In praise of fake endings in movies and added sequences in or after end credits

(There are no spoilers in what follows)

Rather belatedly, I saw Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2.

An absolutely wonderful film.

At the end of the screening, only three of us sat through the end credits in the cinema.

The rest of the audience missed the five – count ‘em – FIVE – extra bits of full-screen live-action scattered amid the credits.

I am enthusiastic about film-makers doing this. It is an added bonus for genuine movie lovers.

Frankly, if people walk out before the end of the movie, they deserve to miss out.

What they missed at the end: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

When I saw On Her Majesty’s Secret Service on release in 1969, because audiences were so familiar, even then, with the techniques of film-making, about 20 people in the cinema walked out when the plot seemed to have been rounded-off nicely with James Bond’s wedding and there was a slow, rising and widening crane shot – a very normal end shot for a movie. By leaving before the credits had even started rolling, they missed out on the plot-changing coda to the film.

I have never been sure if this was or was not an intentional fake ending put in by director Peter Hunt.

Carrie – the 2nd most frightening sequence I have ever seen

The most famous intentional fake ending to a film (now almost de rigueur in horror films) is almost un-arguably Carrie (1976), where Brian De Palma, master of cinematic technique, with careful use of music etc, made the audience believe the main plot of the film had ended and then suddenly pulled out a shock from nowhere. I did not know there was a fake ending and saw the movie one afternoon towards the end of its run in London’s Odeon Leicester Square. I was sitting alone in the front row and there were maybe twelve people clustered in the back rows.

The original Night of the Living Dead – cheap but terrifying

When De Palma pulled the shock, there were multiple audible gasps and one shriek from the back of the cinema and – literally – I felt as if my blood had turned to ice. My blood ran cold.

Next to a particular unexpected shot in the middle of George A.Romero’s original Night of The Living Dead (1968) where those who have not seen it before almost always let out audible gasps, it is the most frightening shot I have ever seen in cinema. The bath scene in Les Diaboliques (1955) had little effect on me.

But, as well as admirable shock and fake endings, there is now a scattered genre of additional sequences at the end of films – Marvel have virtually annexed it as a house style, thus the FIVE additional sequences in Guardians of The Galaxy, Vol 2.

Kong: Skull Island had this extra end-teaser plugging a sequel

The recent Kong: Skull Island (2017) had a surprise addendum teasing a sequel and even the Fast and the Furious and Pirates of the Caribbean films have caught on to them.

Movies as far back as Airplane! (1980), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and American Gangster (2007) have used them fairly inconsequentially. At the end of Lethal Weapon 3 (1992) Richard Donner and Joel Silver blew up  an entire mega hotel for no reason. Just as a bonus, I suspect, for anyone who had sat through the credits. Good for them.

But I remember at least two addenda where the REAL ending of the film was missed by a large number if not most of the audience who just left when the credits started.

After the Young Sherlock Holmes‘ credits finish, there is a major plot revelation and someone raises an eyebrow

In Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), the film very definitely ended.

The credits rolled and then there was a long additional sequence which ultimately climaxed in a revelation about one of the central characters in the film which totally changed your understanding of what had happened.

L.A. Confidential (1990), has a relatively up-beat ending but, after the end credits have rolled…

L.A. Confidential: British TV viewers almost never see this end

…there are flash-forwards in the story which give the movie a much more cynical ending. I think I have seen it on British TV three times and, each time, the additional sequences have not been screened because, presumably, the people preparing the film for screening did not realise there was something else at the end in addition to the credits.

Returning to Guardians of the Galaxy, good old Marvel included a brief (unexplained) sequence with their character Howard The Duck in the first movie (2014).

Howard The Duck – appallingly buggered-up by George Lucas so he was nothing like the grouchy character of the comics

And, in Vol 2, he appears (again unexplained) in a brief sequence within the film itself AND within the end credits. I can only hope this means Marvel are, at some point going to make a movie of Howard The Duck, my favourite Marvel character who was mutilated and cutesified beyond belief in George Lucas’ vomit-inducing ultra-cuddly family-friendly film of 1986.

Maestro Stan Lee appears in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol.2

My hope rests on the fact that the final sequence in Guardians of The Galaxy, Vol.2 has Marvel Comics’ maestro Stan Lee referring to all the other good Marvel characters he has created.

Howard The Duck makes Rocket Racoon seem like Mary Poppins.

Howard The Duck ran for President of the US in 1976. Maybe he should do it again…

 

Rutger Hauer says more about life in “Blade Runner” than the Bible, the Koran and Douglas Adams

Last night, I watched Brian De Palma’s movie The Untouchables on TV. The music is by Ennio Morricone.

“That music is very sad,” I said to the friend who was watching it with me. “An old man’s music. He composed the music for Once Upon a Time in the West too. That’s melancholic.”

I think you have to be over a certain age to fully appreciate Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s not about death, it’s about dying and it’s very long.

On YouTube recently, I stumbled on the closing sequence of Richard Attenborough’s movie Oh! What a Lovely War.

I cried.

I watched it five times over the next week. I cried each time I saw the final shot. I bought the DVD from Amazon and watched it with a (slightly younger) friend. I cried at the closing sequence, watching the final shot. One single shot, held for over two minutes. She didn’t understand why.

Clearly the cancer and cancer scares swirling amid my friends must be having their toll.

Someone has put online all issues of the British hippie/alternative culture newspaper International Times (aka “it”).

I was the Film Section editor for one of its incarnations in 1974.

Tempus fugit or would that be better as the Nicer sentence Ars Longa Vita Brevis?

There comes a point where I guess everyone gets slightly pretentious and feels like Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner.

Especially when you look round comedy clubs and you’re by far the oldest person in the room and you don’t laugh as much because you’ve heard what must be literally thousands of jokes told live on stage over decades.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

With me, it’s flashes of memories from the 1960s.

I remember working at the long-forgotten Free Bookshop in Earls Court. It was really just a garage in a mews and people donated second hand books to it but – hey! man! – wouldn’t it be great if everything was free? I remember going downstairs in the Arts Lab in Drury Lane to see experimental films; I think I saw the long-forgotten Herostratus movie there. I remember walking among people holding daffodils in the darkened streets around the Royal Albert Hall when we all came out of a Donovan concert. Or was it an Incredible String Band gig? I remember the two amazingly talented members of the Incredible String Band sitting in a pile of mostly eccentric musical instruments on stage at the Royal Albert Hall; they played them all at one point or another.

No, I was right originally. It was a Donovan concert in January 1967. It’s in Wikipedia, so it must be true. On stage at Donovan’s gig, a ballerina danced during a 12-minute performance of Golden Apples.

I remember it.

Moments in time.

Like tears in rain.

It’s not true when they say that if you can remember the Sixties you weren’t there.

I remember being in the Queen Elizabeth Hall (or was it the Purcell Room?) on the South Bank of the River Thames in London, seeing the two-man hippie group Tyrannosaurus Rex perform before Marc Bolan dumped Steve Peregrine Took and formed what Tyrannosaurus Rex fans like me mostly felt was the far-inferior T Rex. And the Tyrannosaurus Rex support act that night on the South Bank was a mime artist who did not impress me called David Jones who later re-invented himself as David Bowie. I still didn’t rate him much as David Bowie: he was just a jumped-up mime artist who sang.

No, it wasn’t in the Queen Elizabeth Hall or the Purcell Room. It didn’t happen there. It was in the Royal Festival Hall on Whit Monday, 3rd June 1968. There’s an ad for it on the back cover of International Times issue 31.

The gig was organised by Blackhill Enterprises, who were part-owned by Pink Floyd.

The ad says DJ John Peel was providing “vibrations” and the wonderful Roy Harper was supporting.

I remember that now.

But the ad says “David Bowie” was supporting.

I’m sure he was introduced on stage as “David Jones”.

I think.

I used to go to the early free rock concerts which Blackhill Enterprises organised in a small-ish natural grass amphitheatre called ‘the cockpit’ in Hyde Park. Not many people went. Just enough to sit on the grass and listen comfortably. I think I may have been in the audience by the stage on the cover of the second issue of the new Time Out listings magazine.

I realised Pink Floyd – whom I hadn’t much rated before – were better heard at a distance when their sounds were drifting over water – like bagpipes – so I meandered over and listened to them from the other side of the Serpentine.

I remember a few months or a few weeks later turning up ten minutes before the Rolling Stones were due to start their free Hyde Park gig and found thousands of people had turned up and the gig had been moved to a flatter area. I think maybe I had not realised the Stones would draw a crowd. I gave up and went home. The Hyde Park gigs never recovered. Too many people from then on.

I remember going to The Great South Coast Bank Holiday Pop Festivity on the Isle of Wight in 1968. I went to see seeing Jefferson Airplane, Tyrannosaurus Rex, The Pretty Things, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Fairport Convention. I didn’t go back the next year to the re-named Isle of Wight Festival because top-of-the-bill was the horribly pretentious and whiney non-singer Bob Dylan. What have people ever seen in him?

Moments in time.

Like tears in rain.

Ars longa,
vita brevis,
occasio praeceps,
experimentum periculosum,
iudicium difficile.

You can look it up on Wikipedia.

Though equally good, I reckon is the ancient saying:

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

OK, maybe I spent too much time in the 1960s…