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When great twists happen to bad, bad movies.
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00:00A plot twist can either make or break a movie, pull it off and the story is all the better
00:05for it,
00:05but get it wrong and audiences can swear the film off forevermore. The art of a great plot
00:11twist can't ever be underestimated and every so often a genuinely brilliant twist will somehow
00:16find itself landing in an otherwise dud movie, near enough redeeming it in the process. With
00:23major spoilers ahead, you're watching WhatCulture and here are awesome plot twists that totally
00:28save terrible movies. Esther is dead. Orphan, First Kill. For the most part, this prequel to 2009's
00:36wonderfully unhinged horror film Orphan provides a pretty by-the-numbers origin story for psychopathic
00:43serial killer Lena Clammer, played by Isabel Furman. Also completely blindsides viewers with a wildly
00:50unexpected mid-film twist. First Kill shows Lena, a 31-year-old woman with a growth-stunting pituitary
00:58disorder, escaping from an Estonian psych ward and then posing as a missing American girl called
01:04Esther. This leads to her being quote-unquote reunited with her mother Tricia, father Alan,
01:12and brother Gunnar. And while it's fair to assume that the rest of the movie will simply play out
01:16similarly to the first with Esther turning psycho on her new family, things are a little more
01:22complicated than that. Once a detective discovers who Esther really is, she's suddenly saved by Tricia,
01:29who shoots them dead. Tricia then reveals that she knew Lena was an impostor the entire time because
01:35the real Esther was killed four years earlier during an argument with Gunnar. To protect her son,
01:40Tricia covered up Esther's death while keeping her husband totally unaware. Basically, this seemingly
01:46totally normal mother is actually a femme fatale in her own right and quite the savage match for Esther.
01:53Brahms is living in the walls of the house, The Boy. 2016 horror film The Boy centers around a woman
02:00who is hired by a wealthy elderly couple to be a nanny for their boy Brahms, a porcelain doll that
02:05serves as a surrogate for their son of the same name who perished in house fire 20 years earlier.
02:10Though audiences naturally went in expecting an entertainingly trashy killer doll movie in the
02:15vein of child's play, The Boy is actually a frustratingly tepid effort where the doll only
02:20appears to move around off-screen. But the end of the movie delivers a terrifically subversive plot
02:25twist that flips the entire scenario on its head by revealing that Brahms is actually very much alive,
02:31having survived the fire and is now living inside the walls of his family's lush mansion.
02:35He's been sneaking around and moving the doll, giving the impression that it is possessed.
02:40While the majority of the movie was a disappointingly dull affair, this bonkers expectation-defined
02:45twist brought it surging back to life for a finale in which the nanny has to fend off the real
02:50adult Brahms. Now a less thrilling twist came at the start of the sequel though, which bafflingly
02:55retconned this ending and reverted to the idea that the porcelain doll was actually possessed after
02:59all, while the flesh and blood Brahms was nowhere to be seen.
03:03Jill's husband is actually Duncan, When A Stranger Calls. 1979's When A Stranger Calls features one
03:10of the most terrifying openings in horror movie history, playing on the legend of the babysitter
03:16and the man upstairs in what is honestly a masterstroke of suspense from director Fred Walton.
03:22The film actually remade and expanded upon the director's 1977 short film, The Sitter. Sadly,
03:28the rest of the material is found extremely wanting, as the story devolves into a maudlin array of
03:35sequences of a private detective tracking down the recently escaped perpetrator of the opening
03:40crime. That said, When A Stranger Calls does come full circle enough to nearly justify the extended
03:46story, featuring an end-act twist that rivals the opening in terms of creepy abruptness. Having
03:53escaped his pursuers, killer Kurt Duncan tracks down Jill, played by Carol Kane, the babysitter
03:59he originally stalked and harassed all those years ago. We're initially led to believe that Duncan is
04:05targeting Jill's kids, but the police arrive and find nothing suspicious. Meanwhile, the private
04:11investigator we've been following, John Clifford, tries desperately to reach Jill, only to discover
04:17that the phone lines have been cut. Then, at night, while everyone is asleep, Jill hears Duncan's
04:23voice from within her own bedroom. The closet door is jarred slightly open, leading us to believe
04:29that Duncan is hiding in there. But, psych, he's actually dressed as Jill's husband and he's been
04:36lying in bed with her this entire time. It's a real zinger of a twist, with Clifford managing to make
04:42it
04:42into the room to kill Duncan before he can do any harm. Just a shame that the middle third had
04:47to
04:47be so bad.
04:48Evan kills himself in the womb. The Butterfly Effect, Director's Cut
04:52The Butterfly Effect is certainly an interesting movie, but a fundamentally incoherent one, in which
04:58Evan discovers that he can travel back in time to inhabit the body of his younger self, while hoping
05:02that he can change his troubled future for the better. Despite its ambitious concept, the movie is full of
05:08timey-wimey plot holes and inconsistencies, which ruin most of the fun. It's an over-sentimental
05:13mess of a movie, but with some intriguing ideas, though achieves an inspired transcendence in its
05:19categorically insane original ending, which was restored for the film's director's cut on home
05:23video. In this ending, Evan realizes that his time-hopping shenanigans have ruined the lives of
05:29basically everybody he cares about, and so travels back to when he was a baby in the womb, where he
05:34strangles himself with his own umbilical cord. By dying, Evan negates his negative impact on the
05:40timeline and ensures those around him have more favourable and hopeful futures.
05:44Caroline gets trapped in Violet's body, the skeleton key. The film follows hospice nurse
05:50Caroline Ellis, played by Kate Hudson, who takes a job at an isolated plantation house in Louisiana
05:56to help Violet Devereaux care for her ailing husband Benjamin, played by John Heard.
06:02Plenty of low-energy spooky shenanigans ensue, with the audience being led to believe that Violet is
06:08plotting to sacrifice Ben and Caroline to grant herself eternal life. Quite, though. It turns out
06:14that Violet and Ben are actually former slaves who have been using a ritual to swap bodies with younger
06:20folks they invite into their home. The reason for Ben's condition is that Violet recently body-swapped
06:27him with the family's young lawyer, Luke, played by Peter Skarsgård, who is naturally terrified at
06:32having been swapped into an elderly man's body. In the end, Violet also swaps her own body with Caroline
06:38and beats her a potion-inducing stroke-like paralysis, leaving her unable to fight back or alert
06:45anyone to what's happened. EMS then show up to take Caroline, who is in Violet's body, and Luke,
06:52in Ben's body, away, while Violet and Ben, now in the bodies of Caroline and Luke, pretend that they
06:59inherited the house from them, allowing them to keep living there. It's one hell of a savage ending in
07:05a movie that is otherwise just completely forgettable.
07:09Dr. Gordon is Jigsaw's accomplice. Saw, The Final Chapter
07:13There's a strong argument to be made that the seventh Saw movie, ill-advisedly dubbed The Final
07:18Chapter, is the worst of the entire nine-movie series. By this point in the franchise, the Saw
07:23formula felt pretty played out. The traps had lost their grimly imaginative sheen, the storytelling had
07:29reached a melodramatic critical mess, and even the twists weren't as daftly impactful as they once were.
07:35But The Final Chapter was at least smart enough to pull the trigger on a long-held fan theory that
07:40many had lost hope of ever coming true, that one of Jigsaw's victims from the original movie,
07:44Dr. Lawrence Gordon, would be revealed to be one of his accomplices. Gordon famously went
07:49missing at the end of the first film after sawing off his own foot and escaping Jigsaw's grotty
07:54bathroom, with fans then speculating about his fate ever since. The Final Chapter brought Gordon back
07:59into the fold by having him appear at a Jigsaw Survivor's support group, and at the film's end,
08:04we learn that he's actually been nursed back to health by Jigsaw, and has also been given a
08:09mission. And what is that mission? And that is to take down the new Jigsaw, Detective Hoffman,
08:13in the event that anything happened to Jigsaw's ex-wife Jill. After Jill was killed by Hoffman,
08:18Gordon sprang into action. And so the movie ends with Gordon kidnapping Hoffman and locking him away
08:24in Jigsaw's bathroom, leaving him to die with the satisfyingly smug one-liner, Game Over.
08:29It's all a simulation, but the curse is real. Ghosts of War. It was all a dream! Twists are
08:37pretty played out these days, and certainly sound lame on paper. Within the context of a war film,
08:43it's actually a pretty interesting idea, especially when it comes so out of left field. Ghosts of War
08:49takes place in France in World War II, where a squad of five American soldiers are tasked with guarding a
08:55chateau, which they soon come to believe is haunted by a malevolent supernatural presence. During a
09:02ghostly attack later on, protagonist Chris, played by Brenton Thwaites, wakes up in a brightly lit
09:08room with a group of doctors watching him. Well, this isn't Assassin's Creed. As it turns out,
09:13he and the other soldiers have been hooked up to a simulation resembling World War II in an attempt
09:19to help them recover from PTSD. Chris and his squad mates are modern American soldiers who were
09:25critically wounded while fighting in Afghanistan, but there's more. The surviving member of the
09:30family the soldiers failed to protect in Afghanistan cursed them moments before detonating the suicide
09:35vest which injured them all. And the curse turns out to be very real. Turns out the curse itself has
09:41caused the simulation to be haunted by the ghosts of the fallen family members. And so Chris vows to
09:47re-enter the simulation in order to make peace with them. However, just as he plans to do that,
09:54the machine running the simulation wipes his memory, forcing him to relive the whole scenario
10:00with no knowledge of these shocking revelations.
10:03Remy is actually in a coma. Repo Man. Now, sci-fi action flick Repo Man is a mostly forgettable feature
10:10film, but at least offers up one of the few worthwhile variations on a massively overused type of plot twist.
10:16You see, Remy and partner Jake are two of the titular Repo Men, whose work involves reclaiming
10:22replacement organs from clients who default on their payments, in turn killing them. It's a neat
10:27premise that nevertheless is filtered through the prism of a generic, largely unimaginative sci-fi
10:32flick that, save for its wild twist ending, is mostly forgotten. Yet the film does strike
10:37gold late in the day, when Remy has an expected change of heart and seemingly conquers the organ debt
10:42trade that he was himself a part of, ending up on a tropical beach as a reward for his efforts.
10:47But the big twist reveals that, when Remy and Jake got into a fight earlier on in the movie and
10:51Remy was not unconscious, he received traumatic brain damage and is now in a coma. Remy's beach
10:56getaway is actually a dream world that his brain was hooked up to by a guilt-ridden Jake, allowing him
11:01to live out his life in seemingly able-minded bliss inside this virtual construct.
11:06The plane is another escape room. Escape Room Tournament of Champions.
11:11Escape Room Tournament of Champions is, just like its predecessor,
11:15a disappointingly tame PG-13 horror flick, further weakened by atrociously dumb writing.
11:22But its wild twist ending finally sees the film settling into the more self-aware,
11:27freewheeling tone it should have had all along. While the reveal itself is actually quite predictable,
11:33it proves that this need not be a bad thing when it's actually just really fun.
11:37At the film's end, Zoe, played by Taylor Russell, Ben, Logan Miller and Amanda, played by Daredevil's
11:43Deborah Ann Wall, finally manage to escape Minos' deadly facility and notify the police about
11:48their deadly escape rooms, bringing Minos' activities into the public eye. A victory for
11:54the trio it seems then, except when Zoe decides to get over a fear of flying and Boards are playing
12:00with Ben. It's soon enough revealed to be just another escape room, as we saw Minos testing out
12:06at the end of the first movie. Sure, it felt like the most logical of cliffhanger endings, but it was
12:11also so delightfully ridiculous that it perhaps made even non-fans mildly intrigued to see where a
12:18third film suck it. The Curse Goes Viral Truth or Dare
12:21Now, Truth or Dare is a deeply awful horror film in which a supernaturally cursed version of a game
12:27causes its participants to end up dead one way or another. The movie's script is dumb as a brick,
12:33full of nonsensical plotting without much in the way of internal logic, hilariously wooden dialogue,
12:38poor performances, and unintentionally slapstick-worthy death scenes. But the screenplay gets at least one
12:44thing right, and that is its ending. While we as an audience are conditioned to expect that the
12:48protagonist Olivia will find a way to prevail over the demonic game, she ultimately realizes the only
12:53way to survive is to actually prolong it, and that means to invite more people to join. And so,
12:59Truth or Dare climaxes with a twist where she uploads a video to YouTube inviting viewers to play,
13:04effectively making the game go viral and buying her and her friend a ton of time before the curse
13:10returns to them. For a horror movie hero to do something so selfish and decidedly unheroic in
13:15the final stretch was a genuine surprise, especially as earlier on in the film Olivia made a comment
13:21about how she'd choose to save humanity over herself in a disaster scenario, but alas, the truth came out
13:26in the end. Kirstie traded her husband to Pinhead, Hellraiser Hellseeker. The sixth Hellraiser film
13:33admittedly has few fans, with even the return of franchise heroine Kirstie Cotton,
13:39Ashley Lawrence, giving it much juice. Hellseeker does manage to slightly compensate for its
13:44risable filmmaking and scant runtime afforded to Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley, with its climactic
13:50twist. It's eventually revealed that philandering protagonist Trevor, Dean Winters, has been
13:55scheming to kill his wife Kirstie by making her open the Laman Configuration puzzle box once again.
14:01When Kirstie opened it, she instead made a deal with Pinhead, agreeing to trade her husband and four
14:07additional souls to him in exchange for her own freedom. The four other souls end up being three
14:13of Trevor's extramarital partners and a friend who was helping him plot Kirstie's murder, each of whom
14:19Kirstie murders while framing Trevor as the killer. Trevor then realises that the car crash he was
14:24involved in at the start of the movie was caused by Kirstie shooting him in the head, and he's been
14:29residing in a hellish limbo ever since. Talk about tearing your soul apart.
14:35Hartley is a secret conman, Red Notice. Red Notice was an attempt by Netflix to deliver their own
14:41blockbuster-sized movie to home audiences, complete with loony action sequences and an all-star cast.
14:47It is ultimately, though, pure white noise of a movie, something to casually eye up while doing the
14:51household chores and which might generate the occasional laugh, but is a mostly soulless action-adventure film
14:57that feels like it was generated by a bloody algorithm. The mind-numbingly generic plot does
15:02at least make some entertainingly absurd twists at the end, though, when it's revealed that the
15:06straight-laced FBI agent John Hartley, played by Dwayne Johnson, was actually in on the focal
15:11bejeweled egg heist all along. More to the point, Hartley was in league with Master Thief the Bishop,
15:17with the pair being both romantic and professional partners who teamed up to pull off the job.
15:21It doesn't make a ton of sense if you break the movie down and examine every fragment of what
15:26passes for a story here, but the commitment to such a silly gotcha moment is to be commended,
15:31and in turn ensures that the already announced sequel will have a different dynamic between
15:35its three central characters. Ashley and Nick were the masterminds.
15:39Reindeer Games For those who haven't seen Reindeer
15:43Games, the film follows ex-convict Rudy Duncan, played by Ben Affleck, who ends up forced to help a
15:48band of thieves over a casino upon fear of death, while posing as his former prison mate Nick Cassidy,
15:54who was killed in jail. But it's eventually revealed that Nick didn't actually die in prison,
16:03and instead faked his own death and has been in league with Rudy's love interest Ashley,
16:07Charlize Theron, whose real name is Millie, to set Rudy up. Before they can kill him though,
16:14Rudy manages to turn the tables and off them both. It's an amusingly ridiculous twist coming at the end
16:19of an otherwise totally ho-hum flick. The best friend was a ghost the entire time. Safe Haven.
16:25Up until its final two minutes, Safe Haven is exactly what everybody expected from your typical
16:30Nicholas Sparks adaptation, a hokey, cornball romantic melodrama filled with questionable
16:35acting and embarrassingly chintzy dialogue. You see, the bulk of the film is focused on a woman
16:40called Erin, who flees her abusive past and soon gets smitten with a charming local widower called
16:45Alex. Throughout the film, Erin hangs out with her neighbour Joe, but in the brilliantly unhinged
16:50final two minutes, it's revealed that Joe was actually a ghost the entire time.
16:55More to the point, Joe is actually Carly, Alex's dead wife who has been watching over them and
17:00encouraging their relationship throughout the story. It's a thrilling ending to an otherwise cheesy
17:06romantic drama, and given how drastically the reveal changes the entire context of the story,
17:10it makes a second viewing seem genuinely worthwhile. Tom is actually guilty. High crimes. Of Ashley
17:18Judd and Morgan Freeman's surprisingly large number of collaborations over the years, perhaps the
17:24silliest is High Crimes. Judd stars as Claire Kubik, whose husband Tom is arrested by the FBI for
17:31apparently taking part in a military op in El Salvador, which resulted in the deaths of nine unarmed
17:38civilians. Tom claims he was there, but that he didn't take part in the killings, and from early
17:43on, audiences are basically primed to expect an aggressively conventional conspiracy thriller in
17:49which Tom is being framed by another party. It all seems incredibly cut and dried. That is, until the
17:56genuinely surprising penny drops, when Tom tells his wife that he did indeed commit the murders, and even
18:03had witnesses killed in an attempt to cover it up. Sure enough, it leads to another typical finale where
18:09Tom attempts to kill Claire, resulting in her killing him, but for a few minutes, things actually got
18:15exciting and interesting. Donnie was the real criminal mastermind, Den of Thieves.
18:20Den of Thieves is a superficially passable heist film, albeit one rendered rather tedious and exhausting
18:25due to its brutal 140-minute runtime, ensuring that a potentially breezy crime thriller is elongated
18:31out with self-important subplots and masses of unearned character development drama. Yet this film does
18:37have a frankly delicious ace up its sleeve, which ties together the entire movie in a satisfyingly ridiculous
18:42way. And that's when we learn that low-key getaway driver Donnie isn't quite the hapless everyman that
18:48we've been led to believe. The movie ends with a giddy homage to the usual suspects, as Detective Nick
18:53discovers that Donnie was actually the heist's criminal mastermind all along. Donnie worked his
18:58unassuming job as a bartender at a bar frequented by Federal Reserve employees to grift information about
19:03the Reserve's vaults, allowing him to plan the heist and get away with the money undetected. And as a cherry
19:09on top,
19:09the final scene shows Donnie now working at a pub in London situated next to a diamond exchange.
19:15Aces is Sparazza's son, and Mesna pulls the plug. Smokin' Aces.
19:20Smokin' Aces is the cinematic equivalent of spending 109 minutes with someone buzzing obnoxiously off
19:26illicit substances while you're sat in the corner, sober as a judge. It's got a great cast and has boundless
19:32energy, but is ultimately just a bit annoying. The film is centered around Vegas musician buddy Aces Israel,
19:38played by Jeremy Piven, who has become a mafia informant for the FBI, prompting mob boss Primo
19:44Sparazza, Joseph Ruskin, to place a 1 million dollar bounty, anyone who can kill him and bring
19:50him his heart. Lots of loud grating mayhem ensues over the next 90 minutes, but all the truth is
19:56revealed to FBI agent Mesna, played by Ryan Reynolds. In fact, Israel is Sparazza's illegitimate son, and the
20:03FBI wishes for an ailing Sparazza to receive his son's heart so they can continue to drill him for
20:09information. Oh, and Sparazza himself is also a former undercover FBI agent who decided to become
20:15Sparazza for real after the FBI tried to have him assassinated for getting too deep into his cover.
20:23The final twist then sees Mesna infuriated at seeing his fellow agents die for a mob boss decide to
20:30lock himself in the operating room and pull the plug on both Israel and Sparazza's life support,
20:36killing them while FBI head honcho Loc, Andy Garcia, tries to break in. This is like some Twilight Zone
20:43Outer Limits stuff right here.
20:46Gabriel is Madison's parasitic twin, Malignant, a seemingly generic supernatural horror film,
20:52albeit one harboring a most brilliantly unhinged plot twist. The bulk of the movie revolves around
20:57Madison, a woman who believes that she's being stalked by Gabriel, her childhood imaginary friend,
21:01who is inexplicably manifesting in the real world as a cloaked serial killer. But Malignant transforms
21:07into something else entirely with its absolutely bizarre third-act reveal, and that is that Gabriel is
21:12actually Madison's parasitic twin. While most of Gabriel was surgically removed in Madison's youth,
21:17a vestigial part remains connected to her brain, and so the cloaked mysterious figure we've seen
21:23doing all of the killings throughout the film is actually Madison as possessed by Gabriel,
21:27with his jerky body movements a result of Gabriel operating Madison's body backwards.
21:32Were it not for this big reveal, Malignant would have been forgotten within a week, but now it is
21:37destined to live on as a ridiculous cult classic for years and perhaps even decades.
21:42Everyone's still alive, and Hardy isn't a DEA agent.
21:47Basic. Basic revolves around DEA agent Tom Hardy, played by John Travolta, who investigates the
21:53mystery of a barge military training exercise at an army base in Panama, which has left numerous
21:58soldiers either dead or missing. Hardy probes the survivors for their accounts of what happened.
22:04Hardy isn't a DEA agent, but the colonel of a covert black ops anti-drug unit called Section A.
22:11Moreover, he's been in league with the dead and missing men who aren't actually alive,
22:16including unit leader Sergeant West, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Their goal all along?
22:21To shut down cocaine trafficking in the base, eliminate the soldiers responsible,
22:25and safely exfiltrate West by faking his death.
22:28The moon was built by ancient humans. Moonfall
22:31There's a strong argument to be made that Moonfall is the worst major release of 2022,
22:36a shambolically stupid sci-fi disaster film from the man who actually popularized the genre to
22:42modern audiences, Roland Emmerich. The film chronicles humanity's existence being threatened
22:46by the moon itself, which appears to be falling out of orbit and heading towards Earth. The trailers
22:51ended up spoiling what appeared to be the movie's big twist, that an alien entity is actually residing on
22:56the moon and is responsible for its destabilized gravity. However, the director actually has an
23:01altogether nuttier rogue pull in store for audiences, as the third act reveals that the
23:05moon was actually a megastructure created billions of years ago by humanity's ancestors,
23:10a technologically advanced race far beyond present-day humans. The moon was built to serve
23:16as an arc for their kind, after an AI they created went rogue and attempted to wipe them out,
23:20that AI being the extraterrestrial entity on the moon throughout the film.
23:25As if that isn't insane enough, Moonfall then climaxes with eccentric conspiracy theorist K.C.
23:31Houseman sacrificing himself to destroy the rogue AI, after which it's been revealed that his
23:36consciousness has been replicated by the moon's benign AI operating system allowing him to live on.