Movies With Plot Twists That Feel Tacked On

Post-Scream slashers like 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer aren't exactly known for their amazing twists, and the second movie in that franchise already had a doozy; however, the direct-to-video third installment, I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, still manages to get one up on the sequel.

Moving the setting from the coast to Colorado, the three-quel also leaves behind all of the original film's cast members, starting up a seemingly unrelated story in which some pranksters mimic the “Fisherman” slasher from the previous movies - and then start kicking the bucket.

The twist is, the killer this time around is none other than… the killer from the first movie, who is now undead and also in Colorado for some reason.

From pretty much the moment of its release, the 2019 Matthew McConaughey vehicle Serenity became notorious for its absurd twist ending. In the film, McConaughey plays a fisherman in a quiet resort town called Plymouth Island and gets caught up in a plot to knock off his ex-wife's abusive new husband.

Here's the catch, though: It turns out it's all a video game. In the film's “real world,” McConaughey's son is a computer programmer whose father died in Iraq, and who has written all this in lieu of talking to a therapist, which he might want to do instead.

Despite a cast that features both Bruce Willis and Halle Berry, the 2007 thriller Perfect Stranger seems to have dropped off of many peoples' radars. That might be because of its slipshod twist ending.

A twist that relies on the audience being kept in the dark about things the characters already know rarely works well, and this film is a prime example. The audience sees Berry's character investigating Willis's wealthy ad exec because she thinks he killed her childhood friend.

The problem is, the twist reveals Berry's character actually did the deed and is trying to pin it on someone else, which makes much of the preceding film feel pointless.

“Somehow, Palpatine returned.”

This meme-spawning line came, unsurprisingly, out of nowhere and undid much of what occurred not just in the previous movie in the third Star Wars trilogy, but also Anakin's redemption arc from the first.

This was part of an elaborate - and often unpopular - attempt to retcon much of what was also unpopular about The Last Jedi, including tying Rey's unknown parentage to the villainous emperor from the previous trilogies.

On any list of the worst twist endings in history, “the protagonist was the killer all along” pretty much always makes an appearance. And few movies have ever used this well-worn cliché to more ire than Alexandre Aja's 2003 New French Extremity breakout, High Tension.

Here's how Roger Ebert described High Tension's twist, in which one of the two women struggling to escape a slasher turns out to have been the villain all along: “…Something I think is not possible, given our current understanding of the laws of physics.” The twist itself he called a plot hole that is “not only large enough to drive a truck through, but in fact does have a truck driven right through it.”

Twist endings are usually reserved for psychological thrillers. Remember Me, however, is a 2010 romantic drama that nonetheless boasts a notorious twist.

For the film's entire run time, Robert Pattinson and Emilie de Ravin play star-crossed lovers who get together under misleading circumstances but fall genuinely in love. The picture navigates their tumultuous relationship and various family problems before revealing that the movie takes place in 2001 and ends as Pattinson's character perishes in the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.