10 Movies That Completely Wasted Awesome Twists

8. Norman Is Cured - Psycho II

Everyone knows the twist to Psycho; meek motel owner Norman Bates is really the killer, dressing up as his mother to satiate his desires while storing her corpse in the fruit cellar. It's so well known you can make a TV series based on it without even worrying about crying spoiler (although, interestingly enough, I saw the movie in the cinema the other week and the shock at the reveal was palpable).

The same level of notoriety isn't true of the plot of its late-in-the-day sequel, although perhaps if they'd tried just that little bit harder things might have been different. You see, while Psycho II doesn't come close matching the timeless genius of Alfred Hitchcock, it's still a snazzy little slasher-thriller that packs on hell of a rug pull.

Picking up two decades after the events of the first, Norman is released after being cured. Few believe this, of course, and neither should you given how this was exactly the mother side of his mind's plan at the end of the original. However, as the movie runs on something dawns of you; he actually is now a normal, functioning member of society. All the murders in the film form part of a plot attempting to frame him, with Norman genuinely just wanting to live a quiet life.

The film couldn't stop at that decidedly unbloody resolution though and sadly undercuts all this in its final five minutes, with an old lady from the diner where he works revealing she's his mother and that the woman who raised him was her sister. Then he whacks her on with the head with a shovel, embraces his inner evil and we had to sit through the less defendable Psycho III.