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Greatest Movie Twists Part 8 |
 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 8 |
are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the "100 Greatest Films". |
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(alphabetical by film title) - Part 8 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 |
Elvira Madigan (1967, Swe.) |
At the suicidal conclusion of this beautiful romantic melodrama based on a true but tragic love affair in the 19th century between two doomed lovers during one summer, young runaway tightrope walker Elvira Madigan (Pia Degermark) told her married lover and Swedish Army deserter Lieut. Sixten Sparre (Thommy Berggren) that they had no other alternative but to commit suicide together; when he couldn't pull the trigger on her at point-blank range, she was shot and killed (off-screen) during a freeze-frame image of her grasping for a butterfly in a golden field - he then shot himself with a second blast from his revolver during the same freeze-frame image before the film ended with a black screen |   
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| One of the most startling and stunning plot twists ever devised appeared in this second film in the second trilogy -- it was a moment of paternal revelation when the evil dark lord Darth Vader (David Prowse, voice of James Earl Jones) emotionlessly admitted a surprise relationship to young Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) -- after cutting off Luke's hand: "No, I am your father"; Luke gave a horrified reaction: "No, no. That's not true. That's impossible!"; Darth Vader also urged Luke to join him: "Join me and together, we can rule the galaxy as father and son." |
 
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Equus (1977) |
This film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play uncovered the reason that 17 year-old working class English stable boy Alan Strang (Peter Firth) had inexplicably and horrifically blinded six horses with a steel spike; after he had his first emotionally-exposed human sexual experience with Jill Mason (Jenny Agutter) in the stable in front of the horses that he worshipped and deified as God (Equus was the god of horses), he proved to be impotent; this led him to plead forgiveness from Equus and then commit a bloody and disturbing crime due to temporary insanity -- he blinded the horses out of desperation and shame; it was explained that when he was a boy, a picture of a tortured Christ on his wall was replaced by a picture of a horse's head, and his twisted religiosity and pathological-sexual fascination and fixation with horses led to his outrageous behavior |
 
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Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971)
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In the twist ending of this second sequel to the original 1968 film, it was revealed that a baby ape named Milo, the progeny of two intelligent, talking chimpanzees: Zira (Kim Hunter) and her husband Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) born in the year 1973 in Los Angeles had been switched with the baby (Salome) of a non-speaking circus ape named Heloise, for protection's sake; paranoid and sinister Senior Science Advisor to the US President, Dr. Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden) was determined to kill the talking apes' baby to prevent the eventual domination of the Earth by the creatures and the destruction of the Earth 2,000 years into the future; Zira and Cornelius were befriended by two sympathetic doctors and circus manager Señor Armando (Ricardo Montalbán) who was in on the plan and promised to care for the infant ape and protect it from harm; in the final scene, after both Cornelius and Zira (and the baby Salome that she was carrying in a blanket) were gunned down, Armando spoke to the infant ape in a cage, as the circus was moving to its winter quarters in Florida: "Intelligent creature. But then, so were your mother and father." Baby ape Milo (with a protective St. Francis of Assisi medal around its neck), struggled to speak the words: "Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama" with the voice of a human child as the film ended | 
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Evil Dead II (1987) |
After the chanting of an incantation, hero Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) was sucked and propelled into a whirling portal, along with his Oldsmobile, into a time-travel journey to the Middle-East ca 1300s, where he was surrounded by knights in armor (Crusaders) on horseback, who believed that he was a fearsome deadite; when he blasted a real flying deadite with his shotgun, he was worshipped as a liberating hero by all of the knights: "Hail, he who has come from the sky to deliver us from the terrors of the deadites. Hail! Hail!.." -- horrified, Ash repeatedly screamed: "Nooo!" as the camera pulled back, and the screen turned to black for the closing credits |    
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eXistenZ (1999) |
During the spate of multiple-reality films with the theme 'what's authentic and what's not real?', this David Cronenberg film was another entry; eXistenZ was the name of the latest bio-engineered video game by brilliant inventor/creator Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the near-future, that was played and interfaced by plugging a living game control unit (or pod) directly into one's central nervous system; the player inserted a fleshy umbilical cord like tube into a 'bio-port,' a small orifice carved in the small of the player's back; when engaged, the game took the player into a virtual world of the future ("a wild ride"); when the game was debuted, there was an assassination attempt on Geller by a fanatical terrorist (armed with a "gristle gun" made of a chicken's carcass that shot human teeth), but she escaped with novice game marketer/security guard Ted Pikul (Jude Law) for Antenna Research; however, her game pod with the only copy of the game was damaged, so the two had to replay the game to determine the extent of the damage - and became fugitives on the run from killers in an old trout farm and filthy Chinese restaurant, including avoiding the malevolent Kiri Vinokur (Ian Holm); the film's climactic ending contained an expected twist -- the entire film was a game within another computer game, called transCendenZ, which game-tester Allegra won by 'killing' Ted; the game was already in progress when the film began, and all of the characters in the film were additional players from a sample audience who were testing the game; when the game ended, Allegra and Ted -- who were actually assassins, killed the game's creator and designer Yevgeny Nourish (Don McKellar); the film's last line, spoken by a game-tester, revealed the film's central twist: "Tell me the truth; are we still in the game?", as Allegra had revealed earlier: "You have to PLAY the game, to find out WHY you're playing the game" |
  
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Exterminating Angel (1962, Mex.) (aka El Angel Exterminador) |
During this surrealistic and macabre Luis Bunuel comedy, all twenty of the privileged class, bourgeois dinner guests (after attending a religious play about a naive virgin) hesitated to leave the Mexican estate on "Calle de la Providencia" - held in for days by an inexplicable force, a psychological barrier, sheep-like behavior, or by rueful acceptance or suggestion; eventually the desperate party guests, no longer attended by proletariat workers (the cook and other servants had left), barbarically turned against their aristocrat host Edmundo Nobilé (Enrique Rambal) for feeling self-entrapped and insulated; they slaughtered sheep for food, broke through the walls to access water in the pipes, burned the furniture, and two lovers killed themselves; when they finally left the house in the film's twist ending, they again became confined as parishioners inside a Catholic church after the morning service - with another herd of sheep wandering toward the church |
 
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F For Fake (1973) (aka Vérités et mensonges)
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Writer/director/actor Orson Welles' last feature film was this non-linear, documentary-essay (and magic trick at its end) about fakery, art forgery, authorship and authenticity, charlatanism, the value of experts, magicians, and the art world. Within a hodge-podge of re-edited films (BBC film stock, an earlier documentary on de Hory, candid film footage, newly-shot commentary), the bearded, self-indulgent Welles served as playful emcee as he narrated about "two world leaders in fakery" -- famous Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory (Himself) - who lived on Ibiza, and his scamming biographer Clifford Irving (Himself) - who wrote a biographical book called Fake about the prolific art forger. Irving also wrote his own believable but fraudulent biography of a real person - Howard Hughes, and when found out was dubbed "Con Man of the Year" by Time Magazine. Welles opened the film with a simple statement that hinted at the 85 minute long film concluding with an odd plot twist: "Ladies and gentleman, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery and fraud, about lies. Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie, almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. No, this is a promise. During the next hour, everything you'll hear from us is really true and based on solid facts." The final segment of the film consisted of a 17-minute long dramatic retelling of how a young, sexy Croatian actress Oja Kodar (Herself, Welles' real-life girlfriend at the time of shooting), first seen in the film in a segment on girl-watching, enticed famed artist Pablo Picasso in the village of Toussaint by walking by his place during one summer in provocative beach-dress, and was soon invited in to be his mistress in exchange for ownership of the 22 nude paintings he made of her. Later, she sold fraudulent Picassos made by her painter-forger grandfather to several museums and collectors in their place, and supposedly made a fortune by selling the real paintings - although her grandfather said they had been burned. After a tense "reenactment" of an argument between Picasso and Kodar's dying grandfather (who was the accused forger), Welles - admitting that he was a charlatan himself, playfully and mischieviously reminded the audience of his earlier promise to tell the truth for only an hour, and that the concluding portion of the film was just more fakery: "At the very beginning, I - of all this, I did make you a promise. Remember? I did promise that for one hour, I'd tell you only the truth. That hour, ladies and gentlemen, is over. For the past 17 minutes, I've been lying my head off. The truth, and please forgive us for it, is that we've been forging an art story..." He then apologized to Picasso and summed up: "To the memory of that great man who will never cease to exist, I offer my apologies and wish you all, true and false, a very pleasant good evening." |      
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Fallen (1998) |
The opening voice-over ("I wanna tell you about the time I almost died...") of homicide detective John Hobbes (Denzel Washington) in this soul-transference, supernatural thriller was revealed to be not his voice, but the voice of evil spirit or fallen angel named Azazel, that could possess people's souls; most recently, Azazel (who ominously sang the Stones' song "Time is On My Side" in each new body host, and enjoyed Kellogg's Corn Flakes) had hopped from the soul of executed serial killer Reese (Elias Koteas) into other people and continued to commit similar murders; in the film's climax, possessed detective Jonesy (John Goodman) shot and killed Lieut. Stanton (Donald Sutherland), followed by Hobbes' fatal shooting of Jones (with a shot to the forehead), and his subsequent predictable possession by Azazel; in Hobbes' plan to kill both himself (by smoking a poisoned cigarette) and the demonic spirit, he had chosen an out-of-the-way remote cabin so that when he died, Azazel wouldn't be able to possess anyone else in the vicinity; however, just before his death in the snow outside of the cabin, Azazel 'jumped' into the body of a stray cat (shown from Azazel's POV), ready to inhabit another new body, and told Hobbes as he chuckled: "Oh! You forgot something, didn't you? Back at the start, I said I was going to tell you about the time I almost died. Be seeing you." |
  
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After the solving of multiple homicides, this Coen Brothers' classic ended with a satisfying epilogue between pregnant local Chief of Police Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and her loving husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch) as they watched TV in bed; she congratulated him on being the winner of the USPS oil painting competition (of a mallard duck) for the 3-cent stamp, a necessity when the postal rate is increased; they were anticipating a hopeful future, thinking about their new prospective life as a family after the birth of their child: "We're doing pretty good...Two more months..." |
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Fatal Attraction (1987) |
The film ended with a few terrorizing scenes of scorned lover Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) seeking revenge after experiencing a short fling with errant husband and successful New York publishing lawyer Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) - she made "hare stew" of his daughter Ellen's pet rabbit (named Whitly), and in the shocking and violent conclusion, Dan (seen struggling in closeup) held the hysterical woman under the water in the bathtub after she had attacked his wife Beth (Anne Archer) with a large kitchen knife in the bathroom of their home and also attacked him -- he apparently drowned her - but then she suddenly and explosively emerged still alive to repeatedly slash at him - but Beth shot her in the chest to finally end her terroristic advances. [In the film's original ending, crazed and unstable Alex committed suicide to frame former lover Dan, making it look like he had murdered her. After preview audiences objected, the ending was changed] |
    
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Femme Fatale (2002)
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Brian DePalma's erotic thriller was a prime example of a plot-twister, deliberately hinted at many times by various clues; except for the first half-hour (and the film's short concluding segment), the film with themes of voyeurism and double-identity was almost entirely a dream of the title character's nightmarish future; the film opened with a spectacularly sexy heist during the screening of the film Est-Ouest at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival; nearly-nude, sleek film model Veronica's (Rie Rasmussen) see-through gold-plated "amazing top in the shape of a serpent" was encrusted with 500 diamonds worth over 10 million dollars; blonde femme fatale Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) posed as a photographer at the event, scored to Ravel's "Bolero", and during a hot lesbian/bisexual tryst of kissing and stripping in the ladies room with Veronica, the serpentine gold-plated bodice was supposedly swapped with a fake one; the theft wasn't everything that it appeared to be, although Laure (together with partner in crime Veronica) did execute a double-cross and absconded with the jewels utilizing a bait-and-switch tactic; wearing a black wig and hiding out in Paris, Laure met up with her camouflage-wearing brunette girlfriend in Belleville (a suburb outside of Paris) in front of a church [the girlfriend was later revealed to be her partner-in-crime Veronica!] to receive instructions about where she could obtain a passport to leave the country (Room 214 at the Sheraton Hotel); outside the church, she was photographed by long-haired, in-debt Spanish paparazzo Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) from his overlooking balcony (in split-screen); in the church, she was mistaken for a missing, suicidal woman named Lily (also Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), her own look-alike doppelganger, who experienced a "terrible tragedy" (loss of husband Thierry and daughter Brigitte); Lily's parents (Irma and Louis) trailed her to the hotel - [Note: as she took the elevator up to the room, passersby later appeared in Laure's dream as major characters]; she was thrown off the multi-story balcony of her room into the hotel's inner courtyard by vengeful, double-crossed partner Racine (Edouard Montoute), but miraculously survived the fall; Lily's parents brought her to her apartment to recover, where Laure noticed her resemblance to Lily in photographs framed on the wall; while watching TV, a commentator said: "And if you could see the future in a crystal ball, or in the palm of your hand, or in a dream, would you change it?" -- a major key to the remainder of the film when Laure responded to herself: "Yep"; she found Lily's passport and plane tickets and decided to take them; at 3:33 pm (all clocks remain fixed at 3:33 pm during the next segment of the film) while she took a soothing soak in an overflowing bathtub, she fell asleep -- and the dream commenced; Laure was awakened when a distraught Lily returned and committed suicide with a gun, near a flooding aquarium (hint!); to "start a new life" and escape pursuit, Laure appropriated Lily's identity and flew to the US - conveniently meeting businessman Mr. Watts (Peter Coyote) on the plane and subsequently marrying him; seven years later, she was forced to return to France when Watts became US Ambassador to France; tabloid photographer Bardo snapped her picture as she exited her car at her new Parisian residence (the photo was printed and posted on billboards), and her second, bloodied, double-crossed partner Black Tie (Eriq Ebouaney) was released from prison after serving seven years - he joined Racine to hunt down Laure; they first caught up with brunette Veronica, who was "fencing diamonds," and threw her under a truck; Bando continued to pursue femme fatale Laure/Lily, meeting up with her in Room 214 at the Sheraton Hotel; to seek revenge against him for taking her picture, she manipulated and enticed him, first by non-chalantly stripping to her skimpy underwear in the room (he asked: "Are you flirting with me?" and she replied: "You're so damn lovable") while setting him up for two charges by the police: stealing her car, and a scheme of kidnapping for ransom aimed at her husband (at the Passerelle Debilly Bridge); however, to first have some fun, she performed a strip-teasing dance for him to arouse his angry jealousy in the basement of a sleazy bar/pool-room, before making vigorous love to him - during which time he recorded her admission of her treacherous guilt in the staging of the kidnapping plot ("I made everybody think you kidnapped me, so I could screw my husband out of 10 million bucks"); at the bridge rendezvous at 2 am, Laure/Lily killed her husband ("I was just being careful") and then wounded Bardo; she was attacked from behind by Black Tie ("F--king over everyone again, hmm, not this time!"), who threw her into the cold Seine River - where she was shocked into reality -- the dream ended; suicidal Lily entered the apartment again and this time, Laure warned Lily about killing herself and gave her a second chance to change her future - and her own ("I'm your f--king fairy godmother, and I just dreamt your future. And mine too. And all I know is, if there's a snowball's chance in hell of any of that s--t happening, we're gonna change it right here") -- she encouraged Lily to take the plane to America, and sit next to "good guy" Bruce Watts who would "fall in love" with her; Lily chose life, and hitched a ride to the airport with a truckdriver, to whom she gave a reflective glass-ball necklace to remember the man's 10 year-old daughter ("when you're on the road, your little girl will always be with you"); seven years later, once again paparazzo Bardo was asked to get a picture of the new US Ambassador to France with his three children and wife; he also photographed Laure at an outdoor cafe giving a $4 million share to girlfriend Veronica after slowly fencing off the diamonds they had stolen together; Veronica was again pursued on the street by the two double-crossed criminals, but this time, they lost their lives when a truckdriver (the one with the glass-ball necklace swinging from his rear-view mirror who was blinded momentarily with a flash of sunlight reflecting from Laure's shiny case into the piece of jewelry) veered into them and impaled them on a spiked, loading truck gate; after witnessing the accident, Bardo assisted a shaken-up Laure and asked: "Haven't we met before somewhere?" - she replied honestly: "Only in my dreams" |               
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Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) |
Malingering high school senior Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick), after skipping school to attend the Von Steuben Day parade in downtown Chicago, rushed home to get into bed to escape detection by his parents; his suspicious Dean of Students Edward Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) entered the Bueller house and was attacked by the family Rotweiler, and then humiliated when wandering in the street and picked up by a schoolbus driver (and offered a warmed-up Gummi bear); after the credits rolled, a surprised Ferris emerged from the bathroom, addressed the "fourth wall" (or movie audience) and ordered everyone to go home: "You're still here? It's over! Go home. Go!" |
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| This mystical sports film ended with the revelation that all the strange and compelling 'voices' that Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) had heard (i.e., "If you build it, he will come," "Ease his pain," and "Go the distance") were not (1) to summon the ghost of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) and fellow banned Chicago White Sox ballplayers, (2) to renew the spirit of disillusioned author Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), or (3) to give Dr. Archibald "Moonlight" Graham (Burt Lancaster) a chance to play in the majors; instead, the voices were actually Ray's own internalized desire (Ray: "It was you" Joe: "No, Ray. It was you") to allow his estranged ghostly father John (Dwier Brown) to meet his granddaughter Karin (Gaby Hoffman), and to enjoy a game of catch between father and son one more time as the sun set; the film ended with a stream of cars (and headlights) approaching the ballfield in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, signaling that Ray wouldn't lose his farm after all |
  
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Fight Club (1999) |
An unnamed "Narrator" (Edward Norton), a bored, self-help addicted, and disillusioned corporate worker, found excitement (and a cure for his insomnia) in the twilight world of a macho "Fight Club" that featured bare-knuckle boxing; there, he met violent yet charismatic rebel and soap salesman named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt); by the film's end (told in flashback), it was revealed that Durden was actually one side of the split personality-psyche of the 'Narrator's own imagination; during the explosive finale as terrorist violence escalated through activities called "Project Mayhem," Tyler threatened to blow up a dozen buildings of various major credit card companies and couldn't be subdued by the Narrator; the only way he could destroy, stop or kill "Durden" in his mind was by shooting himself in the jaw/face - he barely survived his own bloody and painful 'enlightenment' as he witnessed the destruction of various skyscrapers with girlfriend Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) at his side as he told her: "You met me at a very strange time in my life" |
   
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The Forgotten (2004)
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The film began with a grieving Brooklyn mother - a free-lance book editor named Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore) who was receiving therapy for her traumatic loss over 14 months earlier of her 9 year-old son Sam (Christopher Kovaleski), due to a plane crash. She had saved a scrapbook and other mementos until she noticed signs that her evidence of Sam's existence was slowly evaporating and disappearing (erased videotapes, and missing and doctored pictures). Then, she was being told by her husband and others, including psychiatrist Dr. Jack Munce (Gary Sinise) that Sam hadn't really existed and she should forget Sam entirely. She was diagnosed as suffering from paramnesia - her doctor told her that she never had a son (following a miscarriage), that she had "memory slips," and that she had "invented memories" of Sam. The fact that the evidence was disappearing, according to her husband Jim (Anthony Edwards), meant that she was coming back to reality, but she began to fear that the loss of her son was part of an unusual conspiracy. [The film also tried to insert doubt about her sanity with her mental lapses about a cup of coffee, the location of her parked red Volvo, and the disappearance of newspaper articles about the plane crash.] She finally convinced her neighbor, alcoholic ex-hockey player Ash Correll (Dominic West), after ripping wallpaper from one of his bedroom walls to uncover a daughter's drawings, that he also had 'forgotten' a missing daughter named Lauren (Kathryn Faughnan) - one of Sam's playmates, who was on the same plane flight with him to camp. Although he turned her into police at first, he then 'remembered' - and they both went on a hunt to find the truth - and their children ("Now how could two people remember two different children if they never existed?"). After the first half of the film - an emotional and despairing look at maternal suffering, grief, deception and sanity, the film became a sci-fi alien abduction flick (similar to The X-Files). Pursued by agents of NSA and by the police, and by a "Friendly Man" (Linus Roache) (who was invulnerable to harm and had frightening powers), they theorized that their children had been abducted. They kept asking about why they were both told: "There are no children. Forget the children." And why were the children taken? And how could they get them back? They coerced captured NSA agent Al Petalis (Lee Tergesen) to admit some sort of 'cooperation' - for survival's sake and for all of mankind - with some unknown beings, and were shockingly told: "The goddamn truth won't fit in your brain. It won't fit in anybody's brain." For some reason, it was clear that Telly had somehow overcome forces compelling her to forget, during some sort of 'alien' experiment about parental memory: "All I know is that you were supposed to forget like everybody else did." When he whispered in her ear, "They're listening" - he was whisked away and the entire house around them was demolished. The illogical, preposterous and contrived conclusion brought NY Detective Anne Pope (Alfre Woodard) together with Telly at the abandoned Long Island home of the bankrupt President of the ill-fated QuestAir, Robert Shineer (also Linus Roache), where Anne was also abruptly whipped into the sky (by an inexplicable force) after confiding with Telly that she would help her to find the children: "I believe you about everything. I've seen it. It's not human. Jesus Christ....We will find your son." And in the next scene, Ash was also whisked away after a crashing fall through a window. Just before a final showdown with the "Friendly Man," Telly learned from her knowledgeable therapist Munce, who knew about everything all along, that the 'aliens' were conducting invasive memory experiments ("They've been doing it for years. Maybe forever...We just try to minimize the damage...You've held on and they don't know why. You're just a lab rat to them"). Because Telly had never doubted, through the powerful force of her own will and faith in her son's existence, her son Sam was never forgotten, and remained a strong memory. She kept insisting on getting her son back -- when she asked the 'alien': "He's just a little boy. What could you possibly learn from him?", she was told that she was the experiment: "Nothing...It was never about the children...Your connection, mother to child. Like an invisible tissue. We can even measure its energy. But we don't fully understand it, so I posed the question: 'Can it be dissolved?' And it can. Except for you." The 'alien' again demanded for Telly to forget her son so that his experiment wouldn't fail, explaining: "I'm accountable. I can't let that happen. And time is running out." He yelled at her: "You need to forget" and shattered glass throughout the building with his powerful voice -- but she refused to cooperate, even when he choked her and observed: "You're different from the others. Why?" He compelled her to forget her son Sam: "It's better this way. You won't be haunted by his memory. You could have a life again" - he forced her to revisit her delivery day in the hospital - ("I need that first memory. Give me that first memory!") and wiped her memory clean of the birth and her first view of Sam. Although that particular memory was wiped clean, he didn't count on her remembering her earlier pregnancy as she touched her belly ("I had life inside of me. I had life. I have a child. I have a son. I have a son. His name is Sam, you son-of-a-bitch!") -- and as the 'alien' spoke: "I need more time" - he was abruptly yanked through the roof. Presumably, the alien experiment had failed. In the film's happy conclusion, Telly was reunited with her son Sam on a playground, and Lauren was also there, with Ash watching her from a nearby swing. Telly and Ash became reacquainted (Ash: "I think we met before"). Everything was restored to normal by the 'alien' life-form (was a time clock wound backwards, or was there another memory trick being played?) - and only Telly could recollect what had happened (she had fallen in love with Ash, but was still married to her husband, who at one point had entirely forgotten her!). |
         
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Frailty (2001) |
In this haunting horror-thriller, a person claiming to be Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey) confessed to Dallas FBI Agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe) that his brother Adam (Levi Kreis) (whose body was in an ambulance after he committed suicide) was the likely, self-proclaimed "God's Hand" serial killer; it was later revealed that both Adam (Jeremy Sumpter as young Adam) and Fenton (Matt O'Leary as young Fenton) had been brought up in a strictly-religious household with a delusional widowed father (Bill Paxton) who had religious visions of "God's will" that led him to enact divine retribution - to kill 'demons' that he saw in various individuals ("They may look like people on the outside, but inside...", and "We don't kill people, we destroy demons"); in the upending, contrived twist ending, there was an abrupt change in the identity of the film's narrator - it was Adam, not Fenton, who had been narrating; Adam had killed his brother Fenton, and then posing as Fenton to frame him, killed Doyle (who was justifiably regarded as a real 'demon' - a mother-murderer - and deserved to be killed) - since everyone thought that the confessor in Doyle's office was Fenton (and not Adam), Adam was able to get away with the murder (and the fuzzy security camera pictures also helped); Fenton (actually Adam) also told Doyle that after his father was killed by his brother, the job of killing demons was passed on to him |
 
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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
