And the villain was holding onto a single balloon, giving plausible deniability.
The end of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings was also awful. Or should I say, endings. People watching your blockbuster should not be left with a final impression of “Why. Won’t. It. DIE!?”
I’ve mentioned this film before here as the most deus ex machina ending I know: The Bad Seed, one from the 50s. It’s not a bad movie-- at least in my memory, I haven’t seen it in a long time. The ending is so terrible that it actually makes it more interesting.
I was going to mention this one.
I heard an interview with one of the writers, and he said that one day they suddenly realized that while their writers included some great and funny film writers (Woody Allen, Terry Southern, Billy Wilder, Joseph Heller, and Peter Sellers among them), “Not ONE of us knew how to write an ending!”
I didn’t think that was the point of the end of Vanishing Point at all.
Vanishing Point was one of a handful of 70s films where the central characters were criminals, and (as with a Chinese film mentioned above), the standards of the times required that the criminals not “get away” in the end. A few brave films had the characters badly wounded, so folks could presume they rode off into the sunset to die, but the vast majority had the characters killed, often abruptly just when it appeared they were in the clear.
Although I guess the point of Vanishing Point was that Kowalski was at the end of his road; that even he knew there was really no other way for the story to end.
I disagree, but the ironic thing is, most LOTR book purists dislike the ending to ROTK because it wasn’t long ENOUGH, ie it skipped the Scouring of the Shire. You can’t please everyone. I thought it was great.
Pfffft what do actors know 
Personally, I’m of the opinion that Tolkien only ever wrote one beginning, and never wrote an ending. Of course, the one beginning he wrote was The Beginning, and he couldn’t write The End because it hasn’t happened yet.
The Fog (the 80s version). It’s over. Adrienne Barbeau and her enormous fake breasts are safe and then Hal Holbrook, playing Father Malone is stupid enough to say:
Father Malone: Why not six, Blake? Why not me?
Whereupon the dead lepers show up and drag him off to hell. Dumbest ending (and question) ever!
I remember seeing this in the theater when it came out. I was with my best friend. When the Father turns around to find the dead lepers, my friend said out loud, “He should have big red eyes!”
Whereupon the leper opened up BIG RED EYES.
We laughed our asses off.
The theatrical ending of Brazil was horrible. The hero sprouts wings and flies away. What crap.
OTOH the director’s cut is fantastic.
I’m not sure which theatrical ending you saw. There was Gilliam’s original version of the movie, which was shown in Europe. He cut a few minutes out to satisfy the contractual time limit for distribution (such as it was) in U.S. theaters; but the changes didn’t affect the ending. And while the legal squabbles were going on, Sid Sheinberg (head of Universal Studios) had his editors working on a different version with a happy ending, and many, many other changes as well. The “Love Conquers All” version, as it is known, was shown on TV at least once, but not in theaters that I’m aware of.
The days before the concept of sequels? When was this magical time?
Just before Homer wrote the Odyssey.
I didn’t see any mention of High Tension.
The writer(s) must have been counting on the audience to have forgotten crucial scenes earlier in the film by the time of the twist ending. It simply couldn’t work.
Roger Ebert said of it (something like), “They left a plot hole so big you could drive a truck through it, and then they drove a truck through it!”
135 posts and NOBODY has mentioned Dr. T and the Women?!
Richard Gere plays Dr. T, a popular and wealthy gynecologist, and the film mainly depicts all the women in his life. His secretary (Shelley Long) secretly has a crush on him. His wife (Farrah Fawcett) is in the loony bin because she was apparently treated TOO well by her family (??) and her sister (Laura Dern) is a lunatic Betty Crocker. His two daughters (Kate Hudson and Tara Reid) are bickering because one knows that the other one is actually gay (but is getting married to a man, in a lavish society wedding very soon.) Dr. T embarks on an affair with his golf pro (Helen Hunt) and suddenly…
a tornado picks him up, in his open convertible, and drops him 500 miles away, unharmed. In Mexico.
Where he is needed to deliver a baby.
Which is filmed in full documentary style. Head coming through vagina, the whole nine yards.
THE END!
I am not kidding one bit.
One just occurred to me. Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. TSitS was originally a free-standing kid’s book by T.H. White about King Arthur growing up. It’s a great read. T.H. White later rewrote it (not for the better, IMHO, although it’s still great) as the first part of his retelling of the Arthur legend, The Once and Future King, which I highly recommend. It’s been a while since I read either versuion, but IIRC, it end with Arthur pulling the titular Sword out of the Stone and being revealed as the long-hidden King.
The book takes liberties with White (as Disney always does), but the parts where Merlin transforms Arthur into various animals to learn lessons about the world are done pretty well. Once he pulls out that sword, though, they had no idea how to end the damned thing. “Blow me to Bermuda!” Merlin had yelled in despair, before the sword-pulling, and gets transformed into a rocket, his pointy wizard’s hat the hose cone, and blastys off, in a particularly non-White bit. Arthur finds himself sitting in a huge empty hall on his throne, oversized crown on his head, not knowing what to do. Every time he opens a door, his is hailed by the people, and closes the door again in fear.
Suddenlt Merlin returns from Bermuda, dressed in Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, a cap, and dark glasses (a joke that would be repeated, except with a Goofy hat, by the genie at the end of Aladdin). Arthur is understandably confused and confesses his problem to Merlin, who dismisses his fears and makes an offhand comment about television, which further confuses Arthur. (I have read that this is a take-off on a Pepsi ad from the period, but I honestly can’t recall any television ad resembling it). The camera pulls back, because apparently now that the goofily dressed and oddly out-of-touch Merlin is back everything will be all right, ending the film not vwith a bang but with a whimper.
Every time we have these threads I always feel the need to mention The Forgotten. Most of the movie has Julianne Moore searching for her missing child. Throughout the movie it begins to look like she might be losing her mind. Did her child ever actually exist in the first place? Is it an huge conspiracy?
No! Aliens!
WTF?
Did someone mention Monty Python and the Holy Grail yet? I have seen it a number of times but only once have I been lucky enough to enjoy the full ending - this was in a little artsy cinema run by a film enthusiast. All other times the copies have been cut after just a couple of seconds of organ music. BTW someone mentioned a black screen, but my recollection is a sign with the word “Intermission”.
I remember thinking “what a dumb ending”. Another terrible Disney ending was the Jungle Book. After he was rescued he suddenly sees a human girl and, with goofy grin on face, goes off with her to civilization. (They were both made in the 60s so I guess the same writers worked on both.