MAJOR spoilers below:
There is one example at least of a movie where the device is used where not only does it not ruin the film, but I was actually glad it happened, because otherwise our hero, Edward G. Robinson, is fucked. Directed by the genius Fritz Lang, The Woman in the Window is worth catching on TCM- one of his best, though highly obscure.
Not so obscure as to be mentioned in the original post.
Another case where It All Happened in His Mind was the original silent the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. One of the people wjho hated this was the director himself, who had this “resolution” thrust unwanted upon him by the studio.
I’m an idiot :smack:
Maybe we’re all just dreaming that you’re an idiot.
Loved it :D. Would have adored it, if it had been the finale. But by then I was growing a little annoyed both with the show AND some of its more overamped fans ( of which I knew many ), so that may have colored my reaction ;).
Based on my Wikipedia research, isn’t that girl
Buffy herself?
Yeah, but I wanted to be subtle w/o having to resort to
spoiler boxes.
I would’ve been so pissed off it would’ve immediately (and likely, forever) replaced the X-Files final episode as “Worst Final Episode Ever, And I Mean EVER!”
I’ve posted this before, but you brought it up…
Not that it would have been a good movie with a different ending, but I proffer Boxing Helena. It had an original premise which lead to an unexpected, if abhorrent, conclusion when, BAM! It’s just a dream and your antagonist is just a pitiful piece of crap with a disgusting fantasy life.
If you want to make a morally repugnant movie, at least have the stones to stick to your guns.
I’ve watched Brazil several times, and I think you can pinpoint the moment pretty precisely.
Reality ends when the head of Jack Lint (Michael Palin) explodes. Everything from that event to the moment we come back to the torture chamber — where we see Lint was never really shot, and Sam never really rescued — is part of Sam’s catatonic dream.
Terry Gilliam also vouches for this interpretation in the DVD commentary. He apparently got this question often enough to want to settle the matter.
Of course, it’s only a movie, so we’re free to interpret it as we wish — especially a surreal one like this. On the Web, I’ve seen people try to argue, seriously, that most of the movie is just a dream experienced by Mr. Tuttle, the poor schmo who’s mistakenly arrested at the beginning.
Who can argue against that interpretation? Except perhaps to say: it completely ruins the film! Are you on crack?!
The movie ending of The Wizard of Oz was parodied in “A Fistfull of Yen”, one of the skits in Kentucky Fried Movie. Even given that the whole skit was farcical, people booed in the theater.
Not a dream as such but Deep Space Nine had two episodes in which Cisco either hallucinated or experienced an alternate reality where he was a science-fiction writer in the 1950s and the whole premise of the show was an unpublished novel of his. It even left open the possibility that this was reality and the mainstream of the series the hallucination.
Just occurred to me – wasn’t the recent episode of “Smallville”, in which Clark was a patient in Bellville, a really close rip-off of that particular “Buffy” episode? (Though the basic idea, of course, has been used many times over many years.)
One of the truly bad low-budget movies they showed on MST3K ended with, not a dream exactly, but a fade-to-black and then a spontaneous rearrangement of reality, explained by a very serious voiceover.
A more contemporaneous (possible) rip-off was in an episode of Charmed, where Piper was psyched into thinking that her witchy ways were all a delusion. Aired in the same season as the Buffy episode, within a few weeks of each other.
I remember a bad night when all three of the movies I had rented turned out to end that way!
Soul Survivors, Carnival of Souls and Campfire Tales – and they were all the Jacob’s Ladder style
There’s also at least one of the movies based upon the old horror comic book style stories, but considering the source material and so forth that’s to be expected.
The soap opera Passions is egregiously guilty of misleading with daydreams. There was an episode of Enterprise that I loathed: a character has a vivid dream while beaming aboard the ship which becomes an occasion for her to discover her courage, but this solipsist plot has no effect on anyone else.
I prefer stories that leave it up to the audience to decide if it was a dream, such as Tim Matheson’s Bid Time Return, the basis for the movie Somewhere in Time. I include The Wizard of Oz in this category because, as a child, I was not convinced that Dorothy hadn’t been to Oz (and also because I had read the books).
Futurama’s episode “The Sting” is consistently rated as one of the series’ best, and it was all just a dream. And dreams within dreams, so that you don’t know what’s reality and what’s not until the very end (at the time, I really believed the royal jelly/DNA combo was how they were going to bring Fry back). My favorite ST:TNG episode, “Frame of Mind”, also uses the “It was all just a dream” idea quite effectively.
I think in both cases, though, it becomes (eventually) obvious that something is pretty screwy with reality and that it could all be a dream, but the question then becomes what is a dream and what isn’t, and more importantly, why is this dream happening?
I also think that Identity used the concept in a fairly clever fashion.
Since this is the SDMB (populated by some very cultured, worldly and intelligent folks), I’m surprised no one has mentioned the term for this plot device - deus ex machina - a Latin term which literally translates into “god from a machine”. In Greek tragedies an irresolvable situation was brought to a conclusion by a god (or goddess) descending onto the stage (by means of a crane) and setting everything right.
As everyone has mentioned, writers have never lost sight of this cheap plot device -
it was all a dream;
the characters are dead but don’t realize it til the end; or
the characters think they are dead but the conclusion has them being alive with a bright new outlook on life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc.
I thought it would be easy to find a link that would explain deus ex machina in greater detail but this is the best I could find:
Oh and Otto, haven’t you heard of a spolier box? I had always wanted to see “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla”, and now you have ruined it for me. 
Hey, it says “spoilers” right in the thread title. Venture inside a spoiler thread at your own risk.
I think the dream ending, while most often trite and indicative of a lazy author, can be done well. Skott’s example of “The Sting” is a good one: After Fry dies after throwing himself between her and the stinger of a giant space wasp, Leela’s experiences get stranger and stranger, with a recurring, increasing sensations of guilt and loss. Each ever-stranger delusion is halted by Fry telling her to wake up, and when she finally does, it is to find that she suffered the poison and has been languishing in a coma.
That episode might be partly a tribute to one of the most disturbing and wonderful stories ever to use the dream trope: Philip K Dick’s “I hope I shall Arrive Soon.” (I must respectfully disagree with CalMeachem: I find Philip K Dick enchanting; a close second to Borges). In that story, the suspended animation unit malfunctions for a traveler on a ten-year interstellar voyage. The ship’s computer uses the man’s memories to make dream sequences for him to keep him from going mad. But each sequence becomes a nightmare of guilt and loss over the memory of a girl in a red dress, and the computer aborts each sequence in turn, until finally the computer decides to play its trump card: a dream of their arrival at the destination planet. This, too, goes bad, and when (if?) they actually arrive, the man cannot shake the horror of his profound existential uncertainty and is, after all, quite mad.
I suppose I’ve gone a bit far afield. Sorry for the semi-hijack.