7 Great Plot Twists That Totally Rescued Terrible Movies

Plot twists are often the most fun parts of movies. If prepared well, they can shock and surprise the audience without feeling like they were tacked on for the sake of creating suspense.

This is doubly true for movies that are otherwise not enjoyable. When a movie’s plot is full of holes or the characters and story simply aren’t engaging, audiences need a reason to feel as if they haven’t wasted two to three hours of their lives. In many cases, a late plot twist makes an otherwise awful movie bearable, and sometimes these twists even make the movie seem brilliant.

7) The Old Woman Is The Devil in Devil

Devil is such a low-budget horror film that it almost becomes a parody of itself. The plot revolves around five strangers stuck together in an elevator who meet a grisly fate one by one. This is not entirely the fault of a human in the elevator — the Devil is working through someone to kill everybody.

This ridiculous plotline was not helped by the claustrophobic setting, which was supposed to be scary but instead felt cheap. However, at the end of the film, it is revealed that an old woman who was previously thought to be dead was the supernatural culprit. This twist added a little bit of surprise to the otherwise dull movie and gave theatergoers something to talk about.

6) Denzel Washington’s Character InThe Book of Eli is Blind

The Book of Eli was more or less a waste of the talents of Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. The movie was a post-apocalyptic film about two men fighting to possess one of the last copies of the Bible.

There was plenty of physical fighting, but this plot only appealed to those who believed strongly in the idea of the Bible having supernatural powers, and the action sequences were indistinguishable from those of other movies.

However, in the end, it was revealed that the Bible was written in Braille — Washington’s character had successfully killed enemies again and again without being able to see them. This twist set the movie apart from others in the genre and almost made it worth watching.

5) Malignant’s Killer Is A Dormant Twin

The plot of Malignant is ridiculous even for a low-budget horror film. After a head injury, a woman begins getting visions of people being murdered. This plot could have been interesting — Stephen King did something similar in The Dead Zone — but the jerky character movements were distracting.

The woman eventually learns that a dormant twin resides inside her brain and is the one killing people. This twist is only a step above all the movies that blame Dissociative Identity Disorder for bad behavior. but the image of the protagonist acting possessed as she destroys a police station makes the movie memorable.

4) The Simulation in Ender’s Game Was a Real War

Ender’s Game worked far better as a book than as a movie. Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi story is about a child who is chosen to fight against alien invaders, and throughout his time at military school, he must grapple with what his personal ethical boundaries are and who he wants to become.

The problem with the film version is that it focuses on the way the school uses videogame-like simulations to train Ender and his classmates, and the movie thus felt like a giant video game and not very interesting. However, the final twist made it make sense: as in the book, the games that Ender played weren’t games at all and he had actually fought and won major battles but had lost his soul in the process.

3) Final Destination 5 Leads to Final Destination

Although the Final Destination franchise was based on a clever idea, by the fifth movie, the plot had worn out its welcome. Audiences expected twists that resulted in weird deaths, but they’d seen it all four times before, so there was little that was novel or exciting about this movie.

However, the final twist made it a memorable entry in the franchise. While some viewers might have been bored by the repeated plot of this movie, in the end it turned out that the final death was the plane explosion that led to the events of the original Final Destination, and this full-circle moment made Final Destination 5 worth watching.

2) Don’t Worry Darling‘s Entire Ending

Don’t Worry Darling seems like a ridiculous and predictable remake of The Stepford Wives up until the final twist. It revolves around a 1950s-era community where women are expected to stay at home and take care of the kids while the men go to work in a mysterious location, but one woman risks her life to find out what’s really going on because everything seems off somehow.

The final twist is that the entire town is a simulation and that misogynstic men have kidnapped women and hooked them up to it to live out their fantasies. That twist takes this movie from a predictable horror-thriller to something completely unexpected and much more disturbing.

1) The Protagonist Is The Possessed Killer In Fallen

This twist should have been predictable, considering the title of the film, but Fallen is elevated from a predictable thriller to a brilliant one by the twist that Denzel Washington’s character was possessed by the demon that was directing the murders all along. Throughout the film, Denzel’s character searches for a copycat murderer, only to find out that the killings are due to a body-swapping demon, which will make it hard to catch the murderer.

This leads to a fairly uninteresting hunt for the demon, but the audience completely trusts the protagonist, so when it turns out he’s the one he’s been searching for, it’s a gut-wrenching moment that makes the movie memorable.

What movie do you think was most saved by a plot twist? Leave a comment and join the conversation at the ComicBook Forum.

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