10 Awful Plot Twists That Completely Ruined Great Movies
8.Signs
The Movie
Everyone's favourite bigot Mel Gibson stars in a horror movie that doesn't rely on helpless women or idiots getting killed in increasingly claret-ridden ways; the effect is astonishing. Not only does Gibson give one of his better performances in this alien invasion drama, but the scares are - almost unnaturally for a modern horror film - scary.
A brief glimpse at an extraterrestrial visitor crashing a child's birthday party is pant-browningly chilling.
The Awful Twist
Shyamalan takes the ug-mo beasties out of the shadows and gives us a glimpse at some really half-assed CGI, as an unconvincing alien attacks Gibson's family inside their home. The writer/director then goes one step further and completely smashes any mythos surrounding these creatures, by killing them off in the most ridiculous way: by having Joaquin Phoenix spill water on them.
It doesn't just not make sense that an alien race allergic to H2O would consider invading a planet full of the stuff, but the sudden turnaround is handled so poorly that it diminishes all the solid tension that came before. M. Night Shyamalan made the plot twist into a water-cooler art form with The Sixth Sense (which still contains the biggest twist in cinema history, alongside Shawshank's sewage tunnel and Psycho's you-know-what), but this finale marks the exact point Shyamalan began his descent into being a massive joke.
Looking back at Signs' best moments, as well as Shyamalan's first two movies on the whole, it's mind-boggling to wonder what happened to such a talent.