8 Movies That Completely Ignored Important Plot Points

3. Happy Death Day - The Murder Consequences

Happy Death Day ending scene cupcake
Universal Pictures

In Happy Death Day, Tree Gelbman is stuck in a time loop, repeatedly being killed by the same baby-faced murderer and forced to relive that day over and over until she can find the perpetrator and stop them.

After being slaughtered again and again, she finally deduces that escaped serial killer John Tombs is to blame; so, she heads to the nearby hospital where he's being held, and tries to kill him before he can escape and kill her.

She ultimately succeeds, but still wakes up stuck in the time loop - Tombs wasn't her killer. Tree later finds out that her roommate Lori was the one behind the mask all along, the two get into a scuffle, and Tree launches Lori out of a window, splatting her on the ground.

So that's two people Tree has murdered, and yet - despite one taking place in a staffed hospital and the other on a busy university campus - the movie completely neglects to show us any of the legal consequences that would stem from her actions.

In order to get to Tombs she had to hold a cop up at gunpoint - which is an offence by itself - and tell him to go and get help, so for all that officer knew, Tree was the one who set the killer free and decided to randomly murder him (this timeline was wiped when the day reset, but she was still able to leave the scene with no consequences).

Plus, the second murder (in the timeline that sticks) took place in an enclosed room with no witnesses, so how could Tree prove that she acted out of self-defense and didn't just try to murder Lori for some other reason?

Normally this sort of thing is easy to wave away, but the movie makes a point of giving Tree a happy ending, and it feels so wrong considering she's probably due a police investigation and a court case.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!