What’s in an ending? For some movies, it’s a fitting epitaph to the events that have preceded it, while others offer twists that recontextualize the entire story. And then there are those movies that just cut loose and go completely crazy. Crazy endings aren’t inherently good or bad; instead, it’s usually dependent on how appropriate or inappropriate they feel when viewed in context with their full stories. What’s true is that they always leave an impression, and it’s especially true when the craziness kicks in the final minutes.
While movie-going audiences are currently unpacking the ending of Zach Cregger‘s horror hit Weapons, it’s a good time to dig back into the final moments of some other movies that left audiences in shock. Fitting or not, good or bad, there’s no doubt that the final five minutes of these ten films are absolutely crazy.
10
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)
Image via MGM
Stanley Kubrick‘s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey has a surreal ending that has so many interpretations it has a separate Wikipedia page. That’s par for the course for Kubrick, who wanted it to remain ambiguous and let viewers puzzle it out, though the director did offer a more definitive explanation in an unearthed interview. Whether one chooses to believe that explanation or any of the other myriad options that have been proffered over the years is immaterial. The ending remains a singularly crazy experience.
Sent to Jupiter to investigate a mysterious monolith, astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), after already having contended with a homicidal artificial intelligence, comes face to face with his mortality as he is transported across space and time through a psychedelic portal that delivers him to an ornately decorated bedroom. It’s in this room that the film’s final five minutes unspool, as Bowman witnesses flashes of his life, all the way to being a withered old man bound in bed before being finally reborn as the cosmic entity referred to as the Star Child. There isn’t any interpretation of those final five minutes that isn’t crazy.
9
‘Scarface’ (1983)
Image via Universal Pictures
The ending of Brian De Palma‘s ultraviolent ’80s remake of the gangster classic Scarface seems all but assured. It is, after all, a classic rise and fall crime epic, and so it was only a matter of time before drug kingpin Tony Montana (Al Pacino) would experience the latter half of that equation. His fall, as it turns out, is just as blood-soaked and cocaine-fueled as his rise.
Having reached the pinnacle of his power and killed or driven away all of his allies, Tony sits in his Miami mansion as a crazed king, burying his face in a mountain of white powder upon which his kingdom was built. As armed assailants begin to storm his compound, Tony arms himself with an M16 with a grenade launcher and wages war against his would-be assassins. Spouting off iconic quotes, Tony mows down a dozen men before getting riddled with bullets and a hole blown in his chest. It’s a crazy, violent end for one of the craziest, most violent gangsters in film history.
8
‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’ (1989)
Image via Palace Pictures
Peter Greenaway‘s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is best known for its lavish visuals and extreme content in a twisted, erotic crime film centered on the titular characters and their interactions. The Thief is Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), who owns a restaurant and has delusions of grandeur despite his abusive, violent nature. His long-suffering Wife (Helen Mirren) begins an affair with a scholarly bookstore owner, Her Lover (Alan Howard), which naturally leads to death and carnage.
After Her Lover’s murder, the Wife enlists the help of the Cook (Richard Bohringer) of her husband’s restaurant to have his body cooked and subsequently forcibly fed to her husband in a final act of vengeance. It’s a darkly comic ending that’s as shockingly visceral as it is formally beautiful. Watching the despicable Thief forced by his Wife to eat Her Lover, who is displayed on a platter like the cannibal’s version of a whole hog roast, at gunpoint, is the best kind of crazy.
7
‘Dead Alive’ (1992)
Image via Trimark Pictures
Peter Jackson‘s splatstick zombie comedy Dead Alive (known outside the U.S. as Braindead) is basically wall-to-wall craziness. It follows poor, put-upon Lionel (Timothy Balme), whose overbearing mother becomes even more of a burden after she’s bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey, causing her to become undead. As she quickly spreads her sickness to others, it results in some unbelievable sequences of gore and gross-out humor, including the world’s worst custard desert. For a movie that involves two zombies having sex and producing an undead offspring, it might seem unlikely that the ending would be able to top that madness, but it does, and then some.
With Lionel finding himself with an entire house full of zombies to contend with, he grabs his trusty lawnmower and turns them into an undead purée, spilling gallons upon gallons of blood. That gory apéritif then leads into the bonkers final minutes as Lionel’s mother grows into a kaiju-sized zombie and then, in the most disgusting enmeshment in cinema history, she pulls her son back into her womb, which he then has to violently cut himself out of. It’s one of the most violent endings in movie history, but that’s why it works.
6
‘Arlington Road’ (1999)
Joan Cusack and Tim Robbins stand next to each other outside and look intimidating in Arlington Road.
Image via Screen Gems
Arlington Road is a serviceable thriller with a plot that doesn’t stand up to too much scrutiny, but has an explosive and iconic plot twist. Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) is a college professor who becomes convinced that his new neighbors (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) are domestic terrorists. His investigation into them alienates him from his friends and family, but also uncovers an apparent plot to bomb an FBI building.
In the film’s climax, Michael races after a van supposedly containing a bomb into the J. Edgar Hoover building. In almost any other thriller of this ilk made during the same period, Michael would manage to stop the bomb and thwart the villains. Arlington Road, however, gets real crazy in its final minutes as Michael discovers the bomb was never actually in the van; it’s in his car. The bomb explodes, the building is destroyed, Michael dies and is later vilified in the press as a terrorist. The villains win and make plans to move and stage a new attack somewhere else. It may not be a great movie, but that ending is bone-chilling.
5
‘The Mist’ (2007)
A shot from the ending of Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007)
Image via Dimension Films
Frank Darabont‘s adaptation of Stephen King‘s The Mist famously changed the novella’s more ambiguous ending for something far more definitive and bleak in one of the most notorious endings of all time. Set almost entirely in a supermarket where townsfolk are trapped after a supernatural mist envelopes everything outside, Darabont’s film is a particularly downbeat monster movie where, naturally, humans turn out to be the greatest monsters of all.
After escaping the clutches of a religious zealot, David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and a small group of survivors, including his young son, try to make their way through the mist, which houses all sorts of Lovecraftian beasts. They eventually run out of gas and, with the roars of bloodthirsty monsters in the distance, David uses his gun to euthanize everyone else in the car, his son included. That’s when he gets out of the car and welcomes death, but is instead greeted by the military, realizing they were mere moments from being saved. It’s a gutting ending for a movie that was generally overlooked upon release, but those final minutes are impossible to ignore.
4
‘Kill List’ (2011)
Image via IFC Films
Ben Wheatley‘s genre-bending hitman folk-horror thriller Kill List is filled with twists that turn the world upside down for its protagonist, Jay (Neil Maskell), a soldier turned contract killer whose most recent assignment earns him far more than he bargained for. Given a list of individuals to kill, Jay does so with a brutal efficiency made easier by the strange passivity with which his targets welcome death.
The final kill brings Jay into the realm of a bizarre cult, who capture him and puts him up against a malformed individual. Wearing a cultist mask and surrounded by the nude members of the cult, Jay engages in a vicious knife fight and slays his final target, only to discover that he has killed his wife and son. Jay’s entire kill list has been an initiation into the cult, with the murder of his wife and son his final sacrifice. It’s an underrated plot twist that’s also shocking, horrifying and crazy as hell.
3
‘Killer Joe’ (2011)
Matthew McConaughey in Killer Joe
Image via LD Entertainment
Before he’d made his official comeback as part of the McConaissance, Matthew McConaughey gave his darkest performance in William Friedkin‘s Killer Joe. He plays the psychotic titular character, a police officer moonlighting as a hitman, who is drawn into the orbit of a dysfunctional family out to collect on an insurance policy. Joe quickly takes control of the family, which includes holding young Dottie (Juno Temple) as collateral.
By the end, after Joe has completely manipulated and humiliated the family, he announces his intention to marry Dottie in one of the most twisted dinner scenes to come out of Texas since its chainsaw massacre. When Dottie’s brother Chris (Emile Hirsch) objects to Joe’s advances on his sister, a bloody battle ensues. Joe brutalizes Chris with the assistance of his father and stepmother until Dottie raises a gun. She kills her brother and gutshots her father before taking aim at Joe. She tells her abuser she’s pregnant and puts her finger on the trigger, and the screen cuts to black. It’s a Texas-sized helping of chicken-fried crazy.
2
‘Midsommar’ (2019)
Florence Pugh as Dani dressed in flowers and smiling in Midsommar (2019)
Image via A24
Ari Aster’s folk horror Midsommar has dread hanging over its entire runtime, much like his previous effort. Hereditary also has a crazy ending, but if it’s limited to only the final five minutes, then the director’s sophomore wins. Drawn into a strange Swedish cult, young couple Dani and Christian (Florence Pugh and Jack Reynor) have, by the end, already seen their friends slaughtered as sacrifices, which leads to the climax.
Dani is crowned as the May Queen and given the choice to select the final sacrifice, and she selects a paralyzed Christian in the most definitive break-up scene of all time. Christian is sewn into a disemboweled bear and placed in a temple that is set on fire, all while Dani watches on in an elaborate flower dress, going from grief to delight in one long, unsettling shot on Pugh’s face that drives the crazy all the way home.
1
‘The Substance’ (2024)
The Substance is not a subtle movie. It’s a blunt depiction of Hollywood ageism and sexism depicted through some incredibly gruesome body horror. Desperate to recapture her youth, faded celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) discovers the titular serum, which splits her into two distinct entities that trade their consciousness every seven days. As her younger, idealized self (Margaret Qualley) begins to disrespect the balance, Sparkle begins to age rapidly, eventually becoming decrepit and deformed.
After a heavy conflict, both entities become merged in a monstrous amalgamation that then turns on a hostile audience that revolts against her. It’s an explosive gorefest that sets the table for the final five minutes when Monstro Elisasue falls apart like a water balloon and Sparkles’ gooey disembodied head wiggles its way back to her Hollywood Walk of Fame Star. Wild, crazy Oscar-nominated madness.
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