The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Monday, August 06, 2007

Top Ten Movie Endings With A Cruel Twist

Life is complicated, messy and contingent. We are very rarely the central character in our lives (that honour usually going to our bank managers), very little happens during most of the 2nd act, the credits do not roll after our greatest victory (which was probably squeezing that girl's tit without getting slapped when we were 16), and it ends suddenly in the middle of a scene with you dead. This is why the neat, all-loose-ends-tied, happy endings of Hollywood movies are so hated. They are lies and they mock us with their rainbows.

The 1970's (the entire decade, you understand) dealt with this by leaving unresolved, ambiguous endings like that of the did he/didn't he catch him French Connection. And that's great and stuff, but they also remind us of the unfulfilling drudgery our lives ultimately consist of.

Movies are escapism too, after all, and that's kind of the point of those neat, happy endings.

So - surely the best of both worlds are the films that keep the neat, unrealistic endings, but just make them really, really bad for the hero. This list celebrates the the grand tradition of the cruel twist ending.

Huge spoilers throughout.

The Evil Dead Trilogy

Sam Raimi realised very early on with these films that the audience's enjoyment was directly linked to the amount of pain inflicted upon the hero, Ash. As such the films are filled (as pointed out in the endlessly re-listenable commentary tracks) with 'it's all right now' moments where Ash seems to have won, only to have the rug pulled out from under him as everything gets even worse.

The first film ends with Ash as the last survivor, walking out into the new day, only to get gobbled up by the 'Evil' in the final shot. the 'real' ending of the third film ends with him waking up from hibernation to a dead, post-apocalyptic world. But, for me, the best ending is part 2, where he is thrown back in time to be stuck forever in a deadite infested medieval hell. The final image starts as a hero shot of Ash towering over the frame and pulls out until he is a tiny figure lost amongst the smoke and ruins of a battlefield. The shot is actually a perfect encapsulation of the move from the male sublime to the female sublime and captures the gleeful undermining of the idea of the 'Male Hero' that the entire trilogy is thematically pinned on. But I'm usually too busy laughing at that idiot Ash to care.

Evil Dead 4 is actually one of the few geeky sequels I'd actually like to see. Those bits with 'evil' Peter Parker in Spider-Man 3 suggests that Sam still has a gleefully malevolent side and I'd love for him to take it out on Ash one last time.

John Carpenter's Entire Career

Geeky sequels I would not like to see include Escape From Earth and The Thing 2: Things. The first films were perfect as they were and, as evidenced by Escape From LA, John Carpenter does not have any more good movies in him.

The Thing ends with a good victorious explosion that kills the beastie and, in a lesser film, sorts everything out just in time for the pretty sunrise. In this film we are suddenly reminded that the survivors are stuck 100 miles from anywhere in subfreezing temperatures with no transport, power or heat. Add to that the realisation that the paranoia that anyone could be 'the thing' still hasn't been solved. Our two heroes are dead and the world is still probably doomed. My money, by the way, is on McReady being 'the thing'.

Escape From New York reverses Evil Dead's 'shit on your hero' approach by ending with Snake Plisskin shitting on the entire world just because he's in a bad mood. After the final, victorious rescue, the audience realises that the day is not saved and our anti-hero hasn't miraculously turned into a do-gooder in the final reel as per Hollywood business-as-usual. It turns out the bastard we can root for is, in fact, just a bastard. I know that Escape From LA ups the ante with Snake plunging the world into a new dark age, but it's still a shit film.

Prince Of Darkness ends with the heroine getting trapped in hell and returning as the angel of death (or something). In The Mouth Of Madness has the double twist of Sam Neill going completely mad and then having his madness become reality. And Memoirs Of An Invisible Man continues Carpenter's world-fucking theme by having Chevy Chase survive.

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)

Bloody hell but the 1978 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. And I was so excited because it had Spock in it. The unremittingly bleak and paranoid film ends with our few survivors creeping about a defeated, alien-infested world when they spot our lead hero, Donald Sutherland walking about and they say:

'Hey Donald! Nice hair! Good to know you managed to survive! I guess there is hope after all, hey? Phew!'

And he turns to them, raises an accusing finger and calls to his fellow aliens.

'AARRRRAAAGGHHRRAAAAARRGGHHH!'

He says, so proving that we are all, truly, fucked.

Don't Look Now

In the second of Donald Sutherland's appearances on this list, he plays a grieving father of a drowned girl, trying to deal with his grief by moping around Venice and doing Julie Christie.

Now I'm not a big fan of describing things as 'pretentious', mostly out of self defence, but this film is certainly very 'arty' and 'slow' and ramjam full of awfully meaningful 'Symbolism'.

The film is so full of portents of doom that the ending can hardly be described as a twist but, nonetheless, Donald becomes obsessed finding a mysterious figure he keeps seeing sporting the same red coat as his daughter did when she died. He catches up to her, she turns out to be an old woman, and she kills him with a knife. The end.

It's about the mortifying obsession of grief and how not accepting the past will ultimately lead to you not being able to live in the present and, as such, is probably a bit obvious for our subtle tastes. Hell, I bet film-buffs only made a fuss over it back then because it had a totally hot sex scene in it and, godammit, it's really pretentious. That said it kept a 12 year old me interested (if a little confused) for its entire length and I used to think A Nightmare on Elm Street was the very height of horror back then.

The Parallax View

In a rare case of a 70's film actually having an ending (fuck the Nouvelle Vague - it was just the drugs they were all taking), this Warren Beatty conspiracy thriller has him as a reporter investigating a secret organisation that trains assassins to kill politically unpopular people so as to manipulate world events in favour of the military-industrial complex. Warren finds out the secret, runs to tell the world, and gets shot in the back of the head. Warren is set up as a patsy, the bad guys win and go on to invade Iraq as often as is necessary. Tough shit Warren, liberals are losers.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

After being as suave as an Aussie ski instructor can be for two hours, George Lazenby infiltrates the baddie's hideout, fights some people and saves the day. As a reward, in the final scene he gets to marry Diana Rigg, who promptly gets shot to death by Blofeld. The end. That'll teach you for trying to be James Bond, George - what's it like being not as successful as Roger fucking Moore?

The latest Bond film, Casino Royale, pulls a similar trick while also being a really good film. The bad guy is killed, the poker game is won and the girl is saved, leading to a final romantic scene in Venice where Bond quits the service and accepts true love for the very first time. Which then goes on, and on, and on until the girl turns out to be a traitor, runs off with the money, leads Bond into a trap and then kills herself out of shame. A cruel twist for Bond, but it does mean he spends the rest of his life a bitter, emotionless sadist who gets his kicks drinking, fucking and killing. Result!

Brazil

I think I've decided that I don't like Brazil. It is an extraordinary film; visionary, unique, imaginative and bold. It is also a mess, cluttered in frame and structure, set at a constant tone of shrieking hysteria and has an undertone of spiteful misanthropy. Ultimately it is exhausting rather than satisfying. The ending is still the shit though.

After being beaten down by bureaucracy, corruption and totalitarianism the entire film, our meek hero is finally roused to rage against the system, break his chains and run off into the sunset with his terrorist girlfriend. Then he wakes up in a torture chamber run by his best mate. The last 20 minutes have merely been another of his pointless, fruitless fantasies. He is lost, and ends the film singing a half remembered tune over and over, dead eyed, as the camera pulls back from his torture chair until he is a tiny figure lost in a massive, vaulted room.

No hope; no joy; imagination and individuality provide no transcendence; we must become cogs in the machine or be destroyed by it. How depressing! And pretty rich from a guy who has, in fact, made a career out of his imagination and individuality. Hard though he had to fight, he still got the films made, and I bet he has more money than I do. Artists may be the soul of a society, but they can be whiny little bitches too. Still, great ending.

Friday The 13th

All of these sorts of movies end with the survivor drawing a sigh of relief as the sun finally rises, only for the presumed-dead killer to reappear and drag them down to hell! What a surprise!

Only they are barely twists because everyone expects them. Equally, by the third installment at the very latest, the killer has become the hero, and is basically the only character audiences care about, so his re-appearance is more like a cheer-worthy victory than a shocking downer. Plus they're all just nakedly set ups for sequels, rather than comments on the cruelty of fate.

I'll include Jason leaping out of the water, as well as Carrie's 'hand from the grave' on this list because it needs an example of the form and because they were the only ones that ever actually 'got' me.

The Graduate

You should have copped off with Anne Bancroft, you cretin. She could have made you cum for a week.

The Vanishing

For the final entry here's the coldest, bleakest, nastiest, cruelest ending of them all. Man loses girl. Man meets another man who promises to show man what happened to girl if he will just drink this cup of coffee. Man drinks coffee. Man wakes up in a coffin, six feet underground. The end.

What makes the ending hit home hardest is the uniquely low-key, matter of fact, rainy-Wednesday tone that only Northern Europeans can master. Glitzy Hollywood could never do an ending such as this, as its heroes will break out of a coffin and kill a hundred bad guys before the first reel is over. And, indeed, in the Hollywood remake, the hero not only breaks out of the coffin, he saves the girl and kills the bad guy. The film, thankfully, woke up in a coffin when the box office returns were announced.

So what are these really, really mean endings for? Schadenfreude? That works for The Evil Dead, but not for most of these other films that have really rather nice people getting shat on. Morality tales? Possibly for Don't Look Now's 'perils of ignoring Julie Christie' plot, but doesn't that make them awfully preachy and therefore unbearably dull? Surely the films aren't suggesting that this is how life really is? After all the very existence of Brazil the film makes an hypocrisy of its final lesson that all imaginative action comes to naught. Are they there to punish the audience or, worse, laugh at them for wanting the naively happy ending? And isn't catharsis just a lie perpetrated by greedy psychoanalysts? Is it all just darker-than-thou teenage posturing?

It all seems rather depressing, now that I think about it. What we really need is, I don't know, to have some films that have happy endings that are genuinely earnt. Don't you think?