My favorite as well. Movie, I never read the book. That ending was brilliant. Also IMO Costner’s best performance as an actor. Which sets the bar kind of low, I guess.
Witness for the Prosecution:
No, Sir Wilfred, I knew he was guilty.
I like Dame Agatha’s original version over the film Hays’ code version better.
I was only 11 or 12 when I saw this movie, and it completely knocked me for a loop.
Oh, yeah, Psycho. Do I have to mention this one?
I lived in China and saw the DVD. I think it was just that the DVD’s are very badly translated into Chinese and whoever did that one called the movie “He’s a Ghost” because they failed at translating the real title.
I wanted to mention that one, but for the I’m-a-Gonna-Kill-You twist, which really wowed me: everything we’ve done, to make it look like some burglar made off with a fortune while leaving me tied up? You’re neither tying me up nor making off with a fortune; me, I’m just a panicked homeowner pointing a gun at a burglar.
Second, X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. When the movie is coming to an end, and we see a smirking Josh Helman playing the sinister military officer who once again has our hero at his mercy, and I can assure you: nobody in the theater was cheering. And the film ends after a couple more seconds, during which we — actually, just kept watching the guy smirk, is all. But the audience went nuts.
Third, THE CONVERSATION. “He’d kill us if he got the chance.”
Excellent choice.
Charade
Actually, lots of twists in this one. But the biggest ones are that the Cary Grant charater is none of the shady characters he’s pretending to be, and that the Walter Matthau charactyer, who appears to be the Comic Relief, is actually the cold-blooded Bad Guy who’s killing everyone.
The Last of Sheila
Again, a LOT of twists in this one, but the biggest twist is that the first solution presented is completely wrong, and a different person committed the crimes for a completely different reason
Body Heat
Kathleen Turner’s character didn’t kill herself; she killed someone else and left the body in the boathopuse to be burned, then escaped herself and left William Hurt as the patsy
The Poisoned Chocolates Case – not a movie, but a classic book by Anthony Berkeley
ALL of the dozen solutions presented are wrong. The real murderer is revealed on the last page
Whodunit? – a play by Anthony Shaffer (who wrote Sleuth) that has never been filmed.
As the Inspector says, in virtually the last line of the play "This is the first case where The Butler Actually Did It! Not true, in fact, but one of the few times, certainly.
There was an old sci-fi novel, my memory says the title was something like Indigo Orchids but google doesn’t turn up anything that sounds right with that title.
At any rate, the majority of the book is taken up by the adventures of two teams of humans investigating an apparently abandoned alien city in some sort of competition to find out its secrets first. No attention is really drawn to it, but their behavior is kind of odd; for example, they are extremely callous to one another, even shrugging off the deaths of teammates as inconvenient rather than appearing sympathetic. And when one of the team leaders is cut in half his reaction is more irritation than anything else. *Then, *they accidentally blow up themselves and a big chunk of the city only to show up without explanation the next chapter, by which point it’s obvious something hinky is going on.
When the caretaker robots for the city show up and execute them with cyanide gas for the damage they’ve done, they just get back up when the gas clears and finally explain the truth.
They are actually remote controlling organic drone bodies they create and control from light years away, and their odd behavior was all due the fact that they were never really there at all. It would probably have not been as much of a surprise today, when the idea of remote controlled bodies is somewhat more common.
There’s a Jame P Hogan short story whose title I *also *don’t recall. It is about a pair of lovers who have met while using remotely controlled bodies, and eventually decide to murder their respective spouses and run away together. So they plot to poison their spouses the same evening and tell each other what they’ve done, explaining how they took advantage of the predictable habits of their spouse.
One of them comments on how they do the same thing, starts to have a moment of dawning realization…and then their remotely controlled body freezes and their partner in crime has just enough time to realize what happened before the poison takes effect. Because the lovers and the spouses *were the same people all along *and were plotting to kill each other so they could run away with each other.
Which reminds me of Fredric Brown’s *Nightmare in Yellow, *a short-short story where a man decides to murder his wife. He decides to do so on his birthday as a sort of warped birthday present, stabbing her to death as he enters his darkened house.
And* that’s* when lights come on and all the assembled birthday guests yell “SURPRISE!” before they see he’s carrying her dead body.
It’s mentioned above, but Fight Club gets special credit because it’s extra-fun to apply that same twist to other movies.
There’s some interesting stuff out there about “The Fight Club Theory of Ferris Bueller”, for example.
Outstanding choice.
My favorites are two from movies with Charlton heston:
*The Planet of the Apes *
He was on Earth all along!!!
Soylent Green
Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!
I think the Alien twist was quite brilliant, even though the fact that the movie was so successful, and projected Sigourney Weaver to fame, completely ruined the effect of the ending, so that the twist effectively no longer exists. But people like me, who saw the film in its first theatrical run got to experience its brilliance.
The quondam twist, for people born after 1977, was that the characters were killed in order of the fame of the actors who played them. Yes, in 1977, John Hurt was the most famous actor in the film-- internationally famous, and Veronica Cartwright was very well-known to 70s audiences because she’d been a prolific child actress in the 50s and 60s. She worked with Audrey Hepburn and Alfred Hitchcock. I know that post-Alien, it’s hard to imagine a world that never heard of Sigourney Weaver, but when Alien opened, no one had; in a mostly pretty famous cast, she was the only complete unknown. Seriously, her credits were a single line in a Woody Allen movie, a TV appearance, and some commercials. According to Hollywood formula, Weaver’s character should have died first and early. She was practically dyed red.
[spoiler]So when she was left alone, alive at the end, it defied all odds, and was already a bit of a mind-screw for the audience. No one believed she could be the sole survivor. I was only 11 when I saw it, but even I knew that according to formula, the hero is the famous one, and she wasn’t the famous one. So I didn’t think she was going to live; I also know it was a pretty dark film, and in films like that, the ending was usually bad. But there was just something…I was completely on the edge of my seat for that whole “T minus” sequence where Ripley is preparing to jettison the pod. Every time she made it a little further… The tension in that theater was like the air had turned to gelatin.
When the alien sprang out of its hiding place in the pod, I though, “Oh, of course, well, she’s dead.” And she wasn’t! The audience applauded like it was a live show!
And all because of that one trick of letting the unknown survive.
If if had gone the other way, and Ripley had died in the first 20 minutes, with Caligula/Timothy Evans/Richard Rich fighting the alien at the end, it would not have had half the suspense. It would have been, “Well, yes, of course.” And, I wager, not as successful. This twist was masterful.[/spoiler]
Yes, I realize I probably didn’t have to spoiler that movie, but one never knows.
Having gone into that movie knowing the twist, everything before was still extremely interesting and riveting. Really great world building for a future that seems to still be coming to pass. Kinda wish the masses knew more about it.
A friend gave me this short story: Custer at the Alamo. Basically, some time warp happens at Little Bighorn and the 7th Cavalry gets whisked back to the Alamo. He befriends Davy Crockett, settle the Travis/Bowie arguments, use their West Point educations to shore up the defenses, etc. Pretty basic “people from the future help the good guys” until
His soldiers refuse to help Custer fight the Mexicans. “We’re helping these slave owners win, Texas will secede in the future, and then re-fight them in the Civil War”
I was not expecting such a twist in basically a fan-service story.
Custer convinces them to free the slaves by telling them about… Sutters Mill.
Never mind.
From Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse 1x06, Man on the Street:
“There are three flowers in a vase…”
I not only didn’t know the twist when I saw it, but I was only about 12, so I really found it SHOCKING! I tell you! shocking!
I don’t know about top three, but three that were very effective for me were:
- There is one on LOST in its 4th episode so massive, people often forget what it was like seeing the first time. It went from twist to very common knowledge, but when I first saw the episode(night it aired), it blew me away. I’m referring to:
John Locke being in a wheel chair before he got to the island.
- I’ll add another from TV, this time from Game of Thrones. I will never forget the episode where we learn:
Hodor means Hold The Door. A flawed show in the end, but this moment is one of the most powerful I’ve seen on TV. I still tear up thinking about it.
- The Sixth Sense one is probably my last one. I saw it opening weekend when we had ZERO idea a twist was coming. The theater erupted in gasps and rapid discussions once we got to the twist. So well known now, but I was lucky to see it fresh with a fresh crowd and it is even more effective and stunning than people realize.
From Boy, Snow, Bird, a novel by Helen Oyeyemi:
A white woman marries an African-American man, who, unknown to her, is “passing” as white, along with his parents and his young daughter, who doesn’t know about this either. When the woman has a dark-skinned baby, the husband tells her that he’s passing, and makes arrangements to send the newborn to his sister, who was abandoned by her parents when she was born unable to pass. Instead, his wife insists on sending her stepdaughter to her aunt instead. Everyone in town believes that she had a baby by another man.