20 Awesome Plot Twists That Totally Saved Terrible Movies

A plot twist can either make or break a movie, pull it off and the story is all the better for it

but get it wrong and audiences can swear the film off forevermore. The art of a great plot

twist can't ever be underestimated, and every so often a genuinely brilliant twist will somehow

find itself landing in an otherwise dud movie, near enough redeeming it in the process. With

major spoilers ahead, you're watching War Culture and here are awesome plot twists that totally

save terrible movies. Esther is dead. Orphan, First Kill. For the most part, this prequel to

2009's wonderfully unhinged horror film Orphan provides a pretty by-the-numbers origin story

for psychopathic serial killer Lena Klammer, played by Isabel Furman. Also, completely blindsides

viewers with a wildly unexpected mid-film twist. First Kill shows Lena, a 31-year-old woman with a

growth-stunting pituitary disorder, escaping from an Estonian psych ward, and then posing as a

missing American girl called Esther. This leads to her being quote-unquote reunited with her mother

Trisia, father Alan, and brother Gunnar. And while it's fair to assume that the rest of the movie will

simply play out similarly to the first, with Esther turning psycho on her new family, things

are a little more complicated than that. Once a detective discovers who Esther really is

she's suddenly saved by Trissia, who shoots him dead. Trissia then reveals that she knew Lena was an imposter the entire time

because the real Esther was killed four years earlier during an argument with Gunner

To protect her son, Trissia covered up Esther's death while keeping her husband totally unaware

Basically, this seemingly totally normal mother is actually a femme fatale in her own right

and quite the savage match for Esther. Brahms is living in the walls of the house, The Boy

2016 horror film The Boy centres around a woman who is hired by a wealthy elderly couple to be a nanny for their boy Brahms

a porcelain doll that serves as a surrogate for their son of the same name who perished in house fire 20 years earlier

Though audiences naturally went in expecting an entertainingly trashy killer doll movie in the vein of child's play

The Boy is actually a frustratingly tepid effort where the doll only appears to move around off screen

But the end of the movie delivers a terrifically subversive plot twist that flips the entire scenario on its head

by revealing that Brahms is actually very much alive, having survived the fire and is now living inside the walls of his family's lush mansion

He's been sneaking around and moving the doll, giving the impression that it is possessed

While the majority of the movie was a disappointingly dull affair, this bonkers, expectation-defying twist brought it surging back to life for a finale in which the nanny has to fend off the real, adult Brahms

Now a less thrilling twist came at the start of the sequel though, which bafflingly retconned this ending and reverted to the idea that the porcelain doll was actually possessed after all, while the flesh and blood Brahms was nowhere to be seen

Jill's Husband is Actually Duncan When A Stranger Calls 1979's When A Stranger Calls features one of the most terrifying openings in horror movie history

playing on the legend of the babysitter and the man upstairs in what is honestly a masterstroke of suspense from director Fred Walton

The film actually remade and expanded upon the director's 1977 short film, The Sitter

sadly the rest of the material is found extremely wanting. as the story devolves into a maudlin array of sequences of a private detective tracking down the recently escaped perpetrator of the opening crime

That said, when A Stranger Calls does come full circle enough to nearly justify the extended story

featuring an end-act twist that rivals the opening in terms of creepy abruptness

Having escaped his pursuers, killer Kurt Duncan tracks down Jill, played by Carol Kane

the babysitter he originally stalked and harassed all those years ago. We're initially led to believe that Duncan is targeting Jill's kids, but the police arrive and find nothing suspicious

Meanwhile, the private investigator we've been following, John Clifford, tries desperately to reach Jill

only to discover that the phone lines have been cut. Then, at night, while everyone is asleep, Jill hears Duncan's voice from within her own bedroom

The closet door is jarred slightly open, leading us to believe that Duncan is hiding in there

But psych, he's actually dressed as Jill's husband and he's been lying in bed with her this entire time

It's a real zinger of a twist for Clifford managing to make it into the room to kill Duncan before he can do any harm

Just a shame that the middle third had to be so bad. Evan kills himself in the womb

The Butterfly Effect, Director's Cut. The Butterfly Effect is certainly an interesting movie, but a fundamentally incoherent one

in which Evan discovers that he can travel back in time to inhabit the body of his younger self

while hoping that he can change his troubled future for the better. Despite its ambitious concept, the movie is full of timey-wimey plot holes and inconsistencies

which ruin most of the fun. It's an over-sentimental mess of a movie, but with some intriguing ideas

though achieves an inspired transcendence in its categorically insane original ending, which was restored for the film's director's cut on home video

In this ending, Evan realises that his time-hopping shenanigans have ruined the lives of basically everybody he cares about

and so travels back to when he was a baby in the womb where he strangles himself with his own umbilical cord

By dying, Evan negates his negative impact on the timeline and ensures those around him have more favourable and hopeful futures

Caroline gets trapped in Violet's body, the skeleton key. The film follows hospice nurse Caroline Ellis played by Kate Hudson who takes a job at an isolated plantation house in Louisiana to help Violet Devereaux Gina Rowlands care for her ailing husband Benjamin played by John Heard

Plenty of low-energy spooky shenanigans ensue, with the audience being led to believe that

Violet is plotting to sacrifice Ben and Caroline to grant herself eternal life

Quite, though. It turns out that Violet and Ben are actually former slaves who have been using a ritual

to swap bodies with younger folks they invite into their home. The reason for Ben's condition

is that Violet recently body-swapped him with the family's young lawyer, Luke, played by Peter

Skarsgård, who is naturally terrified at having been swapped into an elderly man's body. In the

end, Violet also swaps her own body with Caroline and beats her a potion-inducing stroke-like

paralysis, leaving her unable to fight back or alert anyone to what's happened. EMS then show up

to take Caroline, who is in Violet's body, and Luke, in Ben's body, away, while Violet and Ben

now in the bodies of Caroline and Luke, pretend that they inherited the house from them

allowing them to keep living there. It's one hell of a savage ending in a movie that is otherwise

just completely forgettable. Dr. Gordon is Jigsaw's accomplice, Saw, the final chapter

Now there's a strong argument to be made that the seventh Saw movie, ill-advisedly dubbed the

final chapter is the worst of the entire nine movie series. By this point in the franchise

the Saw formula felt pretty played out. The traps had lost their grimly imaginative sheen

the storytelling had reached a melodramatic critical mess, and even the twists weren't as

daftly impactful as they once were. But the final chapter was at least smart enough to pull the

trigger on a long-held fan theory that many had lost hope of ever coming true, that one of Jigsaw's

victims from the original movie, Dr. Lawrence Gordon, would be revealed to be one of his

accomplices. Gordon famously went missing at the end of the first film after sawing off his own foot

and escaping Jigsaw's grotty bathroom, with fans then speculating about his fate ever since

The final chapter brought Gordon back into the fold by having him appear at a Jigsaw Survivor's

support group, and at the film's end we learn that he's actually been nursed back to health

by Jigsaw, and has also been given a mission. And what is that mission? And that is to take down

the new Jigsaw, Detective Hoffman, in the event that anything happened to Jigsaw's ex-wife Jill

After Jill was killed by Hoffman, Gordon sprang into action And so the movie ends with Gordon kidnapping Hoffman and locking him away in Jigsaw's bathroom

Leaving him to die with the satisfyingly smug one-liner, Game Over It's all a simulation, but the curse is real

Ghosts of war It was all a dream, twists are pretty played out these days

And certainly sound lame on paper Within the context of a war film, it's actually a pretty interesting idea

especially when it comes so out of left field. Ghosts of War takes place in France in World War

2, where a squad of five American soldiers are tasked with guarding a chateau, which they soon

come to believe is haunted by a malevolent supernatural presence. During a ghostly attack

later on, protagonist Chris, played by Brenton Thwaites, wakes up in a brightly lit room with

a group of doctors watching him. Well, this isn't Assassin's Creed. As it turns out, he and the

other soldiers have been hooked up to a simulation resembling World War II in an attempt to help them

recover from PTSD. Chris and his squadmates are modern American soldiers who were critically

wounded while fighting in Afghanistan, but there's more. The surviving member of the family the

soldiers failed to protect in Afghanistan cursed them moments before detonating the suicide vest

which injured them all, and the curse turns out to be very real. Turns out the curse itself has

caused the simulation to be haunted by the ghosts of the fallen family members, and so Chris vows to

re-enter the simulation in order to make peace with them. However, just as he plans to do that

the machine running the simulation wipes his memory, forcing him to relive the whole scenario

with no knowledge of these shocking revelations. Remy is actually in a coma. Repo Man. Now

Sci-fi action flick Repo Man is a mostly forgettable feature film, but at least offers

up one of the few worthwhile variations on a massively overused type of plot twist

You see, Remy and partner Jake are two of the titular Repo Men, whose work involves reclaiming

replacement organs from clients who default on their payments, in turn killing them. It's a neat

premise that nevertheless is filtered through the prism of a generic, largely unimaginative sci-fi

flick that save for its wild twist ending is mostly forgotten. Yet the film does strike gold

late in the day when Remy has an expected change of heart and seemingly conquers the organ debt

trade that he was himself a part of, ending up on a tropical beach as a reward for his efforts

But the big twist reveals that when Remy and Jake got into a fight earlier on in the movie and Remy

was not unconscious, he received traumatic brain damage and is now in a coma. Remy's beach getaway

is actually a dream world that his brain was hooked up to by a guilt-ridden Jake, allowing

him to live out his life in seemingly able-minded bliss inside this virtual construct

The plane is another escape room. Escape Room Tournament of Champions. Escape Room Tournament of Champions is, just like its predecessor, a disappointingly tame

PG-13 horror flick further weakened by atrociously dumb writing. But its wild twist ending finally

sees the film settling into the more self-aware, freewheeling tone it should have had all along

While the reveal itself is actually quite predictable, it proves that this need not be a bad thing when it's actually just really fun

At the film's end, Zoe, played by Taylor Russell, Ben, Logan Miller, and Amanda, played by Daredevil's Debra Ann Wall

finally manage to escape Minos deadly facility and notify the police about their deadly escape rooms bringing Minos activities into the public eye A victory for the trio it seems then except when Zoe decides to get

over a fear of flying and boards a plane with Ben. It's soon enough revealed to be just another

escape room, as we saw Minos testing out at the end of the first movie. Sure, it felt like the

most logical of cliffhanger endings, but it was also so delightfully ridiculous that it perhaps

made even non-fans mildly intrigued to see where a third film took it. The Curse Goes Viral, Truth

or Dare Now, Truth or Dare is a deeply awful horror film in which a supernaturally cursed

version of a game causes its participants to end up dead one way or another. The movie's script is

dumb as a brick, full of nonsensical plotting without much in the way of internal logic

hilariously wooden dialogue, poor performances, and unintentionally slapstick-worthy death scenes. But the screenplay gets at least one thing right, and that is its ending

While we as an audience are conditioned to expect that the protagonist Olivia will find a way to prevail over the demonic game

she ultimately realizes the only way to survive is to actually prolong it, and that means to invite more people to join

And so Truth or Dare climaxes with a twist where she uploads a video to YouTube inviting viewers to play

effectively making the game go viral and buying her and her friend a ton of time before the curse returns to them

For a horror movie hero to do something so selfish and decidedly unheroic in the final stretch was a genuine surprise

especially as earlier on in the film, Olivia made a comment about how she'd choose to save humanity over herself in a disaster scenario

but alas, the truth came out in the end. Kirstie traded her husband to Pinhead, Hellraiser Hellseeker

The sixth Hellraiser film admittedly has few fans, with even the return of franchise heroine Kirstie Cotton, Ashley Lawrence, giving it much juice

Hellseeker does manage to slightly compensate for its risable filmmaking and scant runtime afforded

to Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley, with its climactic twist. It's eventually revealed that

philandering protagonist Trevor, Dean Winters, has been scheming to kill his wife Kirstie by

making her open the Laman Configuration puzzle box once again. When Kirstie opened it, she instead

made a deal with Pinhead, agreeing to trade her husband and four additional souls to him in

exchange for her own freedom. The four other souls end up being three of Trevor's extramarital

partners and a friend who was helping him plot Kirstie's murder, each of whom Kirstie murders

while framing Trevor as the killer. Trevor then realizes that the car crash he was involved in at

the start of the movie was caused by Kirstie shooting him in the head, and he's been residing

in a hellish limbo ever since. Talk about tearing your soul apart

Hartley is a secret con man, Red Notice. Red Notice was an attempt by Netflix

to deliver their own blockbuster-sized movie to home audiences, complete with loony action sequences

and an all-star cast. It is ultimately, though, pure white noise of a movie

something to casually eye up while doing the household chores and which might generate the occasional laugh

but is a mostly soulless action-adventure film that feels like it was generated by a bloody algorithm

The mind-numbingly generic plot does at least make some entertainingly absurd twists at the end though

when it's revealed that the straight-laced FBI agent John Hartley, played by Dwayne Johnson

was actually in on the focal bejeweled egg heist all along. More to the point, Hartley was in league with master thief the bishop

with the pair being both romantic and professional partners who teamed up to pull off the job

It doesn't make a ton of sense if you break the movie down and examine every fragment of what passes for a story here

but the commitment to such a silly gotcha moment is to be commended

and in turn ensures that the already announced sequel will have a different dynamic between its three central characters

Ashley and Nick were the masterminds. Reindeer Games For those who haven't seen Reindeer Games, the film follows ex-convict Rudy Duncan, played by Ben Affleck

who ends up forced to help a band of thieves over a casino upon fear of death

while posing as his former prison mate, Nick Cassidy, who was killed in jail

But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, it's eventually revealed that Nick didn't actually die in prison

and instead faked his own death and has been in league with Rudy's love interest Ashley, Chalice Theron

whose real name is Millie, to set Rudy up. Before they can kill him though, Rudy manages to turn the tables and off them both

It's an amusingly ridiculous twist coming at the end of an otherwise totally ho-hum flick

The best friend was a ghost the entire time. Safe Haven. Up until its final two minutes, Safe Haven is exactly what everybody expected from your typical

Nicholas Sparks adaptation, a hokey, cornball, romantic melodrama filled with questionable acting and embarrassingly chintzy dialogue. You see, the bulk of the film is focused on a woman

called Erin, who flees her abusive past and soon gets smitten with a charming local widower called

Alex. Throughout the film, Erin hangs out with her neighbor Joe, but in the brilliantly unhinged

final two minutes, it's revealed that Joe was actually a ghost the entire time. More to the

point, Joe is actually Carly, Alex's dead wife, who has been watching over them and encouraging

their relationship throughout the story. It's a thrilling ending to an otherwise cheesy romantic

drama, and given how drastically the reveal changes the entire context of the story

it makes a second viewing seem genuinely worthwhile. Tom is actually guilty. High crimes. Of Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman's surprisingly large number

of collaborations over the years, perhaps the silliest is high crimes. Judd stars as Claire

Kubik, whose husband Tom is arrested by the FBI for apparently taking part in a military op in

El Salvador, which resulted in the deaths of nine unarmed civilians. Tom claims he was there

but that he didn take part in the killings And from early on audiences are basically primed to expect an aggressively conventional conspiracy thriller in which Tom is being framed by another party It all seems

incredibly cut and dried. That is, until the genuinely surprising penny drops, when Tom tells

his wife that he did indeed commit the murders and even had witnesses killed in an attempt to cover

it up. Sure enough, it leads to another typical finale where Tom attempts to kill Claire

resulting in her killing him, but for a few minutes, things actually got exciting and interesting

Donnie was the real criminal mastermind, Den of Thieves. Den of Thieves is a superficially passable heist film

albeit one rendered rather tedious and exhausting due to its brutal 140-minute runtime

ensuring that a potentially breezy crime thriller is elongated out with self-important subplots

and masses of unearned character development drama. Yet this film does have a frankly delicious ace up its sleeve

which ties together the entire movie in a satisfyingly ridiculous way. And that's when we learn that low-key getaway driver Donnie

isn't quite the hapless everyman that we've been led to believe. The movie ends with a giddy homage to the usual suspects

as Detective Nick discovers that Donnie was actually the heist's criminal mastermind all along

Donnie worked his unassuming job as a bartender at a bar frequented by Federal Reserve employees

to grift information about the Reserve's vaults, allowing him to plan the heist and get away with the money undetected

and as a cherry on top, the final scene shows Donnie now working at a pub in London

situated next to a diamond exchange. Aces is Sparazza's son, and Mesna pulls the plug

Smoking Aces. Smoking Aces is the cinematic equivalent of spending 109 minutes

with someone buzzing obnoxiously off illicit substances while you're sat in the corner

sober as a judge. It's got a great cast and has boundless energy, but is ultimately just a bit annoying

The film is centered around Vegas musician buddy Aces Israel, played by Jeremy Piven

who has become a mafia informant for the FBI, prompting mob boss Primo Sparazza, Joseph Ruskin

to place a $1 million bounty, anyone who can kill him and bring him his heart

Lots of loud grating mayhem ensues over the next 90 minutes, all the truth is revealed to FBI agent Mesner, played by Ryan Reynolds

In fact, Israel is Sparazza's illegitimate son, and the FBI wishes for an ailing Sparazza to receive his son's heart so they can continue to drill him for information

Oh, and Sparazza himself is also a former undercover FBI agent who decided to become Sparazza for real after the FBI tried to have him assassinated for getting too deep into his cover

What? The final twist then sees Mesniff, infuriated at seeing his fellow agents die for a mob boss

decide to lock himself in the operating room and pull the plug on both Israel and Sparazza's life support

killing them while FBI head honcho Locke, Andy Garcia, tries to break in

This is like some Twilight Zone, Outer Limits stuff right here. Gabriel is Madison's parasitic twin, Malignant

A seemingly generic supernatural horror film, albeit one harboring a most brilliantly unhinged

plot twist. The bulk of the movie revolves around Madison, a woman who believes that she's being

stalked by Gabriel, her childhood imaginary friend, who is inexplicably manifesting in the

real world as a cloaked serial killer. But Malignant transforms into something else entirely

with its absolutely bizarre third-act reveal, and that is that Gabriel is actually Madison's

parasitic twin. While most of Gabriel was surgically removed in Madison's youth

a vestigial part remains connected to her brain. And so the cloaked mysterious figure we've seen doing all of the killings throughout the film

is actually Madison as possessed by Gabriel, with his jerky body movements a result of Gabriel operating Madison's body backwards

Were it not for this big reveal, Malignant would have been forgotten within a week

but now it is destined to live on as a ridiculous cult classic for years and perhaps even decades

Everyone's still alive and Hardy isn't a DEA agent. Basic. Basic revolves around DEA agent Tom Hardy, played by John Travolta, who investigates the

mystery of a barge military training exercise at an army base in Panama, which has left numerous

soldiers either dead or missing. Hardy probes the survivors for their accounts of what happened

Hardy isn't a DEA agent, but the colonel of a covert Black Ops anti-drug unit called Section A

Moreover, he's been in league with the dead and missing men who are actually alive

including unit leader Sergeant West, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Their goal all along? To shut down cocaine trafficking in the base

eliminate the soldiers responsible, and safely exfiltrate West by faking his death

The moon was built by ancient humans. Moonfall. There's a strong argument to be made that Moonfall is the worst major release of 2022

a shambolically stupid sci-fi disaster film from the man who actually popularized the genre to

modern audiences, Roland Emmerich. The film chronicles humanity's existence, being threatened by the moon itself, which appears to be falling out of orbit and heading towards

Earth. The trailers ended up spoiling what appeared to be the movie's big twist, that an alien entity

is actually residing on the moon and is responsible for its destabilized gravity. However, the director

actually has an altogether nuttier rug pull in store for audiences, as the third act reveals that

the moon was actually a megastructure created billions of years ago by humanity's ancestors

a technologically advanced race far beyond present-day humans. The moon was built to serve as an arc for their kind

after an AI they created went rogue and attempted to wipe them out, that AI being the extraterrestrial entity on the moon throughout the film

As if that isn't insane enough, Moonfall then climaxes with eccentric conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman

sacrificing himself to destroy the rogue AI, after which it's been revealed that his consciousness has been replicated

by the moon's benign AI operating system, allowing him to live on