10 Movies With Unexpectedly Ridiculous Plots
Faster, sillier and set in space.
To paraphrase Stephen King, once you’ve spent a few years going to the movies, you realize that if you start over-analysing the narrative, you’re done for.
Story is the peg on which everything else - from the character beats to the action sequences, which are usually pretty contrived themselves - are hung. They exist to set up the next slam-bang confrontation and work on the viewer’s emotions, not logic.
Then again, by the time Freddy Krueger was resurrected by a dog’s urine in A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, the series no longer deserved to be given the benefit of the doubt. Being asked to accept that a movie villain could return from the grave not once but three times is one thing, but an audience can only suspend its disbelief for so long.
With their smash cut editing, pounding soundtracks and garish visuals, most modern films are sleek enough for their sillier moments to slip past unnoticed, but repeat viewings reveal the lack of logic to the proceedings. Even the Oscar winning The Usual Suspects has a twist that, if you think about it, negates the entire film: the gun battle on the boat turns out to have been a hit on the one man who could identify Keyser Soze, who as the credits roll has identified himself to the cops.
Compared to the following films, though, it’s still a model of restraint and good judgment.
10. Pet Sematary 2
Pet Sematary had Herman Munster and Bing Crosby’s granddaughter being menaced by a zombie baby, so in an effort to top that Pet Sematary 2 gives us Edward Furlong and Anthony Edwards being menaced by a zombie dog and a drill-wielding zombie Sheriff.
You see, there’s an Indian burial ground near Furlong’s new home, and when his best friend’s dog is killed by the local Sheriff, they remember all those stories about people burying their loved ones there and their loved ones returning to life. They skipped the part about the dead returning to life with glowing eyes and homicidal tendencies, though, so when the dog comes back it tears the Sheriff’s throat out.
Reasoning that the only way out of a hole is to dig deeper, Furlong then buries the Sheriff, who’s reanimated as a scumbag that forces himself on his wife, pushes a kid’s face into a rotating bike wheel and, most heinously, shows Furlong a mouthful of mashed potato at the dinner table.
Strangely, there never was a Pet Sematary 3.