Raising Caine.
Yeah, Orson Welles’. When Joseph Cotton walks past Harry Lime’s inexplicably loyal girlfriend and doesn’t get a rise out of her. That one.
The original ending of The Birds had the main characters escaping down the highway to the supposed safety of San Francisco. In the last shot of the movie, the car approaches the Golden Gate Bridge … which is covered by thousands of crows.
This scene was story-boarded but abandoned due to special effects costs and because it was considered too damn bleak.
Not a movie, but the last episode of The Sopranos.
So all you guys totally understood the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or just none of you have seen it? 
I read the books, hubby didn’t, so he was all “WTF” 
at the end of Catching Fire a few weeks ago. Sure, there was a 2-minute wrap up so it might not exactly qualify, but it did go from high-action to “come back next year for the sequel” really damn quick.:dubious:
The English Patient. I didn’t like any of the movie, but when it was over it just seemed completely pointless, aimless, and incomplete.
I read somewhere years ago that the ending was Burton’s “fuck you” to the studio. I have no idea how true that is.
I love the ending of The Day of the Triffids. The world is covered with monster plants, 90% of the people on earth are blind and the only people that know how to kill the Triffids are on a small island off the US coast.But everything is alright because seawater is the most abundant thing on earth!
The Ninth Gate! Fun movie, but the ending was a ‘wait, …what!?’ tacked onto an old fashioned wtf.
Nope, totally got it, 10 years old and watching it projected inside a planetarium with my dad. Tried drugs later (duh), but no expericence was even close.
That was supposed to be a reply to zipperjj about 2001.
Don’t do drugs, kids.
Push. It was supposed to be the first movie in a series and it ended on a cliff-hanger with a couple of unresolved plotlines. It was not advertised as such and I, along undoubtedly with a number of other audience members, were surprised by the unexpected open ending. Even more annoyingly, the movie didn’t do very well and the sequels were never made.
You know what I dislike about Barton Fink? There’s no acceleration. It starts slightly weird but steadily getting weirder, and maintains that course for the whole movie until eventually it’s really weird. But there’s no real change.
Jungle Fever. After Flipper leaves his house, after make-up sex with his wife, a teenage hooker propositions him and calls him “Daddy.” He hugs her and yells “Nooooo!” That was a real WTF moment for me.
How about the ending of Dirty Mary Crazy Larry? (yes, that link will spoil the end of the movie for you)
I don’t think so. If you read Pierre Boule’s original novel, it ends with the astronauts getting back to Earth (as in the Burton film, the “PLanet of the Apes” wasn’t Earth, which it was in the first film) a police car stops – and apes in uniforms get out. The ending of the Burton version was just a more dramatically striking version of this.
It doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense (the closest I can get is that they came back after a REALLY long time, the apes had taken over, but inexplicably kept human forms and functions in service), but then, neither did the ending of the 1968 film (and the sequels just kept digging the hole deeper). As I understand it, Boule’s novel was really supposed to be satire, not taken at all seriously (like Douglas Adams’ stuff), and should really have its title translate as the much less pretentious “Monkey Planet”.
Empire definitely qualifies - not only weren’t we used to mid-trilogy cliffhangers at the point it came out but it was all rather abrupt. I think a lot of people, myself included, had a “Wait, what? That’s it?” reaction.
I sort of hit this with Donnie Darko in that I spent a lot of the movie thinking “This is going to be cool when it all gets explained” and then suddently BAM we get to the climax of events and the aftermath and nothing is really explained at all. And not in a clever “ooo, this is ambiguous” way but more in a Lost/“we’re going to put weird shit in that we can’t explain either and pretend it’s deep and meaningful” way.
No Country for Old M
Special Report: Journey to Mars (1996). The movie just ends. You hear the astronauts talking about “What’s that over there?” and the transmission just goes to static. End of movie.