Movies that pull the carpet from under your feet

Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive. A pretty conventional, if demented, Yakuza crime story which in the last 5 minutes descends (or ascends) into an anime inspired scene of devastation on a global scale. One of the best "WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED" scenes I've ever seen.

Actually there's a crazy carpet-puller scene in nearly every one of his films...

Dogville. Entire movie seemed to conmfirm every criticism anyone's had of Von Trier....until that ending. Jesus Christ on a bicycle.....

A "throw away" movie with anthony Edwards called Miracle Mile. I watched it late one night on HBO without having a clue as to what it was about..the first 15-20 seemed to be a very bland love story, until Edwards' character gets the phone call....

then all hell breaks lose.

If you get the chance, watch it without knowing what it is about...

Audition.

(You knew it was coming.)

If I understand this thread correctly........

U-Turn staring Sean Penn, Jen Lopez and Nick Nolte. Oliver Stones wierd story about a guy who breakdown in the middle of nowhere just starts getting wierder and wierder and as it sucks you in only to totally throw you for a loop of "WHAT THE F*CK!!!!!" at the end.

I'll second that......."deeper deeper"



Oh yeah, and High Tension, though for far different reasons.


Where-the-hell-did-THAT-come-from?-rating: 1/5.

Executive Decision

Who knew that Steven Seagal would die at the beginning of the film????

The New Zealand sci-fi film The Quiet Earth. Goes along like your typical "last man on Earth" movie, and then along comes the final shot and you're smacked in the head.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK perhaps?

The ending of A Boy And His Dog. Ha ha.

Perhaps too obvious an answer, but The Crying Game.

Fight Club, because with all the hype surronding "I see Dead People" I did not expect the twist in it.

I believe you're referring to "The Sixth Sense," though you may have watched an even twisted version of "Fight Club" for all I know.

"Angel Heart" Really blew my mind and creeped me the fuck out.

In the Bedroom and Million Dollar Baby.

Both were films I expected to be one thing, but each turned radically into something else. Awesome.

Call me pedestrian, but I have to go with The Sixth Sense. When I realized the twist, it was like someone had punched me in the gut. What was even cooler was that I figured it out about one minute before most of the theater, so that I was just recovering when I started hearing gasps all around me.

Audition would have done it, as well, except that I had watched that 100 Scariest Moments special on Bravo before seeing the movie... pretty much ruined it for me (which isn't to say that it wasn't horrific in that skin crawling sorta way).

How about when a film is going somewhere you don't want it to go, but it goes there anyway, no matter how much you don't want to go there. I'd say Requiem for a Dream in those last minutes. That film takes you down a dark tunnel you don't want to go down.

Along the same lines as Seagal in Executive Decision, what about Sam Jackson in Deep Blue Sea? He gives his big heroic speech about the will to survive only to be devoured by a hyper intelligent shark moments later... retarded, but SHOCKING

Arlington Road gutpunched me good. You definitely won't see another ending like that post-9/11.

Yeah, Fight Club did it for me too, but then I was 15 and had never even heard of the movie before seeing it.

A lot of the above movies definitely so that, but I find that in the age of the internet (and places like CHUD - even though I love it) I get less and less of "those moments". I tend to read every story and have a hard time staying away from spoilers. With daily visits to CHUD, AICN and subscriptions to EW that I almost know everything before it happens. I realize it's my own fault, but I think at a place like this - you all know what I am talking about.

What about The Usual Suspects? That's such a gut punch that it's entered our modern lexicon, i.e. to deceive or mislead someone is to keyser (kaiser?) soze them.

Can't believe I forgot that one. While it has nothing to do with a gutpunch moment, the "give me the keys..." scene between Benico, the gaurd, and a Baldwin brother still makes me laugh everytime.

"What's in the box?"

Maybe it's me, but I didn't see that coming.

Les Diaboliques.
Great fucking twist ending, and this was film was made in 1955!
That´s great, considering that every second film these days have twistendings.

What a great horror film. Underrated, if there ever was one. And the big reveal scene is cool, even if it is more of a montage.

Okay, since several others have gotten slightly off the original question, I guess I will too :-)

Shallow Grave
A Simple Plan
The Last Seduction

With all three I had no expectations and had seen no trailers. After all 3 I felt like someone just kicked the shit outta me.

Scenes:

Shallow Grave: The lug wrench across the shins.
Simple Plan: Steve Buscemi getting the axe.
Last Seduction: [**Spoiler alert-If you haven't seen it, stop reading and do so now***] Killing her husband with a whole can of mace down his throat, then tricking her boyfriend into 'raping' her. Holy shit.

-AiV

I don't think it's too obvious. I saw it with my mom (yikes!) when it first came out, neither of us knowing the surprise or even that there was a surprise coming. I think so many people heard about the twist in this movie before-hand that the sharp turns it takes lost their impact for many viewers.

But (could this possibly be a SPOILER for anyone?) I'd never even seen a penis in a movie before that, except for a few pornos, and it was a truly shocking twist, I tell you. Stephen Rea's vomitous reaction seemed more real than acting to me. I couldn't even look at my mom, but I knew she was mature enough to handle it.

But the movie slaps the viewer across the face more than once. Even before Jay Davidson's character is (Um, SPOILER??) revealed to be a man, There is (more SPOILERS?) the sudden shock of Forest Whitaker's death, after the movie has developed his character enough to lead the viewer to believe that he is one of the main players. Yet he is killed off about a third of the way in, and the film, which feels like a political thriller up to that point, becomes a bizarre meditation on human relationships. Not at all what I expected, but a great movie.

The moment in Oldboy when Oh-Daesu discovers who the girl is...that was just a "Whoooooa!" moment. I did not see that approaching from anywhere.

And I will copy that on The Usual Suspects and Seven. Totally did not see those endings coming either.

And having walked into Dusk 'til Dawn completely blind to what was to happen, the last half of the movie made me scratch my head at first and then I just went with it.

House of Games. The best of Mamet's WTF? movies. The ending's a total kicker.
The Conversation

The Vanishing.

Would've been great had I seen it in 1960.

Dark City, with Rufus Sewell and William Hurtbreaking down a brick wall to see what was on the other side. Never saw it coming.

Memento

Planet of the Apes (1968)

The Wrath of Kahn

I had the same feeling when i saw the remake of Psycho.

Irreversible

And not for the unholy amount of shocking material. The message in the end of how fragile our lives are and how all of our hapiness in our safe and protected lives hangs by a single fucking thread really drilled me.

Here I was watching it expecting just to see some ridiculous gore courtesy of those fucked up french, I did not account for the very real amount of fear and raw emotion that the film ended up garnering within me.

And in this day and age when soccer moms go and buy more duct tape when we get an orange alert, the notion of surrendering to the uncontrollable shit that can turn your entire existence on its head appeals to me in a very zen-tastic way. That's right, zen-tastic.

Jacob's Ladder: Freaked me out (especially shaking guy) and threw me for a loop all at the same time.