News > 11 Worst Film Endings

Written by John Lichman

A lot of things can ruin a good movie: the pacing, a single shot, Paul Haggis. But sometimes, all these things come together in some grand cinematic big bang of sheer insanity. ScreenGrab assembled their personal 11 (in part one and part two) and we're reprinting three that we very strongly agree with. To see the rest, go clicky-clicky. Also, it may not surprise anyone that at least three films are Spielberg helmer: Amistad, Munich and Saving Private Ryan.

That Fucking Ending, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942)

It’s perhaps the ultimate in movie-melting bad scenes. (We really wish we had a clip to show you, although, to be fair, its awfulness is best seen in the context of the awesomeness of the rest of the movie.) When RKO took over the cutting of Orson Welles’s follow-up to Citizen Kane, they hacked away over two reels worth of footage and then tried to tie it all together with a ridiculously hokey, "spiritual" happy ending. By most accounts, Welles’s original ending, detailing the sad decline and loneliness of the remaining figures in his family saga, was an exercise in haunting despair. That’s probably why the studio was so bothered by it. In their defense, the film reportedly had a rather divisive test screening. In Welles’s defense, however, he made a lot of cuts and trims himself after the studio requested them. But the unkindest cuts would come later, when the film was taken completely out of his hands. The result is one of the most amazing buzzkills in movie history: a devastating masterpiece that comically fizzles out before it even reaches its climax. 

 

 

Hobbit Pillow Fight, LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003)

It’s probably not quite right to call this a bad scene from a great film. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a great series, to be sure [I contest that. — ed.], but the third installment, which lacks the immediacy and novelty of the first and the grandeur and majesty of the second, is the least of the three films. Its biggest problem, though, is that it doesn’t know when to quit; by our count, it’s got at least five endings, none of them satisfactory. By this point, we’re torn between how fond we’ve grown of the characters and how much we want to get some damn closure, already. And while it’s understandable for director Peter Jackson to be unsure where to go out, given his sprawling source material, there’s absolutely no excuse for the false ending (we think it’s the second or third) where Frodo is reunited with his fellow hobbits, who commence to hop up and down on his sickbed in a disturbing display usually referred to as "the reunion scene" but probably better entitled Big Gay Midget Pillow Fight Party. Jackson’s LotR is already chock-full of homoerotic subtext, but this is ridiculous.
 

Some Very Bad Sex, MUNICH (2005)

We were tiptoeing and whispering all through Munich; could it be that Spielberg, the master of overstatement and bombast, had finally made a small, quiet, subtle movie about hard men facing a morally shaky situation? So it seemed for most of this otherwise excellent film’s runtime, but one of us must have coughed or sneezed or made our chair squeak, because BAM! — out of nowhere comes The Sex Scene. Out of nowhere, our tortured hero, abed with his wife, starts having a spasm not seen in motion-picture love scenes since Kyle MacLachlan sat underneath Elizabeth Berkeley. He flashes back on all the recent events in his blood-soaked life while shaking, sweating, glowering and, er, doing his manly duty, all in hyper-serious slo-mo, while the audience sits there aghast and wonders who let this guy into their movie. The overall effect is like someone farting during a eulogy, and then doing it over and over and laughing about it. The movie never recovers, but at least you can watch the rest of it at ease, knowing that nothing Spielberg’s going to do will be any worse.

 Commenters, what say you? Which films started out awesome and ended so, so horribly?