harley Davidson bike; both his small-minded, laid-back and dishonest partner "Zipper" Davis (Billy "Green" Bush) and egomaniacal homicide Detective Harve Poole (Mitch Ryan) enjoyed harrassing, framing (with planted drugs) and busting hippies during the film's major murder mystery; in the film's unpredictable, abrupt and surprise ending (reminiscent of Easy Rider (1969), although a reversal), Wintergreen shot an intoxicated "Zipper" in self-defense, and then lost his own life to a hippie driving a VW van; in the scene, the vehicle was stopped for a minor infraction (a missing front bumper), but when Wintergreen let the driver go and forgot to return his driver's license, the hippies feared that they were to be arrested when Wintergreen chased after them -- they shot him to death and let him die on the road |
 
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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
