10 Endings That Make Movies Impossible To Rewatch

2. Kiefer Sutherland Is Buried Alive... But Then Saved - The Vanishing

Dutch director George Sluizer’s original version of The Vanishing (or Spoorloos as it’s known in the Netherlands) was a genuinely creepy tale about a young couple, Rex and Saskia, whose holiday in France is cut short when Saskia is mysteriously abducted from a rest stop. Determined to find out what happened to his lost love, an increasingly obsessed Rex eventually comes face to face with Saskia’s abductor who offers to show him what happened but only if he is willing to experience it himself. A sip of drugged coffee later and Rex finds himself buried alive in a coffin-like box, doomed to suffer the same fate as Saskia.

Sluizer’s American remake, however, starring Jeff Bridges as the abductor, Sandra Bullock as the abductee and Kiefer Sutherland as the anguished boyfriend, swapped the terrifyingly claustrophobic ending for a happy one in which Sutherland’s new girlfriend saves him from his killer. Why? Because apparently American audiences will storm out of cinemas in a huff if the good guy doesn’t win, but a bad move that’s seen the movie ranked amongst the worse remakes in film history.

It’s not the first time the good old U. S. of A. has taken a perfectly good foreign film and messed it up – un-scary American remakes of terrifying Japanese horrors, or even worse, Neil LaBute’s Nicolas Cage fronted remake of British cult classic The Wicker Man, anyone? – but it’s nevertheless a clichéd upbeat ending that detracted from the excellent original.