The final question in Kill Bill vol. 1, where Sofie Fatale is asked, by Bill:
Does she know… her daughter is still alive?
So totally didn’t see that coming and, after seeing it on the theater screen, made me want to see KB vol. 2 NOW!!!
Wow…this thread has made me realise that I’ve never actually seen a movie with a twist that I hadn’t found out about beforehand!
I remember when The Sixth Sense was still in theaters, I was watching Craig Kilborne one night and he completely spoiled the ending. He literally said about the movie, “Bruce Willis is dead” with no warning or anything. The movie was still in theaters. I’ve never forgiven him for that and I never will.
One movie that hasn’t been mentioned yet is European Vacation. Remember the hot Earo girl boobs? Here I was, about 10 years old, watching the movie with my family. Awkward! Normally a nice surprise, but not this time.
In “Jaws,” when Richard Dreyfus is swimming under that abandoned boat. He looks up through the hole in the bottom. I think all the air got sucked out of the movie theater on that one…it was a collective “Whooooosh!”
Spielberg later said that was a lesson he learned. There’s only supposed to be one such moment in a movie.
A Korean film R Point,an infantry squad is sent to find a missing unit in Vietnam and after they land on the beach they decide to take a comemerative photo but they all squabble because they all want to be in it.
Eventually someone volunteers to be cameraman.
Later on in the movie they are looking at the pic when they realise that they are all in it and that the photographer was one of the dead soldiers that they are looking for.
A funeral in Berlin also.(Brit.sixties spy film)
Hm…Lust4Life, I may have to look for that one.
More of my own contributions: the ending of Jacob’s Ladder floored everyone. A confused minor in our small audience asked, “So what was that about?” A stunned adult (not me, but I wish I’d said this) responded, “It’s about the difference between subjective and objective realities.”
I did initially feel cheated that we should have watched the titles at the end, but after a while it does seem silly that we didn’t… The name of the film Cache, translates as Hidden, and the initial scene is a long shot of a scene with something (perhaps) hidden in it.
I should buy it to watch again. I never did spot anything interesting in the actual videotape footage at the time…
I remember being totally surprised and freaked out when Michael Meyers sat up after getting a coat hanger stuck in his neck in Halloween. Nowadays, after so many sequels and copycats, that gimmick seems tired and old, but at the time it was pretty fresh and perfectly executed.
**A Tale of Two Sisters **. Korean horror film.
Plot spoilers : Not too hard to figure out that her sister is dead, but it really threw me when her father calls his girlfriend and asks her to come over…she’s already been there for much of the film. But only in the girl’s head. Ha!
Also a superlative misdirection shock moment : One of the women is cautiously approaching the kitchen sink area…an earring or something has just rolled out from under it. This is the area where the girl earlier saw a ghost hiding. I was on the edge of my seat with the build-up cos i just knew it was going to grab her. Then in one of the cupboard POV shots of the woman approaching you see the ghost sitting quietly at the kitchen table behind her.
Kind of like one of those “when you see it you will crap yourself” pictures.(there was a thread on those but I can’t find it, sorry). I actually missed it the first time because I was watching through my fingers waiting for the big scare. :o
My first though upon reading the thread title was The Sixth Sense, but one that hasn’t been mentioned yet is **The Others ** with Nicole Kidman, whose family lives in a house that is haunted. I got chills when the her family finds out that they are the ghosts that are haunting the house.
Final Destination! Thanks to that movie, I get goosebumps every time I hear Rocky Mountain High .
If I ever hear it at the airport, I’ll be cashing in my ticket and renting a car.
Let me ask you, Smid, if you spent the first few minutes of the movie braced for something like those websites that have that screaming head pop up after maybe a minute of having you stare at some still scene to try to “find the hidden…” or else lulling you into enjoying the serenity of the picture? We did! We even played with the DVD (only way to get the full enjoyment from this movie, I would say) to see if the lights in the building, or the wiggling of the bushes, or anything would account for how long that opening scene lasted.
It would be easy to see how the person who invested in trying to scope out that opening scene might let his or her attention sag after it becomes obvious that the main theme is the terror in being watched. By credits time, when your attention needs to be at least as keen and your powers of observation need to be at their peak, as you were coaxed to be at the beginning, if you don’t do some serious questioning as to what that final scene is about, you’ll just have the feeling you were being gypped the whole time.
I wager that next time I have a chance to see another movie by these filmmakers, I’ll pay closer attention. And odds are they’ll figure out another way to surprise me. They seem to make movies for that purpose!
I got drawn in, and it was kind of timed correctly because I’d worked through all the sort of questions I should have been asking myself “Do I expect something to happen here”. “I don’t know anybody to look for” to just about “I’m getting bored, lets look closer in another way”
As for other movies by the filmmaker. Funny Games is apparently by them. I don’t know much about it…
I don’t have much to add, except to say that I LOVE that movie. In fact, the whole movie is one surprise after another. Good stuff.
Another one from a movie seen by, maybe, 16 people:
The Rapture, at the end of Mimi Rogers and her little girl’s desert journey, before Mimi gets arrested. If you’re one of the 16, you know the scene. I didn’t think the film would have the guts to do what it did (and I’m still unsure as to why Mimi felt she had to do what she did), but, being raised on movies where kids always make it out OK, it definitely was a surprise!
Million Dollar Baby… boxing scene… bell rings, corner readies stool… stool tips over…
What a mess that movie became after that…
Recently I was really thrown by the end of The Departed- maybe everyone else saw that coming but I didn’t
I had the opposite experience watching A Perfect Storm. I knew it was based on a true story, and it featured the sailors on the ship, so I just assumed that they were going to make it home safely (after all, how would the movie be depicting the experience of the sailors unless they had provided a post shiprweck summary after being rescued?).
When they drowned at the end, I was stunned for several minutes. Not only did I not expect the ending, I was assuming the opposite would occur.
Casablanca. I was shocked to learn thatgambling was going on in Rick’s Cafe Americain.
Another TV series, (Scrubs) but the ending of the episode entitled My Screwup was quite the homage to The Sixth Sense. It took me several viewings to realize how they accomplished the misdirection so that we thought it was the old man with the heart condition who had died, not Jordan’s brother Ben. The big clue was given at the beginning when JD asked Ben how long he would keep taking everyone’s picture with his Polaroid and Ben responded: “Til the day I die.” Then Ben does not have his camera with him in any future scenes.