This is not about movies where you didn’t understand most/all of it, but movies where you pretty much follow along and may even like, but suddenly something happens that makes your jaw drop and you say “What the hell just happened?”.
Mine is the 1973 movie Hex, with Gary Busey, Keith Carradine, Dan Haggerty and Scott Glenn. It is set in a small Nebraska farm in 1919, right after World War One, when a motorcycle gang hides from the law on said farm run by two Native American sisters who exact revenge on the bikers by setting a hex on them. After a few deaths the young sisters make peace with a couple of the more decent bikers, and at the end of the film the sisters abandon the farm and ride down the road on the back of a couple of bikes…and as they go on down the road four modern fighter jets fly aver them. No explanation, no reveal at all that they are really not in 1919 Nebraska. They are driving cycles of that period, the police are driving vehicles of that period-no reveal at all.
WTF?!?
Something similar happens in Inside Llewyn Davis, which takes place in 1961: the title character is making a phone call at an elevated subway station in Queens and misses a key bit of information when a 21st-century 7 Train passes by in the background. I guess the Coen Brothers decided they had to include the train in the shot for the scene to make sense (and couldn’t rent out or simulate a 1961 model), but it’s an odd lapse in a movie that’s otherwise meticulous about historical detail.
There’s the scene in Quick Change where the characters are trying to find their way out of Brooklyn by car and pass by a San Francisco “49 Mile Scenic Drive” road sign. (It would feel less WTF-ish if the movie were otherwise going for an Airplane! or Naked Gun style of random zany sight gag comedy.)
I’ve never seen this movie, but IMDB describes it as “A group of friends who were World War I flyers ride their motorcycles across America in search of what they believe their generation lost during the war.” Perhaps suddenly ending up decades later is part of the curse, and as pilots they’d know immediately that they’re proverbially not in Kansas anymore.
In 12 Monkeys, Dr. Railly - an American character played by an American actor speaking American-accented English in a film that takes place in the United States - says “advertisement” using the British pronunciation “ad-VERT-iss-ment.”
In My Own Private Idaho, when everyone suddenly starts speaking in iambic pentameter for no obvious reason, and then they just as suddenly stop. Now, one’s man’s “WTF” is another man’s “stylistic choice”, so I’m not going to argue too much against this one.
In Magnolia, which for me, is three hours of WTF, when everyone is simultaneously singing along with the same song at different places is a WTF that didn’t seem to add anything. The rain of frogs at least has some possibility of being a religious metaphor intruding in an otherwise secular film, so maybe that one can be stylistic. maybe.
The first one that comes to my mind is 2001 a Space Odyssey. The ending is so ambiguous that I was left scratching my head. It took me reading the book to understand what it was about. Up to that point you could understand what was happening and then WTF?
I think some sort of time cocoon was involved with the curse, so years passed while the familiars were carrying out their revenge, although it seemed like days to them. When they left the ranch, they also exited the time cocoon into the “present” day. Hey, it was the 70s, maaaaan.
The Amityville Horror (the OG film, not the remake, nor one of the scores of sequels or in-universe properties).
Early in the film, as the Lutz’ are plagued by increasingly weird and increasingly sinister goings-on, a sequence that has left me baffled for 45 years takes place.
[*] Neighbor (sickly-looking and pale) shows up with beer (holding the six-pack at an incredibly awkward angle; either the actor was half-assing it or there’s some deeper meaning), keen on getting to know his new neighbors.
[*] Kathy, already harried and, thus, inattentive, is momentarily distracted and looks away.
[*] When she looks back, the neighbor is gone without a trace, and he is never mentioned again.
At a WAG, I’d say that there was originally more to the scene but it wound up on the cutting room floor.
As I recall Van Sant based the film very loosely on Shakespeare’s plays Henry plays. The dialogue in iambic pentameter may have been directly from one of those plays but I don’t recall specifically.
This is an ultra-bizarre moment at the very end of Dead or Alive (1999). Nothing in the film prepares the viewer for it. The director (Takashi Miike) used bizarre endings in some of his other movies, but none I’ve seen are at this level of outlandishness. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie with a more “WTF?!?” moment. SPOILER ALERT!
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) certainly has an unexpected ending open to broad interpretation.
Your description of the movie had me intrigued, so I searched it…
I mean, I can understand why you feel about the jets the way you do. But honestly, after reading two different plot synopsis, I feel I would have had WTFs the whole time, with the jets barely getting a mention.
