Everybody loves a good plot twist. As soon as word is out that a movie ends with a good twist, audiences flock to the theater to see what it is. You’re watching a movie, you think you know where it’s going, and then all of a sudden, the plot takes a totally unexpected turn and you’re left terrified, harrowed, or otherwise irreparably affected by it.

The best twists are unpredictable. If you can see it coming, then it’s not really a twist. Plus, the best twists mean that the movie can be enjoyed twice. You watch it the first time without knowing about the twist and get shocked when it happens. Then, you can watch it a second time and see all the hints that the filmmakers added in, hidden in plain sight, to set up what was coming. The perfect example of this is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which has a few twists and masterfully seeded foreshadowing.

For whatever reason, the films of the 1990s were rife with plot twists. You couldn’t go to the movies in that entire decade without having your mind blown by a drastic left turn in the story. That was how the studios got people to theaters back then. So, here are 12 Plot Twists That Hurt 90s Movies (And 8 That Saved Them).

20 Hurt: The Sixth Sense

M. Night Shyamalan made a strong debut with The Sixth Sense. However, the plot twist is inconsistent with the rest of the movie. The twist is what made it a hit – and it would become a hallmark of Shyamalan’s work – but it just doesn’t make sense.

If Bruce Willis’ therapist character has been deceased the whole time, then who hired him? And how did he not realize he hadn’t needed to go to the bathroom or open a door for months? Moviegoers don’t consider this when they finish the film, but as they think more about it, they begin to see the inconsistencies.

19 Saved: Fight Club

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The twist at around the midpoint of Fight Club is perhaps the most famous plot twist in movie history. That’s because it’s a real mind-bender, and it pushes the whole movie into another level of insanity.

As the Narrator realizes Tyler Durden, the false prophet he’s been following down a rabbit hole for months, is actually his second personality, he has a meltdown. He didn’t know what Tyler’s ethos was, or why Tyler had been rallying foot soldiers in an anarchist movement against corporate America, and now, all of a sudden, he had to wrap his head around being Tyler.

18 Hurt: Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump is sort of a Disney-esque, family-friendly lesson in 20th century American history. We learn about Kennedy, Watergate, Vietnam, Elvis, Apple – pretty much everything significant that happened during that time is depicted in the movie, with Forrest being involved somehow. It’s an elevated version of a Bill and Ted or Mr. Peabody and Sherman type narrative.

But the twist feels out of place. Years of drug use and prostitution have finally caught up with Jenny and it’s suggested that she’s patient zero of HIV. She finally marries Forrest and passes away a year later. She leaves him a son, but he still deserved a happier ending than that.

17 Saved: The Lion King

Disney hadn’t delivered a truly heartbreaking plot twist like the one in The Lion King since Bambi, around half a century earlier. No one, no matter how old they are, can hold back the tears as Mufasa perishes at Simba’s side. The fact that Scar let his brother perish is the icing on the tragedy cake.

Fans are excited to see the new live-action remake of The Lion King, but they nailed it the first time. The only thing the movie can improve on is the visuals, with today’s photorealistic CGI effects, so hopefully they change nothing and just animate it better.

16 Hurt: The Usual Suspects

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The twist at the end of The Usual Suspects, that Verbal Kint’s narration of the movie has been entirely fabricated based on words he saw around the room, is cool and surprising at first. Every audience member’s mind is blown as they realize that nothing they’ve just seen was true and they were deceived by Kint, just as much as Chazz Palminteri’s cop character was.

However, it’s a little absurd and unrealistic – and it means that the whole movie we just watched was based on false information and was therefore pointless. It’s a good movie, but ultimately, it feels like a waste of time.

15 Saved: Reservoir Dogs

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In 1992, Quentin Tarantino burst onto the film festival scene and changed the face of independent cinema forever with Reservoir Dogs, a heist thriller in which we don’t actually get to see the heist. We spend the whole movie trying to figure out who the undercover cop is, only to discover it’s Mr. Orange, the only one who got shot during the police raid.

Tarantino’s greatest strength as a writer is playing with what the audience knows, and that’s on perfect display here. We find out Mr. Orange is the cop when no one’s around, and then when they all come back, they’re still none the wiser while we know who it is. It’s way more effective than if the twist was left until the end.

14 Hurt: Scream

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The plot twist at the end of Scream which reveals that Ghostface had actually been two different guys the whole time – and not only that, two guys who were actually in the film’s central group of pals – is a head-spinner and makes a lot of sense in the context of the movie.

However, it makes Scream just another slasher and detracts from its deconstructive, self-aware nature. This is what fooled a lot of people into thinking it actually was just another slasher and not something smarter and more satirical than that, leading the Wayans brothers to spoof it with Scary Movie. This was weird, because Scream already is a spoof.

13 Saved: Jacob’s Ladder

Revealing that the character was deceased the whole time is one of the most overused and clichéd plot twists in the book, thanks to the seminal short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” but Jacob’s Ladder uses it expertly in a gripping psychological thriller about the mental effects of serving in the Vietnam War.

The fact that Jacob was not only slain, but slain by an American soldier, makes the twist even more surprising. There’s a remake of Jacob’s Ladder coming out later this year, with the conflict in Vietnam replaced with the conflict in Afghanistan, but everyone already knows the twist, so hopefully they’ll tweak it a little.

12 Hurt: The Game

David Fincher’s The Game, starring Michael Douglas as a man caught in an intricate game, is a suitably tense and mysterious thriller right up to the twist – and then it gets silly. He goes crazy and tries to take his life, only to land on a giant bounce house at a party in his honor, where his brother reveals it’s all been one big game.

But it’s so underwhelming. Nothing about the game actually makes sense, and it relied a lot on chance, like the chance that he would jump off the right building in the right place to land on that bounce house.

11 Hurt: The Devil’s Advocate

The Satanic legal thriller The Devil’s Advocate is really great up until its plot twist. Keanu Reeves plays a lawyer who is led down a corrupt path towards wealth and greed by Al Pacino, who turns out to be the Devil.

However, the twist reveals that all of that took place in an alternate reality and that Reeves hasn’t actually done anything since the trial at the beginning. It makes the whole plot redundant and also makes the movie less dark and more hopeful, which doesn’t work in its favor. It would’ve been a lot better if Reeves’ descent into Satan-approved corruption turned out to be genuine.

10 Saved: Primal Fear

This was a really harrowing one. In the ‘90s, Edward Norton starred in two movies with huge plot twists. In one, we spent the whole movie thinking he didn’t have a split personality and it turned out that he did have one. In the other, we spent the whole movie thinking he did have a split personality and it turned out he didn’t have one.

The latter one was Primal Fear, in which he plays a convicted murderer who claims his split personality “Roy” did the crimes. As it turns out, he doesn’t have any mental disorder and just took people's lives because he liked it.

9 Hurt: The Crying Game

Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game is a contemplative meditation on the mentality of the IRA, posing an IRA member who has a meaningful encounter with a captive British soldier and begins to question the morals of his actions as the protagonist.

The twist where his girlfriend turns out to be biologically male became the focal point of the conversation surrounding the movie, totally disregarding all of the plot’s political meaning. Now, The Crying Game is remembered as “the movie where the girl turns out to be a man” and not a timely study of the IRA’s ethos, all thanks to that twist.

8 Hurt: Twelve Monkeys

The twist at the end of Twelve Monkeys, where Railly holds a fading Cole and then notices a younger Cole watching his adult self pass away, causing the recurring dreams he’s been having for the entire movie, is interesting and ties the whole thing up in a neat bow.

However, it’s not original – it’s ripped straight from the seminal French film La Jetée. Plus, like most Terry Gilliam movies, the plot was so confusing at this point that piling a plot twist on top completely lost most of the audience. The movie ended up getting a TV adaptation that was actually pretty great.

7 Saved: Se7en

David Fincher sure likes his twist endings. M. Night Shyamalan is the one who’s famous for them, but Fincher does them just as often. Se7en has a few twists: John Doe turns himself in, then a FedEx guy delivers Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box, then Doe turns out to be his own final victim.

Fincher ratchets up the tension between each twist brilliantly and they string together in a continuous atmosphere of dread. He flipped the switch on the movie’s plot so many times that he felt the need to roll the end credits the wrong way – from the top of the screen to the bottom – and it felt right.

6 Saved: The Matrix

When Neo finds out his whole reality was just a simulation created by robots from the future to enslave him, we strap in for one of the wildest science fiction stories ever told. As soon as that twist busts our whole world open, we realize this is going to be a totally unpredictable ride.

The Wachowskis’ blend of Lewis Carroll allusion and cyberpunk homage was a surprise hit with audiences, leading to two sequels comprising a trilogy that is still considered a landmark in cinema history to this day. We owe it all to that mesmerizing and surprising plot twist.

5 Hurt: The Big Lebowski

For the most part, the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski is a fantastic mix of comedy and Chandler-esque mystery. However, the brothers followed the Chandler mold a little too faithfully, with Joel Coen identifying “a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant” as one of Chandler’s storytelling techniques that they emulated.

It’s a little disappointing when a plot turns out to be “ultimately unimportant,” like in The Big Lebowski when we find out there was never any ransom money in the first place. The movie is still a hilarious cult classic with a lot of memorable scenes and characters, but it would be nice if it also had an intriguing plot.

4 Hurt: The Blair Witch Project

The twist ending in the final scene of The Blair Witch Project, the movie we have to thank for the wave of found-footage movies that have given horror cinema a bad name in the past few years, is a bitter disappointment.

We spend the whole movie leading up to seeing a witch – the witch is in the title and she’s been haunting the characters from off-screen throughout the whole runtime of the movie – so it’s pretty annoying when we don’t actually get to see a witch. All we see is a guy standing in the corner of a dark room. Meh.

3 Saved: Pulp Fiction

For his second feature, Quentin Tarantino went bigger and better. The non-linear narrative of Pulp Fiction gave cinema the kick in the butt it needed. The opening diner scene, as well as its characters Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, wasn't addressed until the very end – when we realized Jules and Vincent were in the diner the whole time.

It ties the whole thing together and gives the movie an awesome ending as Jules and Vincent walk out of the diner, we cut to black, the credits roll, and we’re left to piece together the unusual, non-linear tapestry of plot we’ve just sat through.

2 Hurt: American Beauty

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American Beauty was a sharp, satirical study of suburban life. It was an interesting and organic plot twist when Frank turned out to be gay and had feelings for Lester. However, it was a step too far when Frank shot Lester in the back of the head.

We’re all familiar with the rule of Chekhov’s gun – if a gun is introduced as being present in a story, it has to go off – but this was an unnecessary plot contrivance. It detracted from the satire of suburbia that would eventually make the movie at hit with both audiences and Academy voters.

1 Hurt: The Shawshank Redemption

On the whole, The Shawshank Redemption is a cinematic masterpiece. It still has the top spot on IMDb’s list of the Top 250 movies of all time. However, it is hurt by one single plot hole in the big twist at the end.

When we realize Andy Defresne has escaped from prison by tunneling his way out and tacking a poster over the hole in the wall, one thing that stands out is how impossibly taut the poster is – taut enough to be pierced by a thrown rock – considering Andy had to put it back up on the wall behind him from inside the hole.