50 Movies Where Evil Won

Plot: Jack Terry (John Travolta), a sound technician on a horror film, unintentionally records the assassination of a presidential hopeful, and soon finds himself in way over his head.

Blow Out, Brian De Palma's cult classic thriller, is mostly a classic case of a by-the-numbers screenplay being elevated by those in front of and behind the camera. De Palma's directing is mesmerizingly good, and it features fine work from John Travolta, Nancy Allen, and John Lithgow in particular, yet the plot is a fairly straightforward espionage thriller. Or rather, it mostly is. 

It does feature an unexpectedly downbeat ending in which Jack and his love interest Sally's (Nancy Allen) attempt to deliver a recording of the assassination goes disastrously wrong. Hitman Burke (Lithgow) meets Sally, pretending to be the journalist she's waiting for, and he eventually destroys the recording and attacks her. Jack gives chase and manages to kill Burke, but discovers that he'd already killed Sally seconds before he arrived. 

With all evidence lost, the cover-up has succeeded, and Jack is left devastated. He ends up using the recording of Sally's final screams as a sound effect in the horror film he's working on, but has to cover his ears when the director keeps replaying it louder and louder. The movie ends on this miserable note. 

Blow Out takes clear inspiration from the aforementioned The Conversation, and that wasn't exactly cheerful either, yet even that wasn't nearly as tough as this.