10 Awful Plot Twists That Completely Ruined Great Movies
3. The Cabin In The Woods
The Movie
Clever meta-horror that pits a group of unsuspecting teenagers against a haunted cabin, which is actually being monitored by TV execs for a show. Eventually, two of the teens discover the underground media station and unleash all the movie monsters ever into the building, in one of the most satisfying creature-on-SWAT team massacres of all time.
The Awful Twist
The Cabin in the Woods is a film full of twists. All of them, bar one final reveal, work to benefit one of the smarter horror movies made for a long while. The movie's still full of great moments, but denied true classic status by the disappointing outcome of a deliriously entertaining third act.
When Cabin is revealed to be a horror movie within a TV show, it becomes a commentary on reality TV, on human nature, on the very existence of the horror genre. When it turns out the whole show is really for the entertainment of gargantuan gods living beneath the earth, it turns Cabin back into a regular horror, leaving that commentary behind and dropping us firmly back in the realm of nonsensical hocus-pocus.
The film just doesn't seem to know how to end after all the carnage has occurred, and so settles for throwing another twist in there (the film is one for chucking everything at the wall and seeing what sticks). It sounds absurd, too, to say this particular twist suddenly makes a film about a studio putting teenagers to death for entertainment "far-fetched", but blood-thirsty corporations really is more believable than underground gods thirsting for the blood of virgins.
The former is satire; the latter is a late plot twist for the writer who ran out of ideas and just suggested "whatever."