Premiere Magazine's top 20 SWERVES~!

[The Third Dukes]

http://www.premiere.com/features/4042/20-b...lot-twists.html

In no particular order, and without spoilers since half of them are now common knowledge:

Planet of the Apes

The Empire Strikes Back

Fight Club

Psycho

Citizen Kane

Soylent Green

The Usual Suspects

Oldboy

Mission Impossible

Friday the Thirteenth

Chinatown

The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari

The Wicker Man

Twelve Monkeys

Jacob's Ladder

Eddie and the Cruisers

Angel Heart

The Game

The Sixth Sense

The Crying Game

So, what are your favorite movie twists?

[NobBe Nobbs]

Spinal Tap getting the fuck back together. Sure, it's by no means a real twist, but who gives a shit?

Wait a second, Citizen Kane? That's supposed to be a twist? OK, I didn't get what Rosebud was supposed to be, but that hardly qualifies as a twist. A plot wrinkle, maybe, but at a stretch

Edited January 13, 2008 by De

[DMN in the House]

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!

[Skummy]

It's pretty tricky to beat IT WAS EARTH ALL ALONG, really.

Jacob's Ladder's an interesting addition...I'm not sure what to make of that, as it's never really made clear what's a twist and what isn't, what's happening and what isn't; is he genuinely being pursued by demons in his everyday life, or is it all a nightmarish vision? Is the vision occuring to him in New York (or wherever he's meant to live), or is it in Vietnam? Was he ever in Vietnam in the first place? The end of the film would suggest that everything he's seeing is mad hallucinations and his "life flashing before his eyes" from his deathbed while in Vietnam, but the whole film is so abstract in itself, that why should we believe that the ending is necessarily a concrete answer to the question posed throughout? It's one of my favourite films, and while ultimately I'm sure it is an allegory for battling against death (the vision of hell as a hospital is one of the most powerful images in cinematic history for me, cementing my own fear of hospitals as well as being an intensely disturbing image in its own right), there's an argument that the ending itself is not necessarily a "twist" or swerve, but merely an extension in a continuous flow of hallucinations and visions.

The Sixth Sense is one of the most predictable twists in cinematic history. You can see it coming a mile off, and it's not satisfying when it's resolved; just Shyamalan being as much of a dick as usual and thinking that he can outsmart his own audience when, in all honesty, he's a medicore director who has pretty strong ideas but lacks the talent to flesh them out.

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari is another of my favourite films, a genuine all-time classic, one of the finest horror films ever made, and a wonderful twist (shamelessly stolen in "Identity", as it happens), but I think the main selling points of the film are its cinematography and composition, the twist is fairly clumsy, really, and not one of the better points.

"I Am Your Father" is a pretty obvious one, and so ingrained in pop-culture that I can't even imagine how it would have appeared to the initial audiences at the first screening of Empire.

Angel Heart is a good fun film (although not actually very good), but "Louis Cyphre" is the most obvious "twist" in history (twistory) and a horrible, horrible pun. Yawn.

[The Third Dukes]

I'm impressed you know of most of these obscure films, Skummy. I hadn't heard of probably six or so of them.

Angel Heart is a good fun film (although not actually very good), but "Louis Cyphre" is the most obvious "twist" in history (twistory) and a horrible, horrible pun. Yawn.

[thuganomic]

I love the twist in Primal Fear, both the book and the movie. I mean, it's not really hard to see coming, but it was just so evil that you didn't want to think it was possible.

[Skummy]

Fair enough, I didn't bother reading most of the entries on there, just covered what I knew, and Louis was one of the few things I remembered from that film, it's been so long since I've seen it.

Jacob's Ladder and Dr. Caligari are two of my favourite films, most of the rest of that list I've never seen; I recommend them both to pretty much anyone, though, Jacob's Ladder is the king of all psychological thrillers, and one of the few films to have legitimately unsettled me, while Dr. Caligari is (along with Nosferatu) really the godfather of all horror movies.

[TheRyno]

Jacob's Ladder is the king of all psychological thrillers, and one of the few films to have legitimately unsettled me

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

The Oldboy twist is interesting because it jsut leads to everything unravelling and the way the protagonist reacts to the situation is extremely interesting in modern cinema.

I quite liked Twelve Monkeys' twist as well. It stopped just short of vanishing up it's own arse and proved to be quite slick.

[LexChaney]

I'm shocked that Identity didn't make the list, but The Usual Suspects and Fight Club have to be two of my picks that I liked the mist out of the films that I have watched.

[Dan]

Fight Club is a damn good swerve.

[Skummy]

I'm shocked that Identity didn't make the list, but The Usual Suspects and Fight Club have to be two of my picks that I liked the mist out of the films that I have watched.

Identity was good, but it was essentially the same twist as Dr. Caligari, and seeing as Caligari did it first, I think its the better choice to have up there.

[Future-Shock]

Identity didn't really have a swerve, more of a "haha you were wrong for reasons that make no sense!"

The Usual Suspects however, owns.

[LL!]

That last film I would've suspected on this list was Dr. Caligari. Wow. That is awesome. More need to mention such a great film.