Movies where the bad guy(s) win(s) at the end

[ulthar]

Not really a bad guy?  Uhm... if THE THING comes to Earth again, he can live next door to you.   

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...

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.

[MST3KFan]

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.

[peter johnson]

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

[ChaosTheory]

The Great Silence.  Pretty extreme in that regard.

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

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

[Jack]

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".

[WingedSerpent]

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.

[Oscar]

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. 

[vukxfiles]

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...

[Nightowl]

The Usual Suspects.

[Oscar]

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.

[JaseSF]

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.

[ulthar]

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.

"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...   

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.   

[Neville]

"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.

[bionica]

"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

[retrorussell]

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.