Badmovies.org Forum

Just what it says!
Any examples?

Arlington Road
Frailty (depending on your take on it)
No Country For Old Men (although I guess he doesn't "win" so much as "get away")
Driller Killer - a lot of slasher flicks fit this category but that's the first one I thought of.

Not a movie, but "Deadwood" ended with the worst bad guy getting basically everything he wanted and then walking away.

Frailty is a very good example.

Scanners.  Though the "protagonist" wasn't that great a person either.
The Dorm That Dripped Blood.

That raises an interesting point; movies where there's a lot of moral ambiguity, it's hard to say whether the person who wins is the hero or the villain.  For example, most of Tarantino's or Leone's pictures, The Limey, and Pitch Black, you could argue that the person who wins is a villain (although the ones they were up against are even worse.)

I understand the subject of this thread. 

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

The Devil's Advocat (1997)

I think that in the most of zombie movies, the zombies allways win in the end.
Like Dawn of the Dead, Zombie 2, The Dead Next Door...

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

The last scene in it was sweet

Point Blank with Lee Marvin is one example and also The Recruit with Al Pacino. Mr Pacino's character actually loses at the end ~ watch it and see ~ but he ultimately wins.  

The Devil's Rain and Race With The Devil are also examples ~ another IMO is First Blood where the cops (the bad guys in the film) win out over John Rambo.

FUNNY GAMES

* INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (remake)
* PHANTASM
* THE PARALLAX VIEW
* THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (although, I guess this movie really doesn't have any good guys)
* SCARFACE (I guss this one doesn't have any good guys either)
* RACE WITH THE DEVIL

Eden Lake
The descent 2

Jeepers Creeper (first one).

Very freaky end.   :buggedout: :bouncegiggle:

Later,

John

Movie I think (unlike most people) is mediocre:

Dutch title: Spoorloos English title: The Vanishing (1988)




One of the few movies that ever truly scared me:

French title: Ils (2006) English title: Them

Extremely good movie!

As suggested by myself above, in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the "bad guys" are us and they "win" in the end.  This point is made much clearer in TOM SAVINI's 1990 remake. 

Intruder. The bad guy dies BUT there's a very funny twist ending...

Heres one to scratch your heads over could The Empire Strikes Back fit in this category. Darth Vader cuts Lukes hand off and while Luke gets away its just barely. Boba Fett takes Han Solo and Lando loses his city.

THE THING

The creature was not really a 'bad guy,' but the 'good guys' did not win.

I guess you're right!
I think that Friday the 13th series can be included in the list.
Jason never dies, excluding the fact that in the end of every part, someone kills him, in the sequel he's alive again.
He's even back from the dead!  :teddyr:

~George

Yeah, I wondered about that one too.  I think overall it's kind of a stalemate, Vader doesn't actually get Luke, but the good guys are in pretty rough shape too.  It's a great cliffhanger at any rate :)

Would Starship Troopers count?  

What do you mean? We're led to believe that the creature was destroyed, do you think that either McGreedy or the black guy were infected?

-Jimmybob

Whether or not they were infected wasn't the only issue at that point.  If I remember correctly their base and supplies had all been destroyed, they had no transportation, no way to communicate, and their next contact with people wasn't scheduled for a few weeks.  They were also in Antarctica, so they knew they would die from cold eventually. To top it all off it was nighttime, so it was probably colder than usual even.  The chances of somebody stumbling upon them was incredibly low.

The Great Silence.  Pretty extreme in that regard.

I'd have to go ahead and disagree on Scanners.  What happened to the main character sucks, but he's still alive and the bad guy isn't.

Not a bad movie, but the first thing I thought of was CHINATOWN.  A damn chilling ending.

All the Saw films, definitely

Thinking some more, I'd say The Dark Knight qualifies.  There's really only one significant victory for the "Good guys" in the film, and the final victory goes to the Joker.

Although it has been mentioned, Funny Games.  That one stands out to me the most of all the films.  The frickin' bad guys cheated!  If no other character in any other movie can use a remote control to fix things, then these a-holes shouldn't be allowed to do it either.  It ruins the movie.

Revenge of the Sith ends pretty badly, although Obi-Wan and Yoda did survive ultimately.  Wicker Man is another example that pops into mind.  Manos: The Hands of Fate is another example, though I'm still confused at just what happened in general.

It's not a movie, but a lot of the endings of When They Cry (Most events of the show loop over and over, changing all the time) have very notable bad guys winning situtions.  The Cotten Drifting one is my favorite.

A very interesting one is The Sidehackers.  What a freakin' load, especially after such a very depressing and extremely boring movie.  Was not my kind of pay off, even though I was watching the MST3K verison.

In general, I really dislike films where the bad guys win.  I just don't like how the bad guys get away with things.  Hell, I could settle with a bittersweet ending where the good guys die but the bad guys still get what they have coming to them.

I love movies where the bad guys win, because they are more realistic, and unexpected. I would love to see a spiderman or other superhero movie where the villain wins and the hero dies. I hate seeing stupid spiderman win all the time, I'D KILL HIM MYSELF IF I COULD!

You can't kill Superman, he's invulnerable! Haha! Just kidding.
I definately agree with you. Imagine Venom  killing Spiderman for example... Now that would rule!

~George

Not really a bad guy?  Uhm... if THE THING comes to Earth again, he/shee-It can live next door to you.   :wink:

I think we're led to wonder if THE THING was destroyed... and you didn't ask me, but I'll pipe in anyway with: I don't think they're infected, but neither is sure of the other, nor is the audience.  I love that movie.  

:thumbup:

Well, we could have a discussion about the morality of THE THING...was it really 'evil' or just doing its thing to survive?  That we ascribe OUR morality to it based on our own speciocentrism (I love making up words) does not make it transcendentally a 'bad guy.'

To it, we were probably bad guys for pouring kerosene on it and such... :bouncegiggle:

As for the ending, Carpenter, et al, purposefully left the ending ambiguous.  Childs was offscreen and out of contact with anyone for a little while, so we the audience can have our doubts.  We are more sure of McCready since he was onscreen more, but, ya just never know.

I love the darkness of the ending - it was perfect and is the real payoff of the movie (not the big creature finale)...on the commentary, it was mentioned someone suggested a helicopter rescue or some such, and I am SO GLAD they did not go that route.

All the Phantasm movies. With Phantasm IV being the biggest kick to the face of the audience leaving us with another cliffhanger that at the rate things are going, may never be resolved.

Neon Maniacs, because the monsters are still around and the kids know it and will have to keep dealing with them because no one else will believe them after what happened in the ending. They know what kills them but can they honestly keep in up forever?

Final Destination series. No matter what the characters do, in the end death will claim them for having avoided it in the first place.

Why are we only talking about "The Thing" in its Carpenter version?  It is a remake, after all, and the original "Thing From Another World/aka Who Goes There?" was very much a bad guy vs. good guy scenario and the good guys won.

I would say my personal business with Bad Guys winning would be Sergio Leone's "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly", because even as an eleven-year-old, I knew that Clint Eastwood's "Blondie" was NOT a "good" man by any stretch of definition.  Oh sure, he took mercy on the dying, but he caused a lot of dying as well -

Yeah, the various "Body Snatchers" references are good -

peter johnson/denny i am not who i seem crane

That's a really good choice.  Really unsettling, depressing ending.

Primal Fear.
Se7en (yeah he dies, but he still got what he wanted.)

The Blair Witch Project.  Though we never see the antagonist, the protagonists don't make out so well in the end.  I guess the sequel was the same way.  And then there's Blood Monkey which rips off the ending of Blair Witch.  Though once again they're monkeys and they kill people for whatever reason, so they're just doing their thing and not really "bad".

A recent example-

Drag Me to Hell-actually now that I think about it, this movie does the same thing as Quarintine and shows the last scene right on the poster, commercials, etc.  But maybe the ending of that movie was more of a given. 
Fallen with Denzeil Washington

Since the bad guys were demons they most certainly were evil.

Se7en. This would also go in my "Most Disturbing" list. I saw it in the theater, first run, and remember thinking that either our society had just crossed the line into unredeemable evil or I had just gotten too old. It was on cable last week and I purposely avoided it. 

If Se7en is the most disturbing film you've seen, then you haven't seen much...

The Usual Suspects.

YukXfiles, I've seen plenty of stuff more gory than Se7en in movies (and in real life), but there's more to something being disturbing than just blood and guts.

The monster wins in Creature From the Haunted Sea...it was cool to see a monster finally win for once. This was especially rare in the pre-60s.

"Who Goes There" has a contrived, almost happy ending as I recall.  When I first read the story, it had a great build-up.  Then they find the solution and all's well in the last few paragraphs.

Carpenter capture the paranoia of the story's build-up and put what is, in my opinion, the only real ending that story could have.  I think what makes this "remake" work so well is that it build on both the original source material (the story) and the Hawkes version.

But yes, I agree, in Hawkes version, the creature was definitely a bad guy...   :thumbup:

Some of the African historical dramas come to mind as possibilities for this list.  We've watched a few of these in the last year or so, but the only one that comes to mind is HOTEL RWANDA.  In a similar vein, I'd probably put BLACK HAWK DOWN on the list, keeping in mind that I am now defining "good guy" and "bad guy" from a certain social-national ethnocentric perspective.   :smile:

"Diabolik". It doesn't matter if you are in Diabolik's side or with the police, arguably they are both evil. The police and the government are corrput and play dirty, and Diabolik is a super-villain who robs and kills for pleasure.

"sweeny todd" a little--at least he doesn't get busted for the killing, but he tragically kills his wife

i was thinking though it would be great if they made more films from the villain's perpective, a close-up, the way "wolverine" was: like "joker" but made from his pov where batman was an annoyance and we see more of his motivation

Kristy Swanson in Deadly Friend actually killed people who deserved to die, so she wasn't necessarily a BAD guy.. but at the end she turns into the robot Beebee (an incredibly stupid scene) and kills her boyfriend.

Who Can Kill A Child
The House With Laughing Windows
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Hannibal

Trying to think of more but drawing a blank. 

Chicago.

They get away with murder...

A Bridge Too Far

If you consider the Germans the bad guys, then, yeah...




Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the one with Donald Sutherland)

Greatest reveal at the end of a movie, ever, I think.

Not only was Roxie a murderer, she was a completely despicable character from beginning to end.  I had a small degree of sympathy for Velma, but none for Roxie. 

Good one.

That is true, but his victory is very deservedly short lived...

Terminator 3.  They were trying to destroy Skynet's central core, but they found out that it was just software existing in cyberspace.  And it launched the nukes.  Okay, not really a bad "guy", but that's all I could think of  :teddyr:

I'm not sure if it counts, but the remake of Halloween 2.  Oh sure, hobo Mike gets killed, but he succeeds in driving his sister nuts, to the point where she has to be committed and starts seeing visions.  The movie is bad and the ending is already pretty crappy in my book, but when I thought about it as the villian winning in some sense, it felt like an extra kick in the nuts to me.

Pete Walker's FRIGHTMARE.  We can't be sure if the heroine is killed at the end but it really doesn't look good..

I think it's just adorable you edit what I write...  :wink:  Setting aside its "thing to survive," which it most certainly is doing, THE THING is a threat to every life form on Earth.  I'm with the humans, philosophically subjective as I am, torch the f**ker.  Yeh.  It's a bad guy.  

We agree this is a remake that stands on its own.  

Uhm... because the thread is called "Movies where the bad guy(s) win(s) at the end..."  :wink:

Spoiler:







Eden Lake (2008)

Actually you've reminded me about Halloween 3 (if it hasn't been mentioned yet  that is).  The commercial still goes off and apparently many kids have their head turn out by bugs and snakes.  

hehe... one day the humans will win... :)

VALENTINE (2002)

But The Bad Guy Had Good Reason For Doing What He Did , And The People He Killed Weren't Exactly "good people"

I tried to watch this the other night and couldnt do it. I dont think I made 5 minutes. A little too real for me.

I kinda disagree completly - John Connor survived and the "bad guy" (the female terminator thing) was destroyed. In consequence the ultimate bad guy (= Skynet) failed and is doomed to lose the war in the future.

Also: How Skynet is not a bad guy ? He/It wants to destroy humankind - simply because it/he thinks of us as a threat. For an action/sf movie it is more than enough to be the bad guy. A typical kind of bad guy for the genre too - found in several SF books and movies.


Twelve Monkeys - sort of.

Impostor - if we assume that the aliens who sent the title character were the bad guys - we know nothing about them or about the war (or who started it) though.

Here are a half dozen plus one. Historical and foreign films predominate.

" Cry of the Banshee"
Everybody dies, except the werewolf.

"The Great Race"
"You cheated. Cheated. I hate you. I refuse to accept. I wwon't win any way but my way. You've ruined my reputation, do you hear? , , , You I hate. . . . I refuse to accept. I challenge you to another race . . . Fire the cannon, Max."

"Lady Jane"
She dies. He dies. And their enemies sit on the throne of England.

"Lair of the White Worm"
The villainess is dead, but her form of vamprisim is spreading and the saved village virgin is in more danger than ever.

"The Mission"

The missions are destroyed, and those who seek to enslave the natives are ascendant.

"Nicholas and Alexandria"
E verybody dies, and the Communists win.

and
"1984"

One of the best historical movies of all times. I have only a small collection of films on dvds and Lady Jane is among them. There is a problem of definition of 'bad guys' again. It is hard to label Jane's enemies as bad guys - they are just political rivals on the same level in terms of morality imo.

wow I hate to spoil this...


Faceless (1988)

Silence of the Lambs, as Hannibal Lecter goes free.

 The Happening, where the things that caused most humans to kill themselves are not destroyed.

 The day mars invaded the earth. (Really old one.)

I don't think we have the same interpretation of that movie, and I've seen it a LOT of times...

Vale (the supposed good guy) sacrifices his body but he takes over Revok - Revok's eyes and voice change over to Vale's and there's a point in the sequence when Vale's face is melting off where you see him gain control.  His solution is to overtake Revok.  That's how I see it, anyway.  I hadn't thought of it as an open ending but I suppose it could be viewed that way.

Re: THE THING, I'm sorta surprised there hasn't been a recent attempt to remake that movie.  Hell, they're remaking every other movie from the 80s that was even remotely successful.  I think the reason they haven't is because Carpenter's creature effects were so good that any CGI garbage they'd throw together nowadays would look like Sci-Fi Channel schlock.  And it doesn't seem like there are any good effects people left in the business that actually make live action effects.  It's cheaper and easier to do CGI so that's what everybody uses even though it looks pretty bad most of the time.

Re: THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE, I don't see the Devil as actually winning at the end of that one.  He just gets another shot at an antichrist grandson.  Keanu could deny him again like the first time, we don't know.

Back to the topic, a few more off the top of my head:

DRACULA 2: THE ASCENSION (hey, it's been on a lot lately...)
KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (but they don't kill Shatner, goddammit!!!)
BASIC INSTINCT (open to interpretation I guess, but it seems pretty clear to me)
ROSEMARY'S BABY (evil baby!)
KOMODO VS COBRA (the melty-face guy comes back to life all lizardy at the end of the credits)
DR STRANGELOVE (the bomb, or maybe Slim Pickens being the bad guy)

I almost always root for the bad guys.  It's more fun that way.  :)