Biohazard (1985)
The end of the movie is when you hear someone off-screen say “cut” and our hero says “I think that’s it”.
Then fade to black and credits, plus nearly 10 minutes of unfunny “blooper” footage in a movie that wasn’t supposed to be a comedy.
Available to view free on Tubi.tv - watch from about 1h10m, if you want to see it for yourself.
On the Mary Jo Pehl Show they watched Sorority Girl, which just kind of suddenly ends.
Act 1: Main character is terrible to people. People complain.
Act 2: Main character is terrible to people. People complain.
Act 3: Main character is terrible to people. People complain.
END
The Time Travelers
Time has either sped up or slowed down exponentially.
Everyone has gone back to the past.
The far future (beyond the post-apocalyptic wasteland everyone just escaped from) is a Florida golf course with added ponies?
Best part of the end of 2001, once I finally saw it, was that then I understood what the end of Clay’s last episode in Season 7 was referencing.
Beyond Atlantis randomly ends in a rushed, haphazard, and baffling manner akin to a bad Saturday morning cartoon. So it definitely is up there in terms of weird movie endings.
Monster A Go Go is a disaster of an ending, but it’s not so much ‘weird’ as it is grotesquely incomptent.
Can’t remember the movie, but one Rifftrax has a family staying in a house overnight and everyone slowly gets murdered until the end when the maid looks with a totally goofy face at the camera and says “Did you think the BUTLER did it?!”. The credits roll while the most cornball, nonsense music you can imagine plays. That’s up there is the weirdest end I’ve seen.
I’m surprised Phase IV hasn’t been mentioned in terms of weird endings.
Sounds like Legacy of Blood, if I remember right. Cinematic Titanic did that one, and it was baaaad.
If we’re expanding past the perimeters of MST3K, I gotta echo @SpaceTimC and go with the ending for The Doomsday Machine on Cinematic Titanic.
It’s like the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but played straight instead of comedically. You can pinpoint the EXACT moment that the money ran out.
The ending of The Black Hole was pretty friggin’ weird. Apparently they promised the actors it would make sense when it was finished. They lied.
That’s it. Yeah the film is grimy looking and the movie leaves you feeling how it looks. And that ending. Oi vey.
Which scene Carpenter re-creates for Escape from L.A.
It is known.
I saw this the other way: The big question of TotS is “is she crazy or haunted?” The movie leans one way, to the point when they lean back the other way, it’s basically cheating, then when it swings to a third way, they’ve kind of emptied their clip and have nowhere else to go, so the movie ends.
Fred Olen Ray! I think they covered this on Red Letter Media’s “Best of the Worst”.
Unrealistic visions of utopia. Hate 'em.
I think I’ve seen that unriffed.
Wut? Bad guys go to hell, good guys go to heaven. Makes perfect sense. I mean, I’m not sure what that has to do with a black hole, exactly but…
I’ve always interpreted the end to mean that no one survived the titular black hole, and that the Good Guys went to Heaven and the Bad Guys ruled over hell.
As an aside, I unironically LURVE that movie. It was the first thing I watched when I got a Disney+ subscription.
It’s one I would watch again. I found it…odd…at the time, but the aesthetic was good, the acting was good, the music IIRC was top-notch. (I’m much less sensitive to odd these days so I might really like it.)
Also, it has Maximillian Schell, MST3k Hamlet!
MST3K-wise, I’ll go with one that hasn’t been mentioned yet: Season 2’s ROCKET ATTACK USA. Back in the early Cold War, there was kind-of genre of thrillers with endings that were… let’s just say chilling. RA-USA was one of the earlier ones and certainly one of the worst. Other FAR better ones were On the Beach, Fail Safe, The Bedford Incident, and the best of them: Dr. Strangelove.
Yeah, I don’t quite think that closing shot of Art Metrano’s tie had quite the oomph that they were looking for.
The ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is not traditionally weird but it’s SUCH a shift that I can imagine people sat in stunned silence afterward (probably why they included the organ music from the “Intermission” over a black screen). It’s honestly one of my favorite endings ever.
My first time seeing it was on the “Special Edition” DVD. There are so many Pythonesque gags that happen before the movie even begins (hint: another movie plays at first, followed by the silly opening credits). The ending seems completely on-brand in context.
House (1977) has a disturbing ending shown as an uplifting one. The final scene’s song makes me cry (it doesn’t help that I first watched the movie on the weekend that my grandmother passed away). It lures you, and one of its characters, into a false sense of security before the inevitable occurs. It may not be as wild as the more extreme scenes but it still fits the premise of a child’s nightmare set to film.
Speaking of that type of energy, Evil Dead 2 's ending must have seemed incredibly wild to its original audiences. We all know now about the brilliance of the third film, but I wonder if audiences in 1987 thought it was surreal, even stacked up against the rest of the movie.
And that ending is somehow even weirder and fourth-wall breaking in the “Severely Edited For Television” version. (Heck, when those words appear on screen, someone cleverly dubbed over a comical foghorn sound effect! Kinda sets you up for the completely incredulous censorship ahead).
The ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is not traditionally weird but it’s SUCH a shift that I can imagine people sat in stunned silence afterward (probably why they included the organ music from the “Intermission” over a black screen). It’s honestly one of my favorite endings ever.
They had an actual ending in mind, but completely ran out of money so they just threw that together. Luckily, it fits their humor style perfectly.
Blazing Saddles sorta has a similar weird shift.
I can only say I, personally, didn’t. I thought it was great.
I remember hearing that one of their original endings had Arthur and the knights finding the grail in a modern London department store. I’m not sure if that’s what they had in mind when they actually were shooting, but it definitely matches the tonal shift of the final film’s ending.
Oh absolutely! The final half hour of that movie plays with the medium of film in ways I haven’t seen very often outside of art cinema. Brooks presents it so masterfully that it still makes a ton of sense.
The closest comparison (other than perhaps Python and SCTV) is likely something from the albums of Firesign Theater. Talk about interesting endings…