Among MSTed movies, let’s not forget The Crawling Hand, where a random cat eats the monster.
A favorite in our MST-watching club is Tammy and the T-Rex, a “comedy” where the girl’s boyfriend’s brain gets put into an animatronic dinosaur and seems to “become” a dinosaur in some ways (killing some people, eating things) despite also having the mind of the boyfriend. At the end, the brain is removed, but the body is dead and buried by that point. So in the end, they just leave his brain in a pan! The final scene is of the girl doing a sexy strip for the brain, who laments that he doesn’t have a body! THE END!
It’s a teen comedy as imagined by H.P. Lovecraft’s mi-go.
This is a movie that occurs when someone calls up Steward Raffill (The Philadelphia Experiment, Mac and Me) and says, “Hey, Stewart, we’ve got a dinosaur for exactly 17 days. Shoot us a picture!”
As far as non-MST3K movies go, Disney’s The Three Caballeros doesn’t so much end as it just… stops, after devolving into madness. It’s like someone animated a fever dream.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great movie; after Fantasia, it’s arguably the most highly regarded of the Disney “package” films (despite it’s problematic content from a modern context), it’s just a very abrupt ending.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is also right up there, both in its TV and film endings…along with Akira, the original run of Mobile Suit Gundam, Space Runaway Ideon…
…yeaaaah, weird endings were definitely an item in classic anime and/or manga.
This is not on the show but it looks like others have shifted away from that anyway. I have only seen this on RT, but even the riffing wasn’t enough of a shield. I even tried watching it twice to see if the initial trauma blocked out the logic and a second time would make it clear, but no. Whatever logic exists only in the mind of the filmmaker. If there.
I’m talking about Godmonster of Indian Flats. The movie starts out as a weird B monster movie with a mutated sheep, but it continues on to some out-of-towner being accused of killing a guy’s dog to the guy almost being executed and then some strange climax that takes place in a landfill with a man shouting and laughing. Quite frankly, I’m surprised his line wasn’t something along the lines of “I’M THE GOD! I’M THE GOD!” And then it’s over. It’s so utterly bizarre that it’s beyond weird, beyond words at all.
Buckaroo Banzai ends with a kiss and a Jamaican alien in a straw hat saying “so whaat, big deeal,” and then becomes a strange marching cast parade with Jeff Goldblum in furry chaps.
Which then raises the philosophical question: would it be weird for a (relatively) weird movie to have a (relatively) normal ending, or would that be normal?
Are weird endings to weird movies only weird if they’re bad movies? Because I mean, most of the movies mentioned ^above are pretty weird (looking at you, Dark Star).
The whole movie is designed to feel like it’s a random middle entry in a huge franchise that doesn’t actually exist (and in those pre-Internet days, standing a good chance of actually fooling a lot of people). Stuff like the watermelon is specifically to play into that. And funnily enough, it now feels a lot like trying to start something like the MCU in the middle.