10 Horror Movie Trilogies That Have The WORST Endings

Long before Saw or Escape Room, there was Cube. Vincenzo Natali's criminally underrated sci-fi horror series finds a series of unwitting and unwilling participants trapped in gigantic cube structures, where they pass from room to room without succumbing to the traps their mysterious corporate captors have set for them.

The first film was made on a shoestring budget and somehow still looks better than many of its blockbuster contemporaries, putting the grim industrial setting to good use as seven uniquely skilled individuals work together and against each other to find the way out without triggering spikes and acid traps and the like. Cube 2: Hypercube raises the stakes significantly, trapping a new group inside a four-dimensional tesseract whose traps are more metaphysical, distorting gravity, time, space and reality. This change in pace kept the series fresh and enabled it to revisit the formula without feeling repetitive.

But once you've raised the stakes so high, the only way to go is, well, back. Rather than escalate the action farther, Cube Zero operates as a prequel, taking us back to an early prototype of the cube, and offering the first real glimpse of the people controlling its function. While this is perhaps the best possible option for a series that didn't want to descend into absurdity, it is nonetheless a big step back, demystifying the other films and ending the trilogy on a bum note.