Well okay, I don’t think any movie can really top Monster a Go Go where the mutated astronaut gets chased down a sewer and disappears. A telegram then says the astronaut was rescued in the ocean completely normal. The end.
But I just watched Travels with My Aunt. Contrived story of a straight laced guy traveling all over Europe with his aunt trying to raise money for his aunt’s lover’s kidnapping ransom. At the end, after endless bickering over who’s lifestyle is better, the straight laced nephew flips a coin in the air to decide whether they should live his aunt’s way or his way. The frame freezes on the coin, so you never find out. Dumb.
Or how about the more famous Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Everybody gets arrested. I think they just ran out of movie.
Any others? You can use spoiler tags if you want to. I just thought these examples were too old, too obscure, too famous for anyone to care.
The end of the theatrical release of The Abyss was pretty damn stupid. Which was a shame, because the rest of the film was good. The Special Edition ending was a lot better.
Close - they just ran out of money. There were going to be reasonably elaborate closing credits, presumably by Terry Gilliam, but the lack of money resulted in the “black screen and organ music for two minutes” ending.
I’m still annoyed by the end of Blazing Saddles, myself.
But the biggest mess-of-an-ending, how-the-hell-do-we-finish-this-film has to be the 1960s version of Casino Royale. It’s noisier and mmessier than Blazing Saddles. George Raft flipping a coin? The Frankenstein monster? Woody Allen with atomic burps?
Some people had issues with the ending*of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. I think the ending’s fine; however, the ending for Anderson’s Magnolia only confirmed that “yep, I have just wasted three hours waiting for this thing to pay off.” Ugh.
Yeah, I would put Blazing Saddles high on the list.
Regarding Casino Royale… seems like a lot of 60s comedies had moronic endings. Like Around the World in 80 Days (Robert Morley or whoever looking into the camera and saying “This is the end”).
I’ll second this. I don’t care how quintessentially British the humor is, or whatever other lame excuse you care to use. It’s like they just got bored with the movie and said “Screw it! Let’s wrap this thing up so we can go home.”
So you haven’t actually seen the movie, have you? Because if you had, you would have noticed that the ending was set up by several scenes all throughout (the professor being killed by the knight, the police investigating their murder). There were additional scenes not shot that would have further continued that line, too, so the entire thing was planned from the beginning (something that should be obvious to anyone paying attention). If the ending was dictated by running out of money, how was it they had enough money to shoot all those extra scenes?
The Mainland China ending of Infernal Affairs (the movie remade in the US as The Departed) has to be up there. In the original ending the triad mole in the police force gets away clean. This couldn’t be shown under the Mainland Chinese equivalent of the Hayes Code, which prohibited films ending with criminals unpunished, so an extremely unconvincing scene was grafted on to the end where the mole meekly surrenders to hordes of uniformed police when he steps out of the elevator.
Monty Python weren’t really known for their endings, anyway. Of the sketches in the TV series, I can only think of a few that really had any sort of a finish to them. Their humor was in the buildup, and not the punchline. Of course, Life of Brian had one of the best endings, ever.
I’ll add Le Salaire de la Peur (Wages of Fear in the U.S.). Four men with nothing to live for are offered a fortune to deliver unstable explosives over dangerous roads to an oil well fire. Only one completes the trip. Finally safe, he is driving back to collect his reward, happily swerving back and forth on a mountain road, when he goes through the guardrail and is killed. I know someone will say how existential and French it was, “doo not to tempt zee fates, yes?”, but it just came out of nowhere. I prefer the American remake, Sorcerer. The ending is equally bleak, but it is the character’s past catching up with him, not just a deus ex michelin.
The OP mentions the film adaptation of **Travels With My Aunt **which is based on a novel by Graham Greene. I’ve read a lot of Graham Greene but I somehow missed “Travels With My Aunt” so I don’t know if the film’s ending is the same as the book’s. Perhaps another Doper can fill us in.
Don’t forget that we also see the girlfriend of the driver suddenly drop dead while she’s dancing in the cafe. I realize they were going for a downer ending but, viewing it from today’s perspective, so much random tragedy is piled on that it seems like a parody.
Yeah, I found the scene on youtube to refresh my memory before writing my post. (I couldn’t remember if it was a rock slide or a tire blowout that forced Mario off the road. Neither one, actually; he was just being an idiot.) It’s not absolutely clear she’s dead; may have just fainted for some reason. However, she’s rather too well-dressed and made-up, consider the location and circumstances. The remake made the town so much more bleak and depressing; where you’d wind up if you really had to disappear.
After watching “Burn After Reading” I just asked myself WHAT THE HELL was THAT all about!? Totally senseless!
I agree about “Magnolia” and I’ll add that neither the beginning nor the ending made any sense and had NOTHING to do with the rest of the movie. The in-between parts were good though.
“No Country For Old Men” yeah that made no sense to me either.
And i forget the title here, but the David Lynch film with Robert Blake; I think it was called “Lost Highway” but I’m sure somebody here will correct me if I’m wrong.
The mist had a great ending. Well, not ‘great’ but a very memorable one.
The movie Vanishing on 7th Street had a good plot and ending to me, but a lot of people didn’t like it because it left things unresolved. To me that was a big part of the appeal.
On an unrelated note, Ink had one of the best endings I’ve seen.