There is something about a perfect mystery movie that we all love. Whether it is a crime story, or a suspenseful novel that keeps you wondering, putting the puzzle pieces together while watching the screen, or a mind-bending psychological thriller, they all have something enticing that you can't get enough of, especially those with an unexpected end.
The '80s were a season that took the film industry by storm with surprising twists, endings, and conspiracies. The kind that draws you in with heart-pounding tension before hitting you with a plot twist in the middle or last scene. We're talking about movies created by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, John Carpenter, Stephen King, and many more.
If you like to be thrown in a loop at the end, or in the middle of a movie, then SPOILER ALERT, these 1980s mystery movies have been known to have endings that you will never see coming.
10 No Way Out (1987)
No Way Out is a thriller similar to Jagged Edge with a plot that gives us a lot of information, but still, it can be confusing because the more you watch the movie, the less you understand it. The opening scene of the movie features Alfred Hitchcock's usual plot: an innocent man is wrongfully accused of a crime, and all the evidence seems to be pointing right back at him.
As the movie progresses, the storyline becomes more complex, and makes a twist that, while some may feel overdone, actually makes sense given the general logic of its story. The film ends with Lt. Tom Farrell visiting the cemetery of the murder victim, following a long chase of dead bodies that brings the murder case to a close. He is then taken hostage by two assailants and interrogated, and it is revealed that he is actually Yuri, a Russian agent.
9 Dressed to Kill (1980)
At the start of the '80s, director Brian De Palma gave the world a taste of his masterpiece, Dressed to Kill, and it's a true mystery. It's all surprises from the start to finish, and is filled with unexpected twists. Dressed to Kill sent chills down spines, and got many mystery movie lovers into in the genre in the '80s. It has a mysterious plot about the murder of a housewife, and Liz, a high-end call prostitute from New York City, portrayed by Nancy Allen, finds the body, spots the killer in the convex mirror of the lift, and ultimately ends up becoming both the main suspect and the attacker's next victim.
Liz finds herself on the run for her life, and works with Peter, who is looking for revenge, to find the killer. This is where the plot starts to thicken, as we discover that Dr. Elliot is actually "Bobbi," the murderer who dressed as the housewife, Shocker! But this is just the first twist. There's a second. In the final scene, after killing a nurse and escaping the asylum, Elliott chases Liz to Peter's house, where he cuts her throat, only for her to wake up screaming and realize that it was all a dream in the end.
8 The Thing (1982)
The final scene from The Thing is among the most well-known and admired parts of this John Carpenter horror film. It is about a research station in Antarctica, where MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Childs (Keith David) are the only members of the research team to survive a run-in with a deadly alien that can assume the shape of any person or animal it comes into contact with.
During the ending, Childs shows up as MacReady sits by the burning remains of the station and claims he got lost in the storm while following Blair (the Thing) after they had been arguing and suspected each other of being the Thing for days. They drink a bottle of Scotch while waiting for a rescue that may never come, fatigued and on the verge of dying, while suspecting each other of being the thing. This concluding scene left its audience in awe, even to this day.
7 The Vanishing (1988)
In terms of movies with shocking endings, The Vanishing is definitely on this list. The ending of The Vanishing scared several people who watched it then, and still does so now. It is a different kind of love story and a terrifying drama that builds up slowly and gets scarier as it goes.
It’s about Rex and Saskia, a charming Dutch couple who go on a road trip, and stop at a petrol station for a break. Rex leaves to get drinks, but when he gets back, Saskia is gone. As Rex's hunt for Saskia lasts three years, things quickly turn into a "not-for-the-faint-of-heart" situation.
He runs into Raymond, a mild-mannered professor with a clinically devilish mind, and he turns out to be the one who kidnapped Saskia. He agrees to tell Rex what happened to Saskia in exchange for having the experience himself. In the end, Rex was drugged, and experiences the same terrifying fate as Saskia, as he is buried alive in a wooden box underground.
6 Angel Heart (1987)
Angel Heart kept its viewers in suspense until the very end. It had a straightforward ending, but still, you'll never see it coming. While it has some tropes of a million other private detective films, a few elements set it apart, which are horror and noir; two very dramatic genres, that combine to help it create a New Orleans-type of movie.
Angel Heart is one of those movies that would get even a mystery veteran’s blood boiling. And it’s one of Mickey Rourke’s best movies, where he is plays the role of a private investigator on an almost Lovecraftian case in the '90s New Orleans. All clues lead to only one person – the devil himself, the Prince of Darkness. At the end of Angel Heart, it turns out that Harry Angel and Johnny Favourite are the same person. Harry has been forgetting things he did because he has amnesia, and he has spent the whole movie looking for himself without knowing it.
5 Blow Out (1981)
John Travolta provides one of his best performances, as a film sound technician who thinks he accidentally filmed a political killing in Brian De Palma's captivating Blow Out.
After listening to the audio recording of the collision, he can clearly hear a gunshot just prior to the tire blowout that caused the collision, leading him to believe that the collision was actually an assassination. He asks Sally, who may have been an eyewitness to the incident, for assistance in finding the truth, although, despite her initial reluctance, she agrees to cooperate.
However, Jack is unaware that Sally is a co-conspirator, who has been hired as part of a broader scheme to blackmail presidential candidate McRyan. The fact that Sally dies at the end of the film renders Jack's audio cassettes useless as proof of a gunshot, allowing the crime to be successfully covered up. After constantly hearing the audio of Sally's voice and growing fixated on it, Jack returns to the editing room in the last scene and uses her death scream in a slasher movie.
4 Blue Velvet (1986)
David Lynch did a great job with Blue Velvet by showing us two planes of reality in the movie. On one level, we're in Lumberton, a simple-minded, tiny town whose inhabitants seem to be clones of 1950s sitcom characters and speak in television tropes. The story begins with Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey Beaumont, an innocent college student, returning to his hometown of Lumberton, North Carolina, where he discovers a severed ear in a field. While trying to uncover the mystery with the assistance of a local detective's daughter, played by Laura Dern, he finds himself entangled with Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has an entirely unhealthy hold over a local nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). From here, they begin to discover the underground world of their little town and many other dirty secrets.
On a deeper level, we are offered a tale of sexual servitude in which Frank kidnaps Dorothy's husband and son, and forces her to become his sexual slave. In the end, we see Dorothy hug Jeffrey and call him her 'secret lover' making Sandy agitated, slapping him. However, Jeffrey and Sandy reconcile and embrace, and Dorothy is reconciled with her son, while she returns to her apartment to find her husband and the man in the yellow jacket dead.
However, the most mysterious ending scene that left the true feeling of unease is the bird perched on the windowsill eating an insect.
3 April Fool’s Day (1986)
April Fool's Day was exactly it for 1980s fans of horror and thriller genres. This blockbuster movie portrays a group of college students who are on a weekend retreat at a remote island home and find themselves being watched by a killer.
The killer, a prank-loving girl named "Muffy," picks off a group of her friends on the weekend before April 1st at her mansion, where she has set up a variety of practical jokes, from simple ones like a whoopee cushion and dribble glasses to more complex and disturbing ones, like the recording of a baby crying in someone's room and heroin supplies in a guest's wardrobe.
However, things quickly turn out ugly and messy, as group members either disappear or are found dead. But Kit and Rob, after piecing together several hints, discover that everyone's initial thinking was wrong the whole time, as Muffy has a violent and bloodthirsty twin sister, "Buffy," who has been on the island with them from the very beginning and has been posing to be Muffy the entire time after killing her and placing her in the basement.
But the movie takes a kind of funny twist, because, after enduring a prolonged weekend of terror, the group finds out that it was a joke, or more precisely, a dress rehearsal, and Muffy apologizes to her friends over some bottles of champagne, explaining how she plans to transform the mansion into a resort offering a staged horror weekend.
Later that night, she finds a parcel on her bed after getting really intoxicated and going to bed. She discovers a jack-in-the-box inside when she opens it. The jack pops out as Muffy gently begins to crank it to open it. Nan abruptly emerges from behind the bed, grabs Muffy by the hair, and brutally cuts open her throat. Muffy yells. Nan smiles and shows Muffy the fake knife with the fake blood gushing out of it as a last back-at-you prank. "April Fools," Nan says to Muffy, as the jack-in-the-box winks at the spectators.
2 Clue (1985)
Clue is a movie based on the well-known board game and revolves around six guests, Mrs. Peacock, Miss Scarlet, Mr. Green, Professor Plum, Mrs. White, and Col. Mustard, who have been given aliases and are anonymously invited to a dinner party by their blackmailer, Mr. Boddy, who knows a dark secret about their past. On arrival at the mansion, Wadsworth informs the visitors that the police have been notified and will arrive in 45 minutes.
While threatening to expose them all if he is arrested, Mr. Boddy gives all six guests a weapon and suggests that when the light goes out, someone kill Wadsworth to make sure that no one outside the mansion knows their secret. But things take a different turn, as a deathly scream and a gunshot are heard as the lights are turned out, and when the lights are put back on, Mr. Boddy is evidently dead. Every visitor becomes a suspect, and everyone conducts an investigation to catch the murderer.
The director then goes a step further, though, by offering the audience three potential movie endings: "How It Might Have Happened," "How About This?" and "Here's What Really Happened."
1 The Dead Zone (1983)
Paramount Pictures
The Dead Zoneis a hit movie and an adaptation of the blockbuster novel by Stephen King. The movie tells the tale of a regular school teacher who finds himself thrown into an exceptional life that he grossly rejects, but things don’t turn out the way he wants. On his way back home from the residence of his fiancée, Sarah (Brooke Adams), a colleague teacher, Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken), is hurt in a car collision on an icy road.
After waking up from a five-year coma following the accident, Johnny learns of his new psychic powers, where he can see the past and future of people when he touches them, and that his fiancée is already married to someone else.
In an attempt to make good with his newly found powers, he gets a vision of the literal end of the world if Stillson, a charismatic but questionable politician played by the legendary Martin Sheen, wins the presidency. In order to prevent this disaster from happening, he tries to kill Stillson, but he loses his life in the process. However, not without seeing a future where Stilson’s political career is destroyed.
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