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Someday I'm going to make a movie. My movie will be a dark murder mystery of the whodunit variety and it will have the most spectacular plot twist ever. First we'll spend the whole movie establishing a realistic plot in a non fantastical world. No supernatural demonic vampire zombie shit here, folks. We're going modern day Hitchcock. Then, just when we've killed off the person you were convinced was the killer and you're freaking out because you have no idea who the killer could possibly be we will reveal that the killer is Jason from Friday the 13th. There will be no mention of Camp Crystal Lake or the Jason mythos at any point throughout the movie. He will just be the killer. Bam! Twist! In your face!!! Oh, but wait, we're not done yet. THEN the guy that just got killed off will wake up. He's not really dead and Jason Voorhees hasn't been stalking his friends. That was all just a dream he had while hiding from the real killer. And it turns out the real killer is... Bob from accounting. No, Bob from accounting is not a real character. He'll be mentioned once, early in the movie in a, "Here, take these ledgers down to Bob in accounting" way, but that's it. No one will suspect him, because no one has thought about him once in the entire course of the movie. I am clearly a cinematic genius.
Since I lack most of the things necessary to get a movie made in Hollywood (see: money, power, influence, motivation, drive, connections, dreams, etc) let's just mock the living hell out of some movies that did get the Hollywood treatment, despite suffering from some of the most poorly thought out plot twists (and sometimes the most poorly thought out plots) in the history of time. This post is full of spoilers, so consider yourselves warned. I would like to pose the argument that the true spoiler of all these films is the twist I'm about to give away to you anyway. Also, I refuse to re-watch any of these crap-tastic suckfests, and some of them I paid very little attention to the first time around, so feel free to call me out on glaring factual errors in my summaries.
10. Orphan
So let's just start with the fact that the parents in this movie are named John and Kate. That pretty much destroys the movie before it even gets the chance to suck. John and Kate have two children and are getting over the loss of what would have been their third child, who was stillborn. Kate pops pills and has overcome her alcoholism in order to be fit to adopt a child to fill that gaping hole in their lives (actual living children be damned!). They adopt Ester, a homicidal little pervert who does bad bad things.
Twist: Ester is not a child at all! She's a dwarf woman in her 30's. And the orphanage they adopted her from was actually an insane asylum!!! Cause we all know how easy it is to wander into a nuthouse by mistake when you're looking to adopt a child. Especially when you're walking around in a booze and prescription drug induced haze. And it's totally normal to walk into an orphanage and pick a child out like it was a hamster at PetCo and then bring it home that very same day. There's no reason why anything would feel the least bit off to anyone.
9. A Perfect Getaway
The Plot: Milla Jovovich and Steve Zahn are on their honeymoon taking a hike on a remote island in Hawaii. They meet up with another couple and some assholes along the way, then find out a pair of killers are on the loose and it's very likely that someone on the island is not who they claim to be.
Twist: Guys, it's totally Milla and Steve the whole time. They just kill people and then live their lives for a while. It's fun for them cause they're psychos, but since Milla is really pretty you can count on her having a smidgen of humanity and turning on Steve in the end, who is unattractive and thus just a murdering dickweed with no soul. The problem with this twist is that it's SO FUCKING OBVIOUS. The very beginning of the movie... We're talking opening credits here... Is footage of their wedding taken with a handheld camcorder. Lots of footage. We see their friends and their family. We see their hands cutting the cake. We see the back of their heads even, but we never see their faces. It's impossible not to notice. Now why, in a movie about killers pretending to be a couple they murdered, why would they take extravagent measures to make sure the face of the bride and groom were never shown in the wedding footage? I knew the twist before the movie actually started. That's just sad.
8. Surrogates
Plot: This is your typical dystopian future dreck. In this version of the future, people have stopped doing fun things and going on adventures. Instead they live their lives through surrogates, which are like cyborg people shells. They can go out and have crazy sex and jump off of buildings and stuff and they're not in real danger because if they kill their surrogate it just ends the simulation or something. I think. I was really drunk when I watched this movie. Anyway, Bruce Willis is some super important guy who created the surrogates and there's some subtext about his wife or something but I never actually caught what that whole side-story was about. Someone has found a way to shoot surrogates with some magic electro-death ray weapon that can kill the person controlling the surrogate as well, and Bruce Willis is trying to figure out who it is.
Twist: The killer is Bruce Willis!! OMG. LOLZ. He's anti-surrogates because people should be really living their lives. And the best way to get people to really live their lives is to kill them, obviously. And none of this twist made any sense whatsoever to me, but I was like two bottles of Riesling into the evening by the time it got revealed, so it may be far less confusing than I remember it. Drunk or not though, I am positive that the movie really sucked.
7. Flight Plan
Plot: Jodie Foster's husband was a super important government dude who worked on super secret airplane propulsion engines until he jumped off a building and died. Now she's on a flight with his dead body and her live six-year-old daughter, and they're on the brand new plane that he designed. They sit down and Jodie Foster falls asleep, only to awaken and find that her child has vanished. She freaks out and has the crew search the plane, but the stewardess is like, "OMG, your kid's not on the manifesto. She must be an other." And then the air marshal is all like, "Calm down ma'am while I handcuff you for being a disturbance cause I just called to check and your daughter died along with your husband." Jodie Foster escapes from him and punches in a secret code to open her husband's coffin (cause important government dudes get combination locks on their coffins) but doesn't find the body of her daughter there, so air marshal guy leads her away and tells her he'll make sure they comb the entire plane after they land.
Twist: Then air marshal runs back to the coffin to get the bomb he had hidden in there but needed Jodie's secret code to open the coffin to get it back out. Oh and the stewardess is in on it too and they tell the captain that Jodie is a terrorist and has a bomb planted and will blow everyone up unless they transfer a butt-load of money to an account. Oh and he killed her husband specifically so that he would have a casket to smuggle his bomb onto the plane with. Oh and he stole and drugged and hid her daughter so that everyone would think she was crazy, which is the most convoluted plot in the history of EVER. First and foremost, his entire evil scheme hinged around the hope that no one else on the plane would actually notice Jodie's daughter. If the kid had said hi to someone or thrown a tantrum or spilled her juicebox then all that planning (and killing a dude) was for nothing. They based an entire hijacking scheme on, "Well, I'm sure no one will notice that she has a kid and I'm sure the stewardess will be able to abscond with her while her mother sleeps without anyone noticing that either." What if the mom hadn't fallen asleep? What if she hadn't rushed to the coffin and punched in the code? What if a bomb sniffing dog had smelled those explosives through the coffin? What if this movie was so poorly thought out that I spent the entire 90 minutes yelling at my television????
6. Anger Management
Plot: Adam Sandler is a pussy who gets sentenced to anger management classes after Jack Nicholson gets him into a fight on a plane. Then the anger management teacher is actually Jack Nicholson, who spends the rest of the movie messing with Adam Sandler and being a total douche and eventually stealing his girlfriend, until Sandler snaps and stands up for himself.
Twist: It was all an elaborate plot to get Sandler to stop being such a pussy. His girlfriend asked Jack Nicholson to do it, and since people in movies have zero problem living double lives and involving all their friends (including the stewardess from the plane and the judge that sentenced Sandler and entire crowds of random others) in an attempt to teach a protaganist an important life lesson, Nicholson arranged the whole flight and sentencing and weeks upon weeks of torture as "therapy." Poor Sandler. Everyone lied to him. Everyone played along. No one had anything better to do. WTF?
5. The Stepford Wives (the re-make, not the original)
Plot: So in the original Stepford Wives all the men in the town of Stepford had their wives killed and replaced with perfect robot wives. Watching the remake it is painfully obvious that a major rewrite was done on the ending after the entire movie was already filmed, and no one thought to go back and check for continuity.
Twist: Glen Close built microchips that she surgically implanted in the wives' brains (using her robot husband to do her bidding) to control them and make them into June Cleavers. This led to happy-ending crap involving the wives having their chips removed and going on book tours to promote their memoirs about their time in Stepford. The problem here (aside from the fact that this pretty well rapes the source material) is that the first half of the movie clearly shows the wives as robots. One of them goes out of control on the dance floor and starts smoking and shooting sparks and another one gets used as an ATM by her husband. He puts his ATM card in her mouth, she swallows it, she spits up a stack of twenties, and then returns his card. Pretty sure that a mood altering brain-chip does not give you ATM abilities, yeah?
4. Saw
Plot: Two guys wake up in a dingy room. They're each chained to stuff on opposite sides and in the middle of them is a fat guy in a puddle of blood who just shot himself in the face. Through a series of over-complicated instructions and flash-backs we learn that both men are sort of dicks and that's why they're being held hostage. At the same time two cops are trying to find the missing dudes and track down "Jigsaw," the killer who sets unnecessarily elaborate traps to torture people who he thinks don't appreciate their lives.
Twist: The cops say that Jigsaw likes to set himself up with a front-row seat to watch the action unfold, and it turns out he's been lying in the middle of the room pretending to be dead and bleeding for however long this stupid movie took. Basing an elaborate torture plot on the hopes that you won't sneeze or cough or have to pee or laugh have an itch you absolutely have to scratch is just dumb. This was one of those twists where no one saw it coming because it was so incredibly stupid.
3. The Village
Plot: It's the 1800's and some people live in a village and talk funny. They can't leave the village because there are monsters in the forest, but that's okay until this retarded guy stabs this blind girl's boyfriend and she goes wandering off into the monster-infected woods in search of medicine.
Twist: OMG it's not the 1800's. Some history professors got sick of all the bad things in the world so they formed a commune which was like being Amish but with more lying, and then they just pretended it was the 1800's and didn't tell their decendants. Only a lot of the people who don't know it's all a ruse are too old to have been born on the commune, leading us to wonder if minds have been erased or something. Plus it probably would have been much easier to join an Amish community instead of LARPing to the point of insanity. And what if a plane had flown overhead or something? And why did they all have to talk and dress funny? And if the mentally challenged are stabbing people in jealous rages then is it time to admit that maybe the internet isn't responsible for everything that's wrong in your life?
2. The Passion of the Christ
Plot: God loves you and wants you to go to Heaven so he sends down his only begotten son to get his ass kicked by Romans for your sins.
Twist: So God is omnipotent, but he created mankind with the inability to live sin free lives, thus essentially damning everyone to an eternity in the firey pits of Hell. But then he gets this brilliant idea to send his son down (who is also himself) to die to sacrifice himself to himself so that he can forgive everyone for something that he was the one who decided they should go to hell for doing in the first place, even though he designed them specifically to do that thing that he was making this great sacrifice to forgive them for. Then He raised himself from the dead and told people to be nice to each other, and people took that as meaning using his name as an excuse to be dicks to each other, and somewhere along the line Mel Gibson called a cop, "Sugar-tits."
1. The Number 23
Plot: Jim Carey is a dog-catcher. Sounds like it will lead to hilarity, no? Instead it leads to brain-hemmoraging levels of stupidity. See, his wife buys him this book about the number 23 and Jim starts relating to all these things in the book that totally mirror his own life and then he gets obsessed with how lots of numbers add up to 23 or 2 or 3 because math is magical and we shouldn't look any further into it than that. The book is a memoir of a man who killed the no good cheatin' hussy he was dating and then buried her body, and then stood on a balcony deciding if he should jump, but that's where the book ends.
Twist: Jim Carey wrote the book. He killed his girlfriend and then tried to kill himself but instead he just gave himself amnesia because that's usually what happens when you jump off a balcony. Then he went to a nut-house and this doctor reads his book and publishes it and then goes all crazy about the 23 thing too and slits his own throat or something. Then we see flashback of Jim Carey being pronounced cured and walking out of the nut-house with a box of his stuff, when he bumps into his wife and they meet for the first time. So aside from forgetting about killing his girlfriend and trying to kill himself, he apparently forgot everything after that too, since he has no memory of ever having been in a psych ward. And his wife either was too dumb to question why he was walking out of a crazy house with a box of personal belongings, or she knew why he was there and bought him the book anyway because she's dangerous levels of mean/stupid/crazy. Also, there's a dog that lives forever and that never really makes any sense, but since nothing in this movie makes sense that's okay. Also, dog has three letters and two of them are constanents and two next to three makes 23. ***mind blown***
Honorable mentions:
The Life of David Gale:
I'm gonna sacrifice myself for the cause of fighting capital punishment, but then I'm gonna send a fucking video tape of proof to a journalist who would render my entire sacrifice useless should she go public with the tape. Which she just might do since she's a fucking journalist.
I Know Who Killed Me:
Lindsay Lohan is a regular high school student. Lindsay Lohan is a stripper. One of these Lindsays is getting her limbs chopped off by her crazy piano teacher and the other Lindsay is spontaneously losing limbs as a result because science is hard and no one will look up how that sort of stuff works anyway. And they're twins but didn't know cause Lindsay's mom's baby died in the delivery room and the doctor offered the dad one of a set of crack babies that had just been born in the next room and the dad was like, "sure, crack baby. Awesome. Don't tell my wife." Cause there's a secret policy in hospitals that if your baby dies you get to pick the next unwanted drug baby without any messy adoption paperwork.
Basic:
This should probably be on the actual list and it should probably be number two on that list, but it's down in honorable mentions here because I still have no idea what the fuck happened in this movie. Sam Jackson and John Travolta do some stuff but then it didn't really ever happen but then it did and then there's a flashback but the flashback was a lie and then some people die but they're not really dead but that was a lie too but it wasn't a lie cause we were just lying about lying and there's a drug sting in here somewhere I think and all the lying was to bust druglords but I don't even know if the druglords are real because there's so much lying going on that I just want everyone in the movie to get shot in the face.
Repo Men:
It was all a dream. It. Was. All. A. Fucking. Dream. Argh! This is the cinematic equivalent of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Lucy is Hollywood and Charlie Brown is all us movie goers and the football represents caring about the plot, characters, and happenings of a movie. And then they just rip the ball out from under our foot at the last second and laugh as we fall down because we never learn any better. >
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