10 More Awesome Plot Twists That Totally Saved Terrible Movies
Malignant's insane final twist saves an otherwise horrible movie.
A plot twist truly can make or break a movie - get it right and it can elevate an already terrific film to truly iconic status, but screw it up and it can flat-out ruin a promising effort.
Yet what about those rare films that, while almost entirely terrible, delivered enough of a startling late-stage plot twist to basically save the entire movie?
Few twists hit with enough impact that they can truly compensate for a movie's worth of bad writing, poor acting, and generally shoddy filmmaking, but these 10 films prove that some plot twists are just brilliant enough to save the day.
Whether through their unexpected cleverness and creativity or sheer boundary-pushing ballsiness, these epic, entertaining, and utterly insane twists rescued otherwise awful films from the trash heap.
It's fair to say that these movies were destined to be quickly forgotten through their laziness and lack of imagination, but then came a twist so good, so wild, so out-there, that it ensured audiences will still be talking about them years from now.
And so, we raise our glasses to those rare terrible movies that pulled off a fleeting flicker of dignity-salvaging brilliance in the final stretch...
10. Brahms Is Living In The Walls Of The House - The Boy
2016 horror film The Boy centers around a woman, Greta (Lauren Cohan), who is hired by a wealthy elderly couple to be the nanny for Brahms, a porcelain doll that serves as a surrogate for their son of the same name who perished in a house fire 20 years earlier.
Though audiences naturally went in expecting an entertainingly trashy killer doll movie in the vein of Child's Play, The Boy is actually a frustratingly tepid effort where the doll only appears to move around off-screen.
But the end of the movie delivers a terrifically subversive plot twist that flips the entire scenario on its head, by revealing that Brahms is actually very much alive, having survived the fire and now living in the walls of his family's lush mansion. He has been sneaking around and moving the doll, giving the impression that it's possessed.
While the majority of the film was a disappointingly dull affair, this bonkers, expectation-defying twist brought it surging back to life for a finale in which Greta has to fend off the real, adult Brahms.
A less-thrilling twist came at the start of the sequel, though, which bafflingly retconned this ending and reverted to the idea of the porcelain doll being possessed, while the flesh-and-blood Brahms was nowhere to be seen.