12 Movies Literally ONE Step From Perfection

Anticlimactic endings, subplots that need the chop, and characters who were never needed...

Midsommar film
A24

Is there any phenomenon more annoying than the almost perfect film?

Not the solid, three-star efforts which fill the multiplex most weeks, good for one watch and instantly forgettable afterwards. No, these films are the deeply frustrating four-star films which have all the makings of a five-star instant classic, but fumble some minor part of the project and leave you cringing, wishing the filmmakers could have pulled it off.

Some of the films listed here may be ones you consider far from classic, and a few may well be films which are widely considered to be perfect as is. But all of them feature a fatal flaw which stops them from being true blue perfect flicks, despite what some audiences and critics may claim to the contrary.

Whether it’s an unnecessary twist on a well-known story, a too brutal moment or a tonal shift which no one needed or asked for, each of these flicks flirts with greatness before going home with four-star also-ran success instead.

So this list is here to dig into the weird decisions that hampered the potential of a dozen almost great movies.

12. Last House On The Left – The Cop Subplot

Midsommar film
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Scream helmer Wes Craven may know how to horrify an audience, but it took a while for the horror legend to learn the tricky balancing act required by his chosen genre.

For example, 1972’s still-horrifying Last House on the Left has retained all its power to shock and disturb despite being nowhere near as explicit as many modern mainstream horror releases.

Despite this, in the middle of an unrelentingly grimy, brutal, and almost unwatchable-ly harsh horror masterpiece there’s an entirely excisable subplot about a pair of bumbling cops on the case which seems transported in from a completely different film and badly dulls the flick’s intense edge.

No need for the side of Fletch with an order of Irreversible

 
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