Frightday Night Film Recommendations: Twisted Twist Endings

It’s Friday…

Ahem…I mean Frightday…

And I have some recommendations for you to enjoy this weekend…

Okay…This Frightday’s theme is…

 

Twisted Twist Endings.

 

Who do you think of when I say the words…

Twist Ending?

Is it this guy?

A guy who because of his first film, The Sixth Sense…

A thriller which boasted a well crafted plot twist…

Was labeled the next Hitchcock…

The next Spielberg…

But after a string of disappointing films…

I’ve come to two conclusions…

The first…

His recent thrillers are all twist and no plot…

And…

He is neither the next Hitchcock, nor the next Spielberg.

 

For me…

When I think of twist endings…

I think of this guy.

A guy whose television series, The Twilight Zone, was not only responsible for some of the best twist endings…

Ever…

But he was also the man who wrote the script for one of the big screen’s most famous twist endings… 

And just like with The Planet of the Apes…

For a twist ending to really work…

 

The build up…

 

The story that takes you to the twist…

 

Is just as important as the twist itself.

 

Let’s take a chronological look at the best, most twisted, and possibly even unknown to you, Movies With Twisted Twist Endings since the release of Planet of the Apes, that you may not have seen…But should.

 

Sleepaway Camp (1983) – Here’s a film that feels like a typical cheesy, low-budget, poorly acted, 80’s slasher film…And it sort of is…For a while anyway…Camp Arawak is the setting for a cornucopia of brutal slayings that cousins Ricky and Angela are trying to survive…The kills are inventive and with the bizarre methods used, the victims are met with horribly painful ends…When the twist finally comes…It’s an even scarier summer camp moment than Rudy’s hair in Meatballs.

 

April Fools Day (1986) – Hey…It’s spring break…Let’s go party in Muffy’s island mansion…What could go wrong? Well…How about everything? In this 80’s horror cult classic, a group of college friends do just that…And yes…Their friend’s name is really Muffy…In typical slasher fashion, one by one the guests are getting slaughtered or they’re vanishing…In not so typical slasher fashion…When the twist gets served up at the end…You’ll be more surprised than when you found out that the main character has the same name as your Lhasa Apso.

 

Jacob’s Ladder (1990) – Sandwiched between his classic tales of infidelity, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal…Director Adrian Lyne brought this mindbending otherworldly thriller about a man who no matter how hard he tries to stop the ride and grab hold of reality…Slides deeper and deeper into…Something else…Tim Robbins is incredible as the emotionally broken Vietman vet with what seems like a serious dissociative disorder…The horrifically macabre things that surround the man defy reality…And disturb the audience to their core…And when the curtain is pulled back to reveal the twist…

It’ll make your head spin.

 

Fallen (1998) – Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear, Frequency) directed this dark and demonic detective tale, about a New York City cop, played by Denzel Washington, who put a brutal serial killer, played by Elias Koteas on death row…The night before his execution, the killer reveals aspects of his true nature…And that’s when the film and a series of copycat murders take off…The killings lead the detective towards a chilling and disturbing ending…And leads the audience towards the twist that comes with it.

 

Session 9 (2001) – Brad Anderson, the independent filmmaker who brought such intense thrillers as The Machinist, and Transsiberian to life…Took the cast and crew of this film to a very authentic location…The Danvers State Mental Hospital is not only the birthplace of the frontal lobotomy…But it was also the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanatorium…Which later became the inspiration for Arkham Asylum in the Batman mythology…Oh yeah…And the place is reportedly totally friggin’ haunted…That being said…The director dumped his talented cast, who portray a team of workers removing asbestos from the now defunct hospital…Bizarre events and mysterious murders are plentiful here…And the twist reveals the true cause of them all.

 

Identity (2003) – To say this film boasts a great cast is an extreme understatement…You’ve got John Cusack…Ray Liotta…Amanda Peet…John Hawkes…Alfred Molina…And…Clea DuVall…And with them…The claustrophobic motel slasher flick takes off, leaving bodies and room keys in its wake…This is one of those dark and nasty thrillers that the audience can really sink its teeth into…And the twisted twist that comes at the end…Just might bite you back.

 

Saw (2004) – There’s a good chance that most of you have sat down on the edge of your seat for James Wan’s instant horror classic…But there’s some…The one’s who think that this just might be another dose of meaningless torture porn…Well…In that case…I’m talking to you. This film is gruesome…It’s bloody…It’s painful to watch…But it’s fucking brilliant…The story is crafted in an almost Hitchcockian fashion…Where the mysteries are just as valid as the gore that spurts from the screen…When the twist comes…Oh, and you will know when it does…Your ass just might fall of the edge of that seat.

 

High Tension (2005) – This French film was part of my Redneck recommendations…And yes…There are French Rednecks…This is the first film from director Alexandre Aja that I saw…And it made me a fan for life…Now with this film…The twist has been the dividing line between the two camps…Those who love the film…Absolutely love the twist…Those who hate the film…Hate it, because of the twist…Wanna guess which camp I belong to?

 

Orphan (2009) – In this film…Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard play a couple who adopt a little girl with all of the tender loving sweetness of Macaulay Culkin in The Good Son…The couple deals with the escalating problems with Esther played masterfully by Isabelle Fuhrman…And as we watch this film, they reveal so much about young Esther’s character…Her dark and disturbing behavior is not only shown to us, the audience, but to some of the cast of characters as well…But the big reveal…Oh man…When that comes…You may not want to look.

 

Final Destination 5 (2011) – I know what you’re thinking…The one about Sequels was last week…And yes…It was…But this is one of those sequels that stood out…Mainly due to the surprising twist that made me look at this film very differently after the twist was revealed…Now…Fans of the franchise have already seen this one…But if you saw the first two and loved them…But then dropped off with the third and fourth installments…This just might be the perfect film for you to watch…And it just might rekindle your love for the first two.

 

Hidden (2015) – This film was brought to us by The Duffer Brothers…They are the creators of the tantalizing new Netflix series Stranger Things which begins streaming on July 15th…This film stars Alexander Skarsgård (True Blood, The Legend of Tarzan) and Andrea Riseborough (Oblivion) as parents who have locked themselves and their precocious daughter Zoe into a bomb shelter following a cataclysmic event…The event which is pieced together slowly in a patchwork quilt of flashbacks…Reveals that a virus has infected the human race…And it just might be that this family hidden underground…Are the only living survivors…I dug this one…A lot…And the twist is a tasty one…And I didn’t see it coming.