How would you change the ending of a movie featured on MST3K?

In the closing host segment for The Girl in Lovers Lane, Crow and Servo are filled with rage over how the movie ended. In response, Joel helpfully points out: “You can write a different ending if you want… yeah, it’s just fiction, I mean, you don’t have to accept the ending they hand you.”

With that in mind, if you wanted to change the ending of a MSTed movie, which movie would you choose and how would you change it?

Maybe the hero wins this time! Perhaps the villain gets away with everything?

Is a happier ending or a darker ending in the works?

Would you want to write an ending that has more closure, a conclusion that’s more ambiguous, or an outcome that opens up the possibility for a sequel?

You decide!

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Space Travelers: Gene Hackman is the one who dies. Especially if you’ve seen the original Marooned, in which it’s made absolutely clear that the disaster is literally all his fault.

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That, I haven’t… that is interesting and puts a whole different spin on it all.

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The Starfighters ends with everyone going into a corn field for some good old de-tassling.

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Instead of just putting up “The End” at the end, I’d have written an ending to Attack of the Giant Leeches. Something like one of the bombed-out leeches rising Glenn Close-like out of the water, hovering menacingly over the sanctimonious damsel in distress, dripping algae and icy death from his bloody stump, only to be gunned down by a swarm of Tommygun-wielding hillbillies. Then sanctimonious Steve-headed PigBenton would say something like, “'Twas beauty killed the beast.”

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The end of Sidehackers is dismal. If I can only change the ending (as opposed to a lot of the story that makes it so unpleasant to watch), then, I’d change the end to be this huge showdown starting but then, he realizes that this won’t fix anything, won’t bring his girlfriend back, and instead he lets the psycho get taken down by the police and walks away, still broken but trying to be better than he was going to be.

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Big twist at the climax of Escape 2000 : Moon Grey (“Devil Vampire Woman”) isn’t dead from a gunshot wound after all. :smiley: She can rise from the grave at will. She comes back to the scene of the final battle and saves a seriously wounded Trash, aiding Strike (and his bratty kid) in a victory against the warden and his flunkies.

As they wrap up the battle and survey the carnage post-victory, she helpfully reminds them that Con-Huge-Co is still very much active and threatening to the lives of the remaining poor in the city. She tells them that they’re doomed to fail in their fight unless they also decide to join the ranks of the undead. No one else is strong enough to have a chance of surviving the corporation’s depredations. She’s still only one person. She can’t do it all alone. Furthermore, there are only so many times she can return after dying. The next time could be the last. Someone has to continue the fight when she’s dragged to Hell for good.

Having offered them this “goats’ dessert,” she smiles in close-up at a dying Trash, then bares a fang. We pan back and roll credits: leaving the fellas’ decisions to our imagination.

* “Goats’ dessert” - In Yiddish folklore, “A rock and a hard place.” You get two choices and they’re both terrible.

(Seriously, I love Moon. She’s the best female character in the whole damn series.)

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I would end Manos: Hands of Fate when the opening credits roll.

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How about ending Monster a Go-Go with an actual frickin’ monster?

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I’m always annoyed by the end of The Amazon Colossal Man. All the pieces are in place, they have the giant, goofy syringe ready to go… just follow through on the action you’ve been setting up. The whole movie is about efforts to save him, they develop a risky potential cure, they come up with a plan to get it to him in the nick of time, and then he falls over and the movie stops. We don’t even get a “twas beauty that killed the beast.” Just, “ARGH” “FIN.”

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There are a lot of disaster movies that end with a group of people smiling and congratulating each other. It would be more realistic for them to perhaps collapse from exhaustion and cry. I don’t necessarily want to see this type of ending, but I sometimes think about what the next day in such a fictional world would realistically look like. Someone has to clean up Yongary’s corpse before it harms everyone downriver, right? :stuck_out_tongue:

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King Dinosaur: The Emotional Scientists fail to clear the blast radius

Santa Claus: No one ever goes to the observatory. As a result, Santa ends up trapped on Earth and is found guilty of breaking and entering. Adding insult to injury (or perhaps the other way around), Dante gets a chomp on Santa’s hinder, which gets infected. Evil wins and a Hell on Earth is established. But since this is Pitch’s brand of Evil, it’s more of a Heck on Earth.

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Two words: Megaweapon Lives!

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I would move the ending of Manos: The Hands of Fate to the moment the car is pulled over and the words “Manos” The Hands of Fate appear on the screen.

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Love finds a way, and the stars of Kitten With a Whip settle down and have a couple kiddos.

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Jimmy in “I Accuse My Parents” has an epiphany that he’s been acting like a douche the whole time and, yes, his parents DO have some deep rooted issues that could have stunted their parenting abilities. However, in spite of that he is able to humbly approach the judge as a mature man and fully accept responsibility for his ridiculous and naive actions that should have been obviously and overtly underhanded if he wasn’t lying to himself about every shady deal and job he performed.

He realized that his parents are imperfect themselves and he knows he has to stand up and accept responsibility for his own actions without being a puss who can’t be strong enough to separate his actions from the shortcomings of his fallible parents, whom he had once used as an excuse to be ignorant and obtuse when he didn’t want to admit that he knew better when he was an immature child, but since his actions led to such a devastating consequence for someone he never met, he decided to grow up, face the music, and accept that it was his series of poor decisions that led to the circumstances that brought him before the judge, not those of his parents. Sure, we all wish he would have had a better lot drawn, but his decisions were chosen by him alone.

He can then ask the judge for mercy as he knows his mistakes and will not make them again, but he alone made the decisions that hurt another. He has learned that his inability to see reality led to his involvement with a crime that ended another person’s life. He apologizes to the family of the man and tells them he would like their forgiveness when they feel ready to bestow it, he will accept it gratefully. Also, he will spend the rest of his life attempting to be a better man than he was when he decided to work with men who ended another man’s life.

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Invasion USA and its horrendous cop-out ending of cutting back to the bar with the revelation that the entire film was some kind of fortune-teller’s hallucination via mass-hypnosis malarkey. I understand if they didn’t want a “downer ending” sort of affair, but what they went with was ridiculous.
The film was made before anything like The Twilight Zone, or even Plan 9, so I can’t necessarily blame them for not thinking to close on some narrator saying to camera “You see, if we’re not careful, the Soviets could win”, but at the end of the day, that would definitely have been the best alternative.
At the very least though, maybe make it a discussion between the characters of what could happen instead of an hallucination, that way, whenever we cut back to the bar to see the characters discussing the latest events, hints could be put in that suggest its not real, or that the situations are merely hypothetical, since all we’ve got in the film proper is that the bartender, as the only one not under hypnosis, is jovial about it all, which isn’t particularly effective foreshadowing, if it’s even meant to be.

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Beast of Hollow Mountain - I would let Mr. Jimmy and Filipe live happily ever after with Panchito as their new adopted son. They would fight the dinosaurs together!
Brokeback Hollow Mountain!

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Welcome defgav!

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