6 Absurd Movie and TV Plot Twists (That Really Happened)
There are a lot of things on TV that just don't happen in the real world: Nobody lives in a huge apartment in New York for a hundred bucks a month; single men don't adopt adorable moppets to sass up their lives; the ratio of fat guy to hot wife is substantially lower; and when George Lopez tells a joke, nobody laughs. But even unoriginal writing has to come from somewhere, and some of Hollywood's most outlandish plot twists didn't come from the booze-soaked mind of a hack writer; they came right from the damn newspaper.
#6.
Maternity Ward Screw-Ups
The Cheesy Plot:
If television and movies are to be believed, hospital maternity wards are a veritable breeding ground for incompetence and skullduggery. Take the 1961 Disney classic (or 1998 Lindsay Lohan atrocity) The Parent Trap: A light-hearted comedy about a divorce so bitter and hostile, the two parents split their twins at birth and lead them to believe that they are only children and that their other parent was murdered and fashioned into a stylish ottoman by Ed Gein (at least that's how we remember that movie, but we suffer from a bizarre mental condition that causes us to remember things as much more awesome than they actually were).
While you certainly can't blame the maternity ward for that wacky series of events--the parents were assholes and the kids were identical twins--what about babies that don't look like each other? That's a pretty common switcheroo in the entertainment world as well. It's happened multiple times on the soaps All My Children and One Life to Live, as well as The Ghost Whisperer. It's so common, TV Tropes has a whole section devoted to it.
Shit Gets Real:
It turns out there's a creepy amount of truth to this one: Apparently maternity wards in real life aren't too discerning when it comes to what parent gets what child, just so long as the little crumbsnatchers are out of their sight eventually.
For example, Marti Miller and Sue McDonald had no idea their families had been switched until one mother fessed up... 43 years later. Or Kay Qualls and DeeAnn Angell, who were switched in 1953. One of their mothers even told the maternity ward that they had fucked up. Unfortunately, she was ignored--a fact that can be attributed to the 1950s being a much simpler time, when having a vagina meant you didn't get to be taken seriously.
As for twins being separated, it happens so often that a research center was opened to study how their lives are different. Hell, even the classic "twins being mistaken for each other" gag has actually happened: In Spain, a woman discovered she had been separated from her twin in a Canary Islands maternity ward 28 years earlier, when she randomly stumbled into a shop that her sister frequented. And, since we stopped reading immediately after we verified our claims, we can only assume one turned out to be rather fussy and useless in a fight while the other spent her entire life relentlessly training in the art of kickboxing, and upon meeting decided to team up and avenge their master's death while learning valuable lessons about life from one other and doing the splits. Either that, or they just made out. That's pretty much all pop culture has taught us that twins do.
Van Damme is prepared to do both. At the same time.
Ha ha, we're so irreverent. What funny, completely implausible scenarios we come up with- oh wait, that happens all the time too--and in fact the twins have unwittingly married each other. God, that's so gross and disturbing we can barely masturbate to it.
#5.
The Unknown Rich Uncle Dies and Leaves You All Of His Money
The Cheesy Plot:
If you need to create some hilarious upper-class/lower-class hijinks, even just for an episode, nothing works quite as well as giving some broke loser a shitload of cash. Sometimes it's in the form of a bunch of hicks finding oil under their land (and moving to Beverly Hills) or winning the lottery. But most often, it's the forgotten relative who dies and leaves said shitload of cash to one of the poorest schlubs in the story. It happened on The Golden Girls (with the wacky stipulation that they take care of a pig) and The Drew Carey Show, and in movies like Brewster's Millions and the 80s Billy Crystal cop movie Running Scared. But seriously, in real life if you had a rich relative, you'd know, right?
Shit Gets Real:
Wrong. Take Sarah Snyder, who hadn't seen her grandfather since she was nine. Considering grandpa lived in a van, she probably wasn't expecting to inherit much more than half a bottle of Thunderbird and a few lice infested blankets when he died. It must have been quite a shock when she ended up with $263,000 that he'd been keeping in a vinyl suitcase. That's a nice haul, but we'd be willing to bet that suitcase was pretty nasty.
The suitcase may also have been meat
Even the dirt-poor schmoe who suddenly becomes a billionaire happens occasionally. Cavemen Zsolt and Geza Peladi (that's not an insult to their intelligence: they literally live in a cave) recently found out their grandmother had passed away, leaving them a $6.6 billion fortune. Their mother was apparently such a screaming bitch she had never bothered to inform her mom that she'd had kids, and lawyers only stumbled across these guys while doing genealogical research. Man, it's always the people that could use it the least, right? Damn cavemen probably blew it all on wheels and fire-sticks.
#4.
Running Around In the Enemy's Uniform
The Cheesy Plot:
Oh no! The Bad Guy Army (an army comprised entirely of men recruited from the Bad Guy province of Evilistan) has captured some character that you are emotionally attached to despite being absolutely useless! What are you going to do?! Easy: Beat up some guards, steal their uniforms (which will of course fit you perfectly) and sneak into the fortress. Because, naturally, evil people are incapable of facial recognition and won't notice random idiots they don't recognize charging around their workplace suspiciously murdering their fellow Bad Guys.
Shit Gets Real:
This is so common there are actually laws in the Geneva Convention about not doing it during war, which is kind of a bummer, because the movies make it look awesome! Even so, Hitler tried it in World War II (he wasn't a "play by the rules" kind of guy) and the results of that particular fuckup most likely inspired the hit comedy Hogan's Heroes. Because nothing provides joke material like concentration camps.
"Concentration Camp? More like Distraction Camp! Ha ha, no but seriously, I can't focus at all because I'm starving to death. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD HELP."
And then there was Friedrich Wilhelm Voight. Voight was screwed coming AND going, and not just because he lived in 19th century Germany. Voight didn't have a passport, so he couldn't get a job, and he didn't have a job, so he couldn't get a passport. In literary circles, that's what's known as a Catch-fuckthisisbullshit. At his wit's end, Voight decided to capitalize on Germany's love for mindlessly following authority, scrounged up a little cash and bought a captain's uniform. He stopped five soldiers on their way to their barracks and ordered them to follow him, which they did--because he's wearing the special pants, so he's got to be an officer, right? Voight got them to arrest the mayor and treasurer, and ship them off to Berlin, then walked off with four thousand marks. Nobody at any point questioned his credentials or even asked why they'd never seen this captain before.
Presumably out of fear of being bludgeoned to death by his giant brass balls.
there's 7 billion of us and about 6,000 years of history im sure a lot of fiction has happened.
ReplyHogan's Heroes was pretty popular in the early '60s in Germany. I watched it dubbed into German with a German family
ReplyI can't believe I never saw this article till now. lol I liked this, though the twins who married each other was just creepy.
ReplyImagine how they felt about the whole thing...how did they explain their sudden separation to their friends and family? Horrible.
I really don't think that you should have mentioned the Spanish case of twins in this article. The fact is that's part of a much, much wider context. During the years after the civil war in Spain, during the fascist Franco regime, nuns and priests used to take newborns from liberals and poor people and give them to rich fascists who didn't have any children. That's the reason why those women were separated. One remained with her true parents, the other was sent to live with rich fascists. In another case, a brother and sister living in A Coruña (or if you want to be a douchebag "La" Coruña") married and had children before they randomly discovered that they were brother and sister. They're still married, I believe, and the children are well enough, but it was one of many horror stories that occurred following the fascist regime in Spain.
Replytl;dr: Thanks to fascism in Spain, lots of kids were separated at birth.
Tetrodotoxin CAN cause a state in which the individual is 99.99999% "dead" (heart/respiratory rates so low they are undetectable without medical equipment, a pulse that is too faint to notice without equipment, etc), but it also causes a loss of consciousness; not to mention, the dose needed to induce such a state is so incredibly precise that you practically have to weigh it by the atom!
Reply"Zombies" originated from the use of Datura/Belladonna alkaloids (atropine and scopolamine) that are extremely potent anti-cholinergics. Acetyl-Choline is one of the most important neurotransmitters, and perhaps one of the most "versatile" in its functions. These functions include everything from heart rate, digestion, and other autonomic processes all the way to skeletal muscle control, memory and conscious thought.
Thus, when administered continually, keeping the blood concentration extremely stable, and at a rather high level of course, it induces a delirium (imagine trying to think while your brain literally had all of the world's clouds condensed into one fog and injected into your skull), and causes skeletal muscles to become, essentially, "permanently contracted" in the form of severe spasms.
Thus, the person ends up becoming temporarily incapable of expressing conscious thought, EXTREMELY controllable via induced suggestibility, and they walk with a very "stiff" gait.
Thus, ZOMBIES
Lohan's Parent trap isn't that bad of a remake from what I remember nor do most critics or average people hate it....so WHAT do you mean "Atrocity"? beacuse if it's just about what she became after that remember what Lucas became after episode 4, what Godfather came after Part 2 and what great 80's icons like Kurt Russel have been reduced to (he was in a small budget movie called touchback where he played the lead's coach)
ReplyAlso, voight did have some HUGE balls.
Also, there are a ton of "Parent Trap" remakes or ripoffs, so much that when the Lohan one came out, I said "yet another remake? Come on!"
f**k you for dissing the cure! if your going to make a joke, actually make it funny and not half-assed
Replygood day sir!
ReplyI am glad to check the article. I am a professional woman. I am just divorced. I lo ve younger men. I am dat ing a man who is 25 year old. he's caring, kind, has a real job that earns him good money and he is very attractive. I think younger men like cougars because they have no agenda, don't usually want to get married and are usually very independent and don't need a man to take care of them.I meet the younger men on this place COUGARKISS,C 0 M.
Um...France didn't have a Victorian Era. Victoria was English.
ReplyThe Guy Goma thing is the dark side of multiculturalism and political correctness. Fifty years ago, such a mixup could never have happened, because the reporter would have realized instantly that anyone who could barely speak English must be an idiot, and not someone to interview.
ReplyIf the worst thing to come out of the "darkside" of political correctness and multiculturalism is that someone gets interviewed by mistake, I think I'll stick with it.
I actually have a doppelganger who robbed a petrol station and stole a few cars. And he was caught, so I wasn't arrested.
Replysure "he" was the robber who was caught....
I don't know...if I ever met a girl who looks EXACTLY like me...my first thought wouldn't be "I need to f**k the ever-living s**t out of that guy-I mean, girl!! She's so me!!"
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesI do not think they were talking about identical twins , I think identical twins have to be the same gender since it gets divided at cellular level, while none identicals can be as different as any brother/sister since it happens with two different ovaries fertilized at the same time
Doesn't matter had sex.
Actually there have been multiple studies finding that people are more attracted to a face that resembles their own than one that doesn't, including a few where the subjects overwhelmingly chose as most attractive a picture of themselves "morphed" into the opposite gender.
I worked with a guy who called to say he couldn't come in because his car was gone. He tried to call a taxi but his bank accounts were empty. His twin brother had jacked his identity and fled the state. It took forever to sort out, because the bank had video of "this guy" coming and and cleaning out all of his accounts, so they weren't responsible.
ReplyThe guy literally had an evil twin.
That makes my day - Partly because I'm an only child :)
You only THINK you're an only child, you mean. The hospital and your parents obviously conspired to separate you from birth so you could have wacky adventures when you eventually do meet.
I presume there's a picture of The Cure there because you used the word "depress" right above it.
ReplyThere's also "get really, horribly sick", that could also apply.
"And, since we stopped reading immediately after we verified our claims, we can only assume one turned out to be rather fussy and useless in a fight while the other spent her entire life relentlessly training in the art of kickboxing, and upon meeting decided to team up and avenge their master's death while learning valuable lessons about life from one other and doing the splits. Either that, or they just made out. That's pretty much all pop culture has taught us that twins do."
ReplyHa!
Alyson Hannigan was also in a movie called Switched at Birth. Two down...
ReplyThe rich relative thing literally just happened to me. Found out my grandpas new younger wife is stealing from my great grandma and when we took her to the bank to look over her bank statements we found she has over 2 million. She failed to tell us that she was one of the founders of one of the biggest banks in california. When asked why she wouldnt think to ever mention it she said "didnt think it was important". *facepalm* Old people were raised not to talk about money and ive found its pretty commonplace that they hide their assests.
ReplyThat guy's face when he heard a different name. Priceless. hahahaha
ReplyFriedrich Wilhelm Voight also known as the Hauptmann von Köpenick. In Germany he's a folk hero, they have made films about him, one with Heinz Rühmann in the lead role.
Reply#6 is scary. It might have happened to me, like, seriously. They handed some baby to my mother and she told them it wasn't me, so they presumably gave her the first newborn they had lying around, and tada... f**k me.
Reply