These are the successes with unfortunate side effects. For one reason or another, their popularity resulted in all sorts of awfulness designed to capture their spark.
Pulp Fiction - and the endless parade of pop-culture spouting hitman movies that followed.
Scream - let’s take teen horror movies and make them ALL self-referential! Because that will never get old!
The Matrix - “Someone fire Stevens. He sent me a script for a sci-fi/action movie where nobody is in trenchcoats and black leather, and there’s no wire-fu stunts.”
(Note on this last one: I heard there’s talk of another movie based on “The Phantom”, only Hollywood feels that the reason the Billy Zane 1996 movie failed was because it needed “a contemporary setting with the weapons and gizmos and ‘Matrix’-style stuff which wasn’t done in the previous film.” Sigh.)
and I’m about to add The Sixth Sense to the list. These days, a twist ending is if the film doesn’t have a twist ending.
I know of others, but I’ll let other people point them out. The movies that unwittingly spawned an unholy brood of stupid imitations.
Instead of blaming The Sixth Sense I think you need to focus on the true culprit…The Usual Suspects. This was the true kicker to the whole “twist ending” movies that have been popping up lately. The absolute worst spin off being that gawd aweful piece of shit not even deserving of a stick, Wild Things. How many fucking “twists” can one movie have? And none of them made any fucking sense to begin with. GOD that movie sucked.
Aliens can get a little shit as well. It was a great movie, and Vasquez was a wonderful character, but how many kick ass and take name women need to be in action films? It’s good to have a woman who’s not always a fucking victim in a movie, but when her entire role is to constantly show the other men in the unit she’s tougher than they are, she’s useless.
I’m sure it can be blamed on older movies from the 40’s and 50’s, but I’m going to put the modern blame on Anaconda for all the large snake movies that seem to keep popping up on the video store shelves. I haven’t bothered to pick any of them up, but I do like the fact Python is hailed as “This year’s Lake Placid.” That one may deserve at least one booze clouded viewing.
Okay, I feel bad…Anaconda is by no means a “good movie,” so I shall replace it with The Shining. It gave us the creepy kid image, which has been used successfully in some movies, but HORRIBLY fucked up in others. Also, how many fucking movies have at some point used the line “Iiiiit’s Johnny!” after that movie came out?
The best part of Anaconda is where the snake vomits up Jon Voight and his creepy eye rolls around in the socket to stare down Jennifer Lopez.
Python is one of the few Casper Van Dien movies I haven’t seen, because I’m too embarrassed to rent it.
And then there’s the classic Sssssss, starring Dirk Benedict.
What about The Silence of the Lambs? We can hold it responsible for the travesty of Hannibal and the subpar entertainment that goes by the title Red Dragon, as well as other lesser films featuring female FBI agents/cops chasing killers, like the abominable Murder By Numbers. I’m sure y’all can come up with some better examples.
Aliens also needs to answer for the hardware intensive nature of its scenes and props. Its seems like every sci-fi movie these days tries to do a pale, overblown imitation of the Colonial Marine Pulse Rifiles. Usually, the clueeles directors just say “add a dozen more barrels to that super sci-fi rifle, can’t have enough barrels!”
Worse was a TV show called “Space Rangers” (or something) that, amongst other crimes, had the Rangers running around with Guns with about 18 barrels and tubes. They were as wide as a person’s chest. Kinda unwieldy
And lets not forget that thanks to Aliens now every movie and tv monster that appears in large numbers are just like social insects whether it makes sense or not.
Alien as well is a film that’s been ripped off so often and so poorly I almost wish the original had never been made. I suspect that I could come up with fifty or sixty direct rip-offs of the movie and then there’s all those that were clearly inspired by it.
(There is a PLOT TWIST. Then there is a PLOT TWIST. Then there is a PLOT TWIST. Then there is a PLOT TWIST. Then there is a PLOT TWIST. Then there is a PLOT TWIST. Then there is a PLOT TWIST.)
THE END
(Then there is a PLOT TWIST. Then there is a PLOT TWIST. Then there is a PLOT TWIST.)
That’s an interesting post-feminist take on human reproduction. Word nowadays is that they enjoy it just as much as men do, anyway.
So yeah, the OP: I want to give a deep, booming heartfelt second to The Matrix and all the horrible things it’s done to our culture.
And I have to disagree slightly with El Elvis Rojo; although The Usual Suspects is a much better movie in almost every way, I don’t think it had nearly the impact on the industry that The Sixth Sense did. I still think that’s where the everything’s gotta have a twist ending gimmick really took off again; especially evidenced by Shaymalayan’s subsequent movies. (Note that The X-Men didn’t need a surprise ending gimmick).
What about Seven and the whole pack of movies who took the cue that music-video-editing + distorted credits + NIN music == edgy? And even more annoying, the tendency for people to do obnoxious stuff with movie titles like put spurious numbers in them, e.g. “Thir13en Ghosts” which is even more ridiculous than the ludicrous “Se7en”?
For that matter, what about Blade Runner and the fact that every distopian sci-fi future now looks exactly like a cheap knock-off of the LA in Blade Runner?
Well there were creepy kids before The Shining, in the Exorcist and in The Omen, and the title character of Rosemary’s Baby. Of course, those creepy kids were done reasonably well. Haley Joel Osmond is just irritating.
I sort of felt that Memento was trying to spoof Fight Club, the way the narrator in Memento just wouldn’t shut up when scenes were going on, just as Edward Norton was always doing the voice overs. Although I’m not sure which movie came first…they both seemed really similar in that.
I’m sure some people will disagree that The Blair Witch Project is a good movie, but regardless of what you think about it, the technique has been imitated so much that it’s hard to remember why it was ever scary. I’ve been noticing it even more now, with all the Halloween stuff out. Every TV show / bad TV movie / even commercials use the “shaky camcorder in the dark” effect. Put people in the woods at night and it’s scary!
How about The Full Monty? Thanks to them we’ve got dozens of twee British and Australian happy movies to wade through every year featuring crazy, cooky eccentrics…
Yeah. Let’s not build sets. We’ll do it in a computer.
I would hardly say that The Usual Suspects is the source of ‘the twist ending’. It may have ushered in a resurgence of them. I think The Sixth Sense has brought about the horror/suspense twist ending fad with The Ring and The Others being notable examples.
I think you guys are confusing this with another movie. My best friend has Wild Things on dvd, and we’ve watched it like 15 times, and there aren’t any plot twists. There isn’t even a plot. For those who haven’t seen it, the movie’s only like 3 minutes long, and it’s about Denise Richards and Neve Campbell making out. They make out a little. Then they take their shirts off. Then they make out some more.
I think there’s briefly some guy on screen, but I guess it’s just a key grip or something that accidentally wandered into the shot. I mentioned to my friend that the key grip (or maybe he’s a gaffer) looked kind of like Matt Damon, but he didn’t agree apparently, because he just said, “Dude shut up. Neve Campbell’s taking her shirt off.” Which when you think about it is a good point.
So it’s sort of an abstract film, I guess. There’s hardly even any dialog. It’s kind of like 2001 in that regard. I think it’s probably an allegory, because from what I understand most films are allegories.