6 Recent Movies Nobody Told You Were Completely Insane

6

In Serenity, Everything Was ... A Video Game?

Serenity (not the good one) was marketed as a noir melodrama, and that's how it plays out at first. Matthew McConaughey is a rugged fisherman, and Anne Hathaway is his mysterious ex who offers him $10 million if he bumps off her abusive husband.

Aviron PicturesMcConaughey and Hathaway, seen here wondering where it all went wrong.

Then things take a turn -- as in, a plot twist in an episode of Black Mirror written by your stoned college roommate. The movie continually cuts away to show some random kid, whose voice McConaughey can somehow hear. Is he a ghost? A memory? Nope, he's the one who designed the simulation everyone is living in. We'll wait while you clean up the coffee cup you just dropped.

That's right, the movie takes place inside a fishing video game which this kid has modded in order to digitally resurrect his dead dad (who looks like McConaughey), so that he and his mom can get revenge on his real-life stepdad. It's bonkers. And at the end, when McConaughey finally goes through with the murder, this inspires the boy to do the same thing in reality. Even weirder is that this means the late-night Cinemax portions of the movie were also overseen by this teen. For some reason, he used his technical know-how to vividly simulate his parents banging on a fishing boat.

5

Robin Hood Is A Fever Dream Of A Batman Ripoff

In the opening of the new Robin Hood movie, our hero gets drafted into a Crusade while wearing a shirt he seemingly picked up at Ye Olde J. Crew.

Lionsgate Films

Lionsgate Films95 percent illiterate population, written draft notice. Makes sense.

4

In Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, Meryl Streep Is A Goddamn Ghost

The original Mamma Mia centered around Meryl Streep's character, Donna, yet in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, she's totally dead. How? For some insane reason, this question is never even addressed, though her untimely demise would have had to have occurred fairly recently. Audiences were likely surprised that Donna died offscreen between movies, partly because Streep is front and center on the film's poster. But to be fair, she does show up at the end ... as a G-G-G-GHOST!

Universal PicturesThough, being Meryl Streep, she could've accidentally walked onto set while checking her phone and still gotten top billing.

This movie left some critics wondering if it even took place in our reality, with one positing that it takes place in some kind of afterlife dimension full of ABBA tunes -- which, now that we're saying it, we realize is in fact Hell. For starters, time seems to have no meaning in these movies. In Here We Go Again's flashbacks, we learn that young Donna graduated college in 1979. So Donna's trysts with her three mystery men, as recounted in the first movie, happened that summer. That means her daughter Sophie was born around 1980. Sophie is 20 in the first movie, meaning the original Mamma Mia took place in the year 2000, even though it was made in 2008. While there's nothing in the first movie that contradicts this, bizarrely, Here We Go Again is specifically set five years later. Meaning that it takes place in 2005, despite the fact that people use iPhones and tablets that wouldn't be on the market for years to come.

Universal Pictures

Universal PicturesOf course, it's also a 2005 where everybody still cares about ABBA, so maybe the alternate reality idea holds water.

3

Life Itself Is Practically A Horror Movie

Fans of This Is Us likely went in to creator Dan Fogelman's movie Life Itself expecting a similar brand of sappy melodrama. But what they got was far more intense. It starts from the first scene, which is surprisingly bloody and more surprisingly narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. We're introduced to both Oscar Isaac and Annette Bening, right before Bening is graphically run over by a bus, presumably because this movie is set in the Final Destination universe.

Amazon Studios

This causes bystander Jackson to freak the hell out and quit narrating.

We're gonna take an enormous leap of imagination and guess that he wrote that dialogue himself.

2

If You Thought The Genie Looked Bad, Meet Will Smith's Lucifer In A Winter's Tale

A Winter's Tale seemed like a typical fantasy romance starring Colin Farrell ... at first. Farrell plays an orphan taken in by a demon, played by Russell Crowe. And if "Demon Russell Crowe" seems like off casting, wait until Will Smith shows up as his boss, Lucifer. He even grows CGI fangs as he chastises Crowe, like some kind of awkward Fresh Prince / Critters fan film.

Warner Bros. PicturesWe guess Will Smith was so impressed by the goofy big-mouth CGI in I Am Legend that nothing would do but to get in on that awesomeness himself.

1

The Nutcracker And The Four Realms Turns The Sugar Plum Fairy Into A Sexy Villain

Disney's The Nutcracker And The Four Realms tried to turn the familiar story into a fantasy adventure, but just ended up steamrolling into abject unpleasantness. The movie starts, like the ballet, with young Clara leaving a Christmas party and discovering an enchanted land, where she meets the heroic Nutcracker and the Sugar Plum Fairy.