10 Movies That Made No Sense If You Watched Them In Other Countries
3. The Villain's Death Had Its Context Totally Changed In Germany - Breakdown
The cult classic 1997 thriller Breakdown follows Jeff Taylor (Kurt Russell), a man whose wife Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) goes missing after their car breaks down and she accepts a lift from a trucker (a brilliant J.T. Walsh) to get assistance.
Though the film wasn't massively tampered with for its global release, it did receive one small but significant edit that changes the entire context and meaning of its ending.
In the final sequence, Jeff and Amy triumph over Red by hurling him off a bridge to the rocks below, presumably to his death.
But after a moment, Red begins to move, and so in order to finish him off, Amy then releases the gears of her pickup truck - which is hanging over the side of the bridge with Red's tractor - causing the tractor to careen over the edge and unambiguously crush Red to death.
It's an awesome, satisfying villain death, and yet in Germany the scene was toned down to plane all the edges away and make Amy out to be a completely squeaky clean person.
Instead, the shot of Amy shifting the gearstick was removed, with the implication being that Red's tractor simply fell off the bridge on its own.
Red's fate is the same either way, but why deny the audience the satisfaction of the primary victim in all this exacting brutal revenge on their captor?