Bad Twists

 A few years ago late at night I watched the 2005 thriller Hide and Seek on some local channel.  Just as it was getting to the final act, though, the movie went to commercial and after the commercials the channel went to some old Friends rerun.  WTF?!  I couldn't find the movie on Amazon Prime or Hulu or anything and I didn't feel like paying to watch the last 20 minutes or so, so I just put it on my watchlist on Amazon in case it ever did go on Amazon Prime.

Then Halloween when I was looking for something to watch, I realized the movie was finally on Amazon Prime.  So I decided to watch the whole thing.  The movie is about a psychiatrist played by Robert deNiro and his young daughter played by Dakota Fanning moving to upstate New York after his wife and her mother kills herself.  The little girl starts playing with an imaginary friend named Charlie, but then it starts getting creepy when a cat is drowned in the tub and she blames it on Charlie.  Eventually "Charlie" kills someone.  

When the movie cut off the first time, I still didn't know who "Charlie" was supposed to be.  The red herring is the creepy neighbor.  When I got to watch the final act, it's revealed that deNiro is actually Charlie.  Apparently seeing his wife kissing some other guy at a party caused a psychotic break and so he murdered her and then started playing with his daughter as "Charlie."

Instead of clever, I thought it was a pretty lame twist.  To that point the movie had really done nothing to set up this twist.  There's a vague mention of him having a bad childhood, but nothing about any schizophrenia or anything like that.  So it just sort of comes out of nowhere.

There's a similarly bad twist in the James Nguyen disasterpiece Julie and Jack.  In the first act Julie and Jack go out to dinner a couple of times and tour their native San Francisco and fairly normal stuff like that.  Then it's revealed they're actually meeting in virtual reality all this time.  Wait, what?  Why the hell are you eating at restaurants in virtual reality?  Really they could have been skydiving or base jumping off the Eiffel Towel or jumping around the moon.  I mean come on t's virtual reality!  Have some fun with it.

Except A) that would have been too expensive for a lower-than-low-budget movie and B) If they had done wild stuff like that it would have tipped viewers off that they were meeting in virtual reality.  But would that have been so bad?  I don't think this first twist was really that important that it needed hidden.  It wouldn't have tipped people off to the other twist:  that Julie is in reality dead and her consciousness is on the Internet.

I get that if you have a twist you don't want it to be spoiled too early, but at the same time you don't want a twist that comes out of nowhere or doesn't really make sense.  Or like the movie Duplicity where the twist made me think the main characters were morons with how easily they were duped.  When you're doing a twist ending, you have to be careful.