What are some of your absolute favorite WHAT THE HECK???? endings from the world of movies? Preferrably the sleazier, horrific or just plain amazing---

I assume this post will contain the dreaded *SPOILERS!*

Two that come to mind immediately are;

Twitch of the Death Nerve----What was up with that ending? That "La-La-La" children's music playing after those kids kill the survivors....the movie was kind of blah, but that totally random denouement was a *WOW* and made up for it.

Death Game- THE BEST ENDING of all time, IMHO.....i love the looks on their faces when they get ran over by the ASPCA truck...!

I remember that Cemetery Man had a pretty curious ending, as well....

Your turn!

Everyone, assume that all of the posts in this spread will contain spoilers, but if you could still leave some space between the title of the film and any description of the ending, it would be appreciated by anyone who wants to read some of the spoilers, but not all of them.

I think DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY has one of the most effective final shots ever seen in a film, shocking, surprising, dramatically potent and one surely to leave you stunned for several moments.

However, for pure WTF bliss, I have to point out BLOOD DEBTS, a ridiculous action picture shot in the Philippines with American-born star Richard Harrison, a former Italian western star who found himself slumming in a slew of awful martial-arts flicks.

SPOILER

After making his way to the villain's lair, blasting and killing and shooting a huge stable of henchmen along the way, Harrison finds himself on the ground, unarmed, and the target of the villain's own gun. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, in a story turn never even hinted at, Harrison flicks his wrist, exposing a James West-like pistol out of his sleeve. Only it's not just a pistol; it's a rocket launcher, which fires a missile at the villain. The villain explodes into a zillion pieces, as the frame freezes, the theme music plays, and an absurd DRAGNET-style disclaimer reads across the screen, explaining what happens to Harrison's character in the years to come. Brilliant.

My first was Christmas, because I watched this the other night and....
SPOILER





... at the end when brandon maggert is racing around in his van and you know he is about to die but then he flies over the ledge and it turns into that sleighride and he looks thrilled/shocked and then the movie ends like a childrens fairy tale and i pick this one because i was expecting some randoom slasher movie end, definately not that. imo it is one of the best movie endings ever.

Also, i do not remember the name of this movie, so if someone does, please repost because I would like to rewatch it, but it was a Pepin/Mehri movie from the late 80s, possibly frsshkill or mayhem???, and at the end....
SPOILER



there is a huge gun battle and then when it looks like the two leads got away and the movie is about to end, a helicopter flies down and guns down the two leads and the movie ends. i remember saying "what the fuck" when i saw that.

NO question in my mind on this one:
INVASION FROM INNER EARTH takes the prize.

--SPOILERS--

Everyone I know who has seen Bill Rebane's ultra-low budget yakfest talks about its unforgettable, out-of-left-field ending, where the surviving man and woman suddenly transform into naked little children and venture into what is apparently supposed to be the Garden of Eden, inferring that they will be the progenitors of the new human race. I first caught this movie on the late show and having this finale come on at about 4:37AM after almost two straight hours of non-stop talking, unseen aliens, and zero production values made my head spin. "That's it?! THAT is the ending?!"

I love the conclusion of CHRISTMAS EVIL. It's the perfect ending for such an unusual, European-influenced horror film.

John Charles

I have seen that Pepin/Merhi flick but can't remember the name of it either. I will have to check out my collection. And Marty, how dare you label BLOOD DEBTS ridiculous! :)

As for complete WTF endings, I would have to go with the Bruce Li actioner THE IRON DRAGON STRIKES BACK.

SPOILERS

At the end of the movie, Bruce Li gets into an amazing fight with Philip Ko in a tiny HK apartment. These two literally beat the hell out of each other until Li kills Ko. Li, weathered from the fight but relieved his plight is finally over, stumbles out of the apartment building into the pouring rain to start his life a new. BAM! A sniper shoots him dead and drives off. The film ends with Li, the film's only honest character and the one you have been rooting for the entire time, dying in the street.

Also, one of the Wings Hauser PM movies (I think it is LIVING TO DIE) had a similar ending where he got away with it all, only to be shot off his motorcycle by some random hitman.

an obscure George Kenndy MGM film ZIGZAG has a WTF ending, as does a obscure Bruce Li kung fu film COBRA.

COMETOGETHER and GENTLY BEFORE SHE DIES (YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY) have similar WTF endings, both influenced I think by EASY RIDER. Or Karl Malden's sermon in POLLYANNA.

I swear to you that this scene made me laugh louder and longer than virtually any comedy I have ever seen. I watched this film (titled TERROR IN TOYLAND on my prerecord VHS) with a group of friends about this time last year. Truthfully, it didn't do much for me, beyond Maggart's strong performance and an oddly sick atmosphere around it. But when that WTF ending happened, well, I completely lost it. It goes far beyond Absurd into Unabashed WTF Territory. With a bullet. I'd like to watch the film again this Christmas, but no way could it have the same effect on me.

CHRISTMAS EVIL spoiler

-----------------------------------


In his commentary on the Troma DVD, the director mentions that, if you listen carefully, you can hear that the van crashes and Maggart's character presumably dies. The van taking flight is apparently supposed to be the character's deranged fantasy. The sound effect was apparently supposed to be more prominent in the mix, but someone messed up. Either way, it's still a great ending.

John Charles

I'd put the ending to TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION up there in WTF territory.....I even believe the last line is something like "What is going on here?!"

I always loved the bizarro ending of Argento's Opera. I know it bugs some people but wow, what a delirously insane way to end a film. I like to think of it as a segue into the themes of Phenomena.

Thanks for the explanation of the Christmas Evil ending - i'd always wondered what on earth that had all been about and I, like most others, took the ending literally. I certainly didn't pick up the sound of any car crash when I watched it on VHS several years ago !! And I like what I thought was the ending best !!

HG Lewis's "Wizard of Gore" has that incredible zen ending. I pop the disc in every now and then just to watch it.

Lamberto Bava's UNA NOTTE AL CIMITERO/GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE (1987).

My memories of this one are pretty vague, but as I recall, a group of teenagers on a shoplifting spree drive their van off the road, and take refuge in some kind of castle. After various supernatural adventures, they realize that the castle is hell (I think), and that its owner (or perhaps caretaker) is death himself.

But...

The teens manage to escape eternal damnation when one of them pulls out a hidden pocket knife and stabs death!

I was waiting for an ending which revealed that they had all died when they drove off the road at the beginning, but no. They simply escape from death by stabbing him!

Henry Hopper wrote:

"I always loved the bizarro ending of Argento's Opera. I know it bugs some people but wow, what a delirously insane way to end a film. I like to think of it as a segue into the themes of Phenomena."

Agreed - I love it too. And (to indulge in some customary shameless self-promotion) there's my analysis of OPERA and its ending over in the Archives Reclamation board, which I resurrected from the old Mobius Eurocult forum. (A warning to anyone who hasn't seen the film: this review contains the biggest spoilers possible.)

Cheers for posting the ending to Graveyard Disturbance, Brad. I only managed to sit through half of it, and now, thanks to you, I won't have to suffer the other half.

A lame ending to the most lame Italian "horror" movie ever!

William Friedkin's CRUISING - I'm never quite sure if I've understood what's happened at the end of this one. Much as I like the film, I think this uncertainty may have something to do with the film having 40 minutes hacked out of it prior to release.

oh my gosh- how can i forget the ending to Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY?!?!
THE BEYOND was pretty beyond me, as well....

love them all though, i love leaving a movie with a sense of bewilderment ---one that makes me revisit these movies over and over again.

Quite a few Fulci films! will somebody please tell me what is the problem at the end of GATES OF HELL?

No problem "getting" HOUSE BY THE CEMETARY's end-but oh man! :blink:

title? I believe THUNDERING MANTIS,a kung fu film,starts like your average martial arts comedy then turns very very downbeat with the hero becoming the bad guy. Highly recommended film btw.

Andy Milligan's MONSTROSITY.

We all know it by heart now but if you were a kid and saw BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE for the first time,you were probably messed up for weeks!

:lol: by two minutes Eric!

Actually THE BEYOND made sense to me,believe it or not!

Really, Roger? What was your interpretation?

Not a contibution to the thread really, but a response to a couple of great posts here. Spoilers ahead.

Of course, the "WTF ending" is among the richest artistic treasures to be found in lowbrow genre cinema before its conventions were co-opted and poisoned by the New Hollywood and its megabudget stupor.

TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE, which I saw again on cable's Halloween Bava fest, is an awesome film - it was years ahead of its time, and Bava turned his poverty of means (needing to shoot many scenes in almost unbroken master shots with zooms and rack focuses) into a dizzying, vertiginous visual style that is a perfect correlative to its wild and nihilistic narrative. The ending with the kids killing their parents is of course a replay of the killing of the wheelchair-bound matriarch at the beginning of the film. Also, it foreshadows similar endings in Italian gothics and giallos in the coming years, most notably in my mind FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN and CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE.

Ah, THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE. In my opinion one of the greatest horror programmers ever. A psychoanalyst would have a field day with the movie's ending and the gender anxiety on naked display here. The film's two monsters, a vengeful woman without a body possessed of piercing psychic intellect and a drooling misshapen phallic giant locked behind a closet door are, of course, lunatic imaginings of monstrous femininity and masculinity, respectively. They are mirrored in the human characters, Bill, the sociopathic scientist straight out of the grand guignol, and Doris, the scarred, embittered femme lesbian figure model, lying sedated and nude on the operating table. The scientist is murdered (eaten, actually) by his own id ("the sum total of all of [his] mistakes" says Kurt, the deformed assistant before his earlier dismemberment - a thinly disguised castration), and the re-establishment of the heterosexual couple - which has provided the ending of American horror movies from DRACULA on - consists of the pinhead mutant carrying off the drugged disfigured lesbian like a groom carrying a bride across the threshhold while the disembodied head cackles in bitchy sadistic glee.

They don't make 'em like that anymore!

OK - not a fault with the film, nor it's true ending, but it certainly caused a WTF reaction. A friend and I eagerly awaited MULHOLLAND DR. when it was releaesd theatrically (she had never seen a Lynch film - but I had her check out the trailer and she was psyched to see it after that). So we went on a Sunday afternoon of the opening weekend (it was in limited release in our city) and sat glued to the screen for the first two hours of the movie - us and maybe 8 other people in the theater. And then

*** SPOILER AHEAD ***

As soon as the blue box hit the ground the screen went black and the theater lights came up immediately. Nobody got up from theiir seats - this could NOT have been the ending of the film - or could it? About 20 mins. later after no one would leave and we were all getting quite audibly agitated that apparently no one working there even noticed it, a theater employee came in and said that the projector bulb had blown and they wouldn't be able to finish the showing - or any of the three others scheduled for that day (lame excuse) and gave the usual worthless one fres admission pass to each person in the theater. While waiting, I think everyone had the remote possibility in their mind that Lynch COULD have ended the film that abruptly, but just DIDN'T believe it. Needless to say, we were not going to be left hanging like that knowing that it wasn't the ending after the employee's spiel and had to make our way to the nearest theater playing it (like 45 mins. away) and pay again to see it (not the same chain, couldn't use the passes), but it was worth it. A lot happens really quickly after tthat blue box hits the ground - but to see the film end that way the first time was confusing to say the least, and frankly, quite jarring. Incidentally, isn't that how the pilot episode of MULHOLLAND DR. was supposed to end when it was still set to be an ABC series? I hate to say it, but I think that would've REALLY annoyed alot of television viewers if it was.

Rob's story reminds me of the time I first saw Sergio Martino's THEY'RE COMING TO GET YOU! at a drive-in. I don't know if a bulb blew, or what, but they ended the movie with the revelation that the London police department were a Satanic cult! As anyone who's seen the film knows, this is just a paranoid hallucination of the heroine's, and the movie goes on a bit longer than that.

In the early '70s, a lot of movies just ended abruptly on a downbeat note. José Larraz' film WHIRLPOOL, which I recently got to see, has got a real sucker punch of a WTF ending.

-TAXI DRIVER spoilers-





For years after my first viewing of TAXI DRIVER I was under the assumption that Travis had died in the final scene and the film ended with him pointing his bloody finger to his head. I had caught a late night cable broadcast at a friend's house when I was in high school and I guess we just changed the channel after the cops arrived.

When the film made the rounds in rerelease a few years later I was shocked to see that, not only did Travis live, but that he was viewed as a hero and Iris had moved back home with her parents. What a "happily ever after" shock!

That's STILL my interpretation of Taxi Driver! My read on it is that Travis dies and the "happy ending" is a fantasy he has while dying on the floor. I think it's logically consistent( a happy ending after all THAT?! This isn't a Spielberg film).

In the Indian movie DIL SE, after two hours of unfulfilled, tragic romance, on the morning of a massive terrorist attack, intricately planned and ready to be carried out during a military parade, the lovers at last find each other again...

Highlight below to read SPOILER:

They hug. They Explode. The End.

-- Peter

Of course, this interpretations of the denouement of TAXI DRIVER as a hallucination would be consistent with the later DeNiro / Scorsese fantasy ending in KING OF COMEDY.

Does anybody else remember the ABC SUNDAY MOVIE telecasting of TAXI DRIVER in 78 or 79 when they slapped up a disclaimer at the end stating something like "The protagonist of this film is not a hero. Our point was that in judging acts of violence terrible mistakes can be made - The Filmmakers" ?

So maybe it would have been easier for the standards and practices folks at ABC to slap up a graphic which read, "Don't you see? It's all a DREAM. He's dead, you see? He was just imagining this as he was dying! You see?"

I'm surprised no one has brought up MAD FOXES (LOS VIOLADORES). If that movie didn't have the most abrupt ending, what does?

I am reminded of the classic SCTV sketch "Hugh Betcha's Short Story Playhouse" where they premiere a lesser O. Henry tale which ends with the protagonist eaten by a lion, followed by Betcha (Joe Flahrety) angered at the arbitrariness. He then offers a dramatization of the last days of O. Henry, depicting how none of his contemporaries appreciate the lion ending either, and then Henry himself is eaten by a lion, played by Betcha.

"And the moral children: always have a justifiable ending, or else...you too could get eaten by a lion."

Sorry there,Eric I had logged off.

Afraid I will have to apologise a second time as I can't really offer a decent explanation of THE BEYOND closer as I have not seen the film since 1991! But I recall it "fitting" the story and it did not jar me like the two Fulcis previously mentioned.

Three movies with similarly bizarre endings:

THE APPLE
GREASE
REPO MAN

Any movie that ends with a car flying or descending from space earns a "WTF" in my book.

2001:A SPACE ODYSSEY must have some first-time viewers still scratching their heads. Right now I'm scratching my head over the ending of LEMORA, which I finished watching awhile ago. Well, not really. I'm actually, at the moment, wondering if I'm crazy thinking Lesley Gilb looks like Martine Beswick, with a little Sean Young from BLADE RUNNER thrown in. Or is it the other way 'round?

I think THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE tops them all. It has not one, not two but THREE WTF?!?! endings.

**spoilers**

The first WTF?!? ending happens when Elsa dies from falling off the circus net and they keep on filming her while she dies. Sure!

You think the movie ends there but no...

Second WTF?!?! ending happens right after, when the Lylah Clare film they were shooting has its premiere at the Mann's Chinese Theatre and we see the audience watching footage they shot of Elsa when she was dying being used for the actual ending of the Lylah Clare biopic. In reality, for legal and moral reasons, no one could ever use real footage of someone dying for the ending of a movie. The whole thing is so wacky, on so many levels that I won't even dwell on it.

So you think the movie finally ends after that totally ridiculous faux ending, right? Naw...

Third WTF?!?! occurs while Rosella Falk watches Peter Finch giving a live interview on TV from the Mann's Chinese Theatre and she's holding a gun (she's about to shoot herself or simply waiting for Finch's return to kill him? We never know...) and then the live TV coverage of the Lylah Clare premiere is interupted by a dog food commercial (dog eat dog world...subtle, hmm...) and the movie ends like that. That dog food commercial, which, btw, is actually credited in the opening credits of LOLC, really comes out of nowhere and leaves a bitter taste in an already messed up movie.

I still, to this day, do not understand what Aldrich was thinking when he made this really bad movie, which I LOVE so much.

While it may not be exactly the ending, I do remember being extremely puzzled by the revelation in WHO KILLED MARY WHATSERNAME? that, seemingly, a group of rich suburban white woman were meeting with this miltant black guy at a theater so that they could be verbally abused by him... or something like that....what the hell was going on there?

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
;)

To the guy who posted the explanation of the end of Christmas Evil,
Thanks, as I never knew what you wrote about, and I do not have the DVD. I have a VHS tape, under the title Christmas Evil and another under You Better Watch Out, and the car crash noise is unnoticable on both tapes. Still, I like what I thought the ending was better than what it turned out to be.

I remember a kung-fu movie from the 1970s (sorry, this is so far back in my youth that I can't remember the title anymore) that not only ended with the two villians winning against the heroes, but then shows them walking down the streets of modern-day hong-kong and getting shot up by unseen assassins.

As the picture freeze-frames, a title comes up that says the two men were "killed by some guys a few weeks later." Not "Killed by their enemies," or something a bit stylish - "Killed by some guys."

What a way to end the movie. Like Michael O'Donoghue's old joke about ending short stories with the line, "They were all hit by a bus."

Regarding TAXI DRIVER, one of my favorite films of all time...

MAJOR SPOILERS




How is it necessarily a happy ending? Although the dying fantasy concept is interesting, I find taking the ending events as truth far more compelling. The media and society at large have viewed the violence of a deluded psychopath as the actions of a brave hero. It was only chance that kept Travis from letting out his rage by assasinating Palantine and killing the pimps instead. And at the end, despite everything seeming to be calm and peaceful, with his friendly ride with Cybil Shepard, the final moment shows that Travis is still boiling and ready to pop again. I find it a very troubling ending about how violence in society is tolerated and even ignored. Perhaps not a totally unhappy ending, but certainly a very dark and ambiguous one.

And, on the subject of WTF endings.... how about POSSESSION??? I know the whole thing has a WTF aura about it, but the ending really hits me. "Don't open it! Don't open it! Don't open! Don't ooooooopen!"

oh my gosh- i remembered another one----- Macabre a.ka. Frozen Terror...I don't even want to explain the ending. If you haven't seen it---do yourself a favor and watch this!

Spoiler alert:

How about the surprise ending of DEATH SMILES ON MURDER when the detective's wife turns out to be Ewa Aulin wearing old age make-up despite the fact that she was a rotting walking corpse a few minutes ago. Cool ambiguous exchange of looks between the two and perfect freeze frame, but still, WTF?!

BTW, the endings of HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY and THE BEYOND don't need any explanation... it's all in the style and the emotional reaction. On the other hand, CITY has the most nonsensical ending I can ever remember seeing.