6 Recent Movies Nobody Told You Were Completely Insane
For the most part, when you plunk down your hard-earned money at the multiplex, you more or less know what to expect. A Marvel movie will feature epic superhero battles, a Fast & Furious movie will be full of car chases, and a new Star Wars promises two hours of space adventures followed by an eternity of petty internet squabbling. But as we've mentioned before, sometimes movies that seem normal take a hard left turn into madness once the lights go down.
SPOILERS follow for films like ...
In Serenity, Everything Was ... A Video Game?
Serenity (not the good one) was marketed as a noir melodrama, and that's how it plays out at first. Matthew McConaughey is a rugged fisherman, and Anne Hathaway is his mysterious ex who offers him $10 million if he bumps off her abusive husband.
Then things take a turn -- as in, a plot twist in an episode of Black Mirror written by your stoned college roommate. The movie continually cuts away to show some random kid, whose voice McConaughey can somehow hear. Is he a ghost? A memory? Nope, he's the one who designed the simulation everyone is living in. We'll wait while you clean up the coffee cup you just dropped.
That's right, the movie takes place inside a fishing video game which this kid has modded in order to digitally resurrect his dead dad (who looks like McConaughey), so that he and his mom can get revenge on his real-life stepdad. It's bonkers. And at the end, when McConaughey finally goes through with the murder, this inspires the boy to do the same thing in reality. Even weirder is that this means the late-night Cinemax portions of the movie were also overseen by this teen. For some reason, he used his technical know-how to vividly simulate his parents banging on a fishing boat.
Related: 5 Recent Movies (You Never Realized Were Completely Insane)
Robin Hood Is A Fever Dream Of A Batman Ripoff
In the opening of the new Robin Hood movie, our hero gets drafted into a Crusade while wearing a shirt he seemingly picked up at Ye Olde J. Crew.
The war plays out like a Mark Wahlberg movie, in which crossbows are basically machine guns and all the costumes are Antifa outfits.
The movie clearly wants to emulate the Dark Knight trilogy, so much so that Robin Hood is just called the Hood, and gets to retain his (wait for it) secret identity as a wealthy playboy. In one of the weirdest scenes in any Robin Hood movie. Nottingham Castle throws a casino night that looks like Terry Gilliam partnered with Cirque du Soleil to direct your nightmares.
While Robin was away, Maid Marian hooked up with Harvey Dent -- sorry, Will Scarlett -- an ally of Robin's with a different methodology. In the end, Marian gives in to true love and kisses Robin, causing the nearby Scarlett to drop a Molotov cocktail he was holding. Then he falls into the flames . The stupid twist of this stupid setup? Now he's horrifically burned like Two-Face, and becomes the villain. In the end, he's the new Sheriff of Nottingham.
Related: 10 Insane Movies And Shows To Watch Out For In 2019
In Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, Meryl Streep Is A Goddamn Ghost
The original Mamma Mia centered around Meryl Streep's character, Donna, yet in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, she's totally dead. How? For some insane reason, this question is never even addressed, though her untimely demise would have had to have occurred fairly recently. Audiences were likely surprised that Donna died offscreen between movies, partly because Streep is front and center on the film's poster. But to be fair, she does show up at the end ... as a G-G-G-GHOST!
This movie left some critics wondering if it even took place in our reality, with one positing that it takes place in some kind of afterlife dimension full of ABBA tunes -- which, now that we're saying it, we realize is in fact Hell. For starters, time seems to have no meaning in these movies. In Here We Go Again's flashbacks, we learn that young Donna graduated college in 1979. So Donna's trysts with her three mystery men, as recounted in the first movie, happened that summer. That means her daughter Sophie was born around 1980. Sophie is 20 in the first movie, meaning the original Mamma Mia took place in the year 2000, even though it was made in 2008. While there's nothing in the first movie that contradicts this, bizarrely, Here We Go Again is specifically set five years later. Meaning that it takes place in 2005, despite the fact that people use iPhones and tablets that wouldn't be on the market for years to come.
Perhaps most bizarrely, the sequel introduces Donna's mother -- but she's played by Cher, who's only three years older than Streep. If that wasn't weird enough, they strongly implied in the first movie that she was dead. Further proof that this series take place in Satan's disco of the damned.
Related: 6 Crazy New Movies That Slipped Under Audiences' Radars
Life Itself Is Practically A Horror Movie
Fans of This Is Us likely went in to creator Dan Fogelman's movie Life Itself expecting a similar brand of sappy melodrama. But what they got was far more intense. It starts from the first scene, which is surprisingly bloody and more surprisingly narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. We're introduced to both Oscar Isaac and Annette Bening, right before Bening is graphically run over by a bus, presumably because this movie is set in the Final Destination universe.
This causes bystander Jackson to freak the hell out and quit narrating.
We're gonna take an enormous leap of imagination and guess that he wrote that dialogue himself.
But wait, in a crazy twist, this is all just a screenplay Isaac is writing in a Starbucks. At this point, we are only five minutes into the movie.
It turns out that Bening is really Isaac's therapist. He recounts the troubles he's had with his wife, and all the grisly details of her biography (which include her father being decapitated in front of her when she was a child). Oh, and it was his wife who was killed by a bus. While she was pregnant. And if you think that's the end of this aggressively depressing chapter, Isaac then shoots himself in the head during his therapy session, because this movie hates you.
And this is but the first of five chapters -- one of which takes place in the future year of 2079, where bizarrely, nothing has changed for some reason. Oh, and there's a dog named "Fuckface," because internet comedy writers were apparently this movie's key demographic.
Related: 5 Totally Crazy Film Genres You Had No Clue Existed
If You Thought The Genie Looked Bad, Meet Will Smith's Lucifer In A Winter's Tale
A Winter's Tale seemed like a typical fantasy romance starring Colin Farrell ... at first. Farrell plays an orphan taken in by a demon, played by Russell Crowe. And if "Demon Russell Crowe" seems like off casting, wait until Will Smith shows up as his boss, Lucifer. He even grows CGI fangs as he chastises Crowe, like some kind of awkward Fresh Prince / Critters fan film.
Satan's minions poison Farrell's love interest so that his "miracle" can't happen. But bizarrely, the poison is activated through sex, so at one point, Farrell literally fucks a woman to death.
"LET ME DO THIS MY WAY!"
A whole bunch of other crazy stuff happens, and in the end, Farrell finds salvation through true lov- just kidding, he stabs his adoptive father in the neck, which causes him to turn into an ice statue for, presumably, reasons.
And we haven't even mentioned Farrell's (sigh) flying horse.
The Nutcracker And The Four Realms Turns The Sugar Plum Fairy Into A Sexy Villain
Disney's The Nutcracker And The Four Realms tried to turn the familiar story into a fantasy adventure, but just ended up steamrolling into abject unpleasantness. The movie starts, like the ballet, with young Clara leaving a Christmas party and discovering an enchanted land, where she meets the heroic Nutcracker and the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Things deviate slightly from tradition when the Sugar Plum Fairy reveals the four titular realms, and that she needs a special key to operate a fancy laser to make toys sentient so she can create an army to protect her realm. Less Disney magic, more the kind of thing you'd expect to find in an anime with translation problems. Clara has to travel to the fourth realm, which is full of horrifying clowns and ... little else.
When she returns, she discovers that the Sugar Plum Fairy, a benevolent force in the ballet, has been conning her and is the actually a villain. The Notorious SPF creates an army of giant toys to conquer Nutcracker-land. And she's unusually sexual around her new, presumably genital-free toy soldiers.
After leading a giant battle (which includes a Godzilla-sized Victorian automaton) Clara zaps the Sugar Plum Fairy with the giant laser. Again, this is an adaptation of the famous ballet.
A fitting end that dumb old Tchaikovsky never had the courage to try.
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