Monster of the Day #1440

Updated on September 30, 2016 By Ken Begg 16 Comments

I saw this in theaters back in the back. It was well enough made, but it has one of those endings I just hate.

For a lot of bizarre factors, the Cubs game last night was allowed to end in a tie. You don’t see that in baseball very often.

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  • Gah, this movie.

    Minor spoilers: You talk about endings that trash a perfectly good movie. This one’s a crime against the audience and the art or writing. They might have gotten away with it had it been a Twilight Zone episode–God knows Twilight Zone tried it often enough–but a full length movie? Really? You invest that much of your life in a film, you deserve something better than the filmmakers failing to be clever.

    As I said, gah.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Since I’ll never see this movie, just what was so awful about the ending?

  • bgbear_rnh

    There is no tying in baseball!

  • kgb_san_diego

    Think Nightmare City…

  • zombiewhacker

    No… think Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

  • Eric Hinkle

    Oh, the ‘It was all just a dream — no, wait, it’s real’ “shock” ending?

  • Marsden

    That’s what I thought, what happened, Ken?

  • More like the “He was dead/dying all along, so every scene I put you through for the past hour or so didn’t really happen and is completely meaningless ain’t I a stinker and deucedly clever” ending. The kind of ending where the writer, by rights, should be taken out behind a shed and smacked around with a clue-by-four.

    I’ve seen this ending work maybe twice (Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge). it’s like the “It was all a dream”, it needs a great deal of care and skill to be pulled off, and even when it is, you have to ask yourself what the flipping point was in the first place.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Ugh. Yes, I agree. I hate those sort of endings. Then again I’m probably just an uncultured Neanderthal, since I also think that O. Henry’s ‘Gift of the Magi’ is one of the worst things I ever read.

  • Ken_Begg

    End of the season. Both team’s playoff status determined. Both teams due to hit the airport after the game night to travel to another city for their next respective series. Long rain delay with no sign of letting up. Literally a perfect storm. It happens, but it’s pretty rare.

  • KeithB

    What movie is it?
    Just saw “The Mad Magician*” with Vincent Price and Eva Gabor on Get-TV. They seem to be playing a lot of classic horror this month.
    * I still don’t see how he cleaned up so quickly after the first buzz-saw death. Reminded me of the wood-chipper scene in “Fargo”.

  • James

    I believe it’s ‘Jacob’s Ladder’.

  • JJ Gauthier

    Although I normally hate that twist, too, I thought it worked in this one — the whole movie genuinely is thematically about him coming to grips with his life, his time at war, and his impending death. Like Owl Creek Bridge, it’s not just a cheap twist, it’s what the whole story is about.

    It helps, too, that the movie is genuinely nightmarish, both in the sheer intensity of its horror sequences and its wandering, dreamlike structure.

    I think it’s easy enough to have a knee-jerk reaction to that twist that it can be off-putting even when it’s done well. I know the last act of Mullholland Drive really ticked me off when I first saw it, but the more I thought about it, the more I understood and respected what the movie was doing and why it pulled that.

  • zombiewhacker

    And when it’s not done with a great deal of care and skill, you end up with George Romero’s Day of the Dead.

  • JJ Gauthier

    Day is in the same category as “Assault on Precinct 13” in the sense of “You can pinpoint the moment they ran out of money.”

    Mind, it’s not in Assault’s category in any other sense…

  • Luke Blanchard

    I think THE MAD MAGICIAN was Price’s first horror movie after HOUSE OF WAX. It’s really a semi-remake.