< Shoot the Shaggy Dog

Shoot the Shaggy Dog/Film

  • The Coen Brothers LOVE this trope. There are a few exceptions, but the vast majority of their films end with most of the characters dead and their accomplishments (if any) negated. Specific examples:
  • John Woo's masterpiece, The Killer, is sort of an example; the protagonists bring down a mob boss, but the main character dies before he can reach his goal, to raise enough money for the eye transplant of the singer that he blinded in the movie's first shootout. Not only that, but in a rare antiheroic example of Karmic Death, his Plan B of having her use his eyes falls flat when that's where the mob boss shoots him. And the other protagonist, a maverick cop, is arrested by his fellow officers when he finally guns down the mob boss to avenge his friend and keep the villain from getting away with it all because he had done so right in front of them in cold blood after the boss had surrendered to them, so he can't use the money to have the singer's eyes fixed either. When Woo piles on the tragedy, he piles it on.
  • Despite his valiant efforts, the hero of Night of the Living Dead utterly fails to protect any of his fellow survivors from the Zombie Apocalypse, and in the morning, as the sole survivor, is unceremoniously shot by a ragtag band of zombie hunters that doesn't bother to look very closely at their targets.
  • An extreme example is seen in the 2007 horror film The Mist. In the movie, a thick, billowing fog has swept over the countryside, bringing with it hordes of ravenous otherworldy creatures, and several dozen people are trapped inside a supermarket with the monsters outside and no way to contact the outside world. Near the end of the film, a group of people led by the protagonist make a break for it in the hero's jeep. After a brief stop at the hero's house to confirm that yes, his wife is dead, the five of them (including the hero's little boy) decide to ride on until either the mist ends or their fuel runs out. Naturally, the fuel runs out first...and our group is surrounded by mist, likely to be snatched up and killed horribly as soon as they leave the car. They make an unspoken decision to commit suicide, but there's five of them, and only four bullets. We cut to outside the car, and there are four shots. Then we see the hero in a car full of corpses, screaming in grief and repeatedly trying to shoot himself with the empty gun. But it doesn't end there... he exits the car, screaming for the monsters to come and get him...and not half a minute later, tanks and jeeps roll through the fog. Monsters are being blasted with flamethrowers, and trucks of survivors are being driven through. And the mist is being cleared...
    • Also note the truck is coming from the back, so they were driving from salvation all along.
    • There is one other interesting detail: The survivors include the mother who left in the beginning, having successfully found her children.
      • This mother begged the protagonist to come with her, but he declined because he had his own kid to look after. That sure backfired.
    • You know what's really frustrating? The original short story by Stephen King ended with the first spoiler, Bolivian Army Ending leaving it likely they would die, since the mist had spread all the way across New England, but allowing room for optimism. (Although King has said that he liked the alternate ending of the film.)
  • In The Strangers, the titular villains manage to overpower and kill the lead characters.
    • Subverted. Yes, the villains stabbed Kristen and James seemingly to death. However, Kristen turns out to still be alive! At first glance, you might think that makes no sense. However, Dollface showed feelings of guilt. It can be inferred that she was the one who was supposed to stab Kristen to death, but since she didn't have the stomach for it right then, she actually didn't try that hard to kill her!
  • The Japanese Tokusatsu feature film Casshern did this in spades. The story hinges on a Crapsack World After the End where everyone is dying of pollution, fallout and biochemical warfare agents unleashed in the last world war. A scientist creates a 'Neo-Cell' project where new organs can be grown at will and the human body regenerated and rendered immortal. This is the setup for a Freak Lab Accident that creates a race of Badass superhumans that must be battled by the hero, the scientist's dead war hero son resurrected by his father's techniques and suited up with an awesome cybernetic combat suit. Naturally this all goes horribly wrong - and turns out it was never right in the first place.
    • If the fact that Casshern basically fails to do anything heroic whatsoever during the entire movie, backfiring spectacularly every time he tries to save innocent people and spending most of the film killing rather sympathetic Anti Villains who themselves engage in pointless violence for no reason wasn't enough to make this pointless and Glurgey, the ending really cements it. I guess it was meant to be a Deconstruction of the usually upbeat Tokusatsu genre, but...what?
  • Buried.
  • Rocket Attack USA, a 1960s propaganda piece featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The heroes manage to infiltrate a Soviet missile base, but the missile launches anyway (with hilariously awful special effects) and wipes out New York. "We cannot let this be... THE END."
  • See the entry under Diabolus Ex Machina for Sean Penn's film The Pledge.
  • The Cube series:
    • In the original Cube, characters are repeatedly set up as heroes in an escape for their lives from a mechanical maze, but they all end up dying or being killed by another character, except for the Idiot Savant character. He would be the only person who could sound the alarm or summon help, but would not be able to communicate the situation, assuming he understood it at all.
    • The sequel Hypercube is even worse. After many perils, the main heroine manages to escape the maze but once her superior has received what she was sent in to find, he has her unceremoniously executed for no apparent reason. Her facial expressions indicate that she knows what's coming, but she does not try to resist or escape.
    • Cube Zero, a prequel to Cube shown from the point of view of the maze operators, reveals that the savant was in all likelihood killed by the operators moments after the first film's ambiguous ending due to a cryptic line near the start of the movie. It also turns out that Rains manages to escape, but will continue to be pursued until recaptured. Wynn is lobotomized and thrown back in the Cube like many Cube "Operators" before him. Everybody else dies except for the villains.
  • Nevil Shute's On the Beach.
  • Alien 3 starts out by killing off the characters that Ripley saved (including a little girl), stranding her on a prison colony, and showing that for all the pyrotechnics of the second film, the alien menace is still at large. Needless to say, a lot of fans consider the series to have ended with the previous film.
    • This also extends to the comic adaptation, Newt's Tale, which tells Aliens' events from the perspective of the titular girl of the same nickname. Not only does it spoil her eventual fate in the third film, but it makes the extended backstory (where she narrowly escapes after her mother and brother are massacred by the xenomorphs during the colonists' last stand) more pointless than her appearance in the sequel. The comic book adaptation of the third film goes one step further and makes a point of showing her death by drowning.
  • In Chinatown, the protagonist spends most of the movie investigating the murder of the head of the water department, uncovering a rather complicated conspiracy in the process. He eventually discovers the villain, who's revealed to be so evil that he even raped his daughter and fathered a child by her but In the end he gets away with everything, taking custody of his incestuous grand-daughter at the same time, and the police shoot the protagonist's love interest dead as she attempts to flee with the girl. As the famous quote goes: "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."
    • Supposedly, the original script had a happy ending with the the Big Bad being shot, and Jake getting the girl, but Roman Polanski insisted on this sort of ending. Which becomes incredibly creepy when you consider Polanski raped at least one teenaged girl in real life.
    • The Ghost Writer, another of Polanski's films, ends with the title ghostwriter getting run over by CIA agents after not quite exposing that the CIA controlled post-9/11 British policy via the Prime Minister's wife. Then again we're only told his "accident" was "really nasty" and the PM did manage to get his memoirs published before he was killed and if anyone else notices that each chapter's opening sentence sound a bit weird before they're recalled and burned....
  • "The only thing that's changed[...] is that a few ineffectual people have died." Yep, that just about sums up Robert Redford's Jeremiah Johnson...
  • Sha Po Lang (Killzone in the US) is a Hong Kong police movie that pretty much ends with all of the cops dying. Including the Badass and The Captain. Fortunately, the Big Bad doesn't get away unscathed either. He kills the Badass cop by throwing him out the window of his skyscraper....and right on top of the car the Big Bad's wife and baby were waiting in. Ouch.
  • Both the original German and English Remake versions of Funny Games follows a Hope Spot with a Diabolus Ex Machina to ensure that the movie has a Downer Ending. The entire movie is a Take That at its own audience, so it's somewhat to be expected that it would Shoot the Shaggy Dog as well.
  • Epic Movie ends with the four lead characters being inexplicably flattened by a runaway water wheel, making the whole movie pointless. Even more so than it already was.
  • Brazil ends with the revelation that the film's "happy ending" was just a hallucination, and the main character was actually tortured to insanity
  • Ran. Influenced by King Lear, Akira Kurosawa managed to make his film incredibly depressing. Nearly everyone dies or is pointlessly killed. The father, Hidetora, lord over a great clan, plans to divide his kingdom to his three sons, expecting them to be loyal even though most of his power came through bloodshed, war, and treachery. He ends up banishing the third and youngest brother, who warns him of the stupidity of such a plan. He stays with his first son, at the First Castle. Through a large chain of events, Hidetora loses everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. He is left insane, and his only hope is his youngest son. When the father manages to reunite with his youngest son, he dies due to an arrow from an enemy soldier, and the father dies of a heart attack. The ending scene is bleak, as the blind brother of Lady Sue, wife of one of the other brothers, is left alone, as his sister was killed. He ends up dropping the gift his sister gave him, and is left to die in the ruins of his father's castle, forgotten.
    • The Sengoku period (in which the film is set) is infamous for constant, often senseless violence, and general chaos. Even the title, Ran, can be translated as "chaos".
    • Kurosawa seems to be fond of Shooting the Shaggy Dog. Ran is a good example, but his best is probably The Bad Sleep Well, his (very loose) adaptation of Hamlet. Toshiro Mifune spends the entire movie building up his plan to get his ultimate revenge on the corporate grifters who drove his father to suicide, but he ends up falling in love with the daughter of his primary target, leading the evil executive to drug his own daughter and arrange for him to be killed. You don't even see him die - the daughter and her brother return to his hideout, only to be told by his badly beaten best friend that he, too was drugged and then sent on the road, where he was killed by a train. The movie concludes with the executive's kids effectively disowning him, but other than this he gets away scot-free with literally every terrible thing the movie spent time elaborating upon.
  • Alejandro Jodorowsky loves to do this. Fando&Lis ends with Fando killing Lis, whom he was taking to the mythical City of Tar in order to cure her paralysis. El Topo has the people the title character spent the entire third act helping mercilessly gunned down, rendering all his efforts worthless. And The Holy Mountain ends just before the climax, with a major character proclaiming the movie over and the shot panning back to reveal the film crew shooting the scene.
  • Sorry, Wrong Number and the radio play it was based on. In the end, and after a few Idiot Plot scenes (between the protagonist's mistakes and the depiction of the police), she fails to prevent her own murder. And this was based on an episode of a radio show where the rule was almost always to make sure the bad guy lost. (Oddly enough, it was also their most popular production...)
    • The film did try to suggest she deserved what she got. Her husband, who had planned her murder, doesn't get away with it either.
  • Das Boot. After everything they've survived for 99% of the movie, they're killed in an Allied air-raid once they get home.
  • Terminator 3 set a new standard in Shoot the Shaggy Dog. Not only was the Crowning Moment of Awesome of the preceding movie totally erased; but after all that crap they went through, Skynet winds up obliterating humanity anyway while John Connor hides out in a hole.
    • This one's debatable, though - if John and Kate were killed before they could form the resistance and ensure humanity's future it would definitely count, but since they survive it may just be a Downer Ending.
    • The first film's message was that time travel can't change the past and that Skynet even trying to do so only caused both itself and the leader of the resistance to be. The second movie's entire Aesop was the change to the idea that we can change the future. Then it decides that maybe it was right the first time. An exercise in indecision, rendering a whole movieseries pointless beyond the pretty explosions?
    • The original script for Terminator Salvation not only nearly did this to John Connor, but to the entire point of the character and all three preceding movies in the first place. Basically, Connor was supposed to have been killed, and then have his skin and face grafted onto the cyborg Marcus, who assumes the identity of John Connor and leads the Resistance. This ending was leaked, and the fandom was not happy, forcing a rewrite. If they'd gone ahead with it, it would have meant that Skynet went on a wild goose chase across the entire franchise, since the John Connor we know wouldn't have been the "real" John Connor. It wouldn't have mattered if Skynet had terminated him or Sarah, since he was nearly that easily replaceable.
      • Though there are those who wish they stuck with that ending anyway.
  • One word: Bulworth. Five words: Rapping politician, meet sniper bullet. Yes, in a comedy. And he ordered the hit on himself!
    • Actually, Bulworth was shot by an insurance lobbyist over one of his campaign points. Halle Berry was the hitman hired to kill him and she called it off herself.
  • The remake of Dawn of the Dead. At the end of the movie, it appears that the few remaining protagonists' struggles have paid off, and they're finally able to sail into the sunset to find an island they can start a new life on. Guess what? Island zombies, is what. How do you like them coconuts? Although the characters aren't actually shown dying..
    • This ending was tacked on after test-audiences griped about the original, far more ambiguous, version.
  • The last half hour or so of The Descent is an extended version of this trope, as it's implied that if you can't stay together as a cooperating pack [they can't] the only way to be Badass enough to get out of the cave is to go crazy and become as vicious as the crawlers. Also, in the UK ending, everyone dies. At least Sarah regains her humanity at the last minute... by choosing to stay with the hallucination of her dead daughter and apparently accept death. Hooray!
  • The Great Silence. The film sets up a pretty standard story of an antihero out for vengeance and protecting some townsfolk from cruel bounty hunters. And then the bounty hunters kill the comedic sheriff, kill the townsfolk, kill the hero's girl, and kill the hero. It is a total and unqualified victory for the villains.
  • The same twist ending was used in The Cave and Ghost Ship, where the parasitic/ghostly evil that they spent the whole film trying to defeat has just infected a new host.
    • Ghost Ship's flashbacks could be construed as this as well. So many people killed and the thieves didn't manage to get away.
    • Note that in Ghost Ship, the original screenplay is available. This trope is averted in it.
  • Along with a Crapsack World and a Diabolus Ex Machina, the film A Simple Plan literally shoots the helpless underdog, when Bill Paxton's character finally shoots his unwitting, lower functioning brother, played by Billy Bob Thornton, made even worse by the fact that the entire plot is rendered meaningless in the film's final frames, where it turns out the money that all of the movie revolved around is marked, and has to be burned. And yet, the ending to the movie is cheery and lighthearted compared to the novel.
  • In Dresden the main character (a British pilot) manages to live through the bombing of Dresden with serious injuries and escapes back to England. After the war, he flies back to see his true love (and, OMG, their child)... when his plane crashes. He dies. They don't even give him a death scene - he dies in the voice-over at the end.
  • The Wages of Fear is particularly cruel. The protagonist takes on an extremely dangerous job (trucking badly needed nitroglycerin up a mountain). He turns out to be the only man in the group to make it all the way alive. Word of his survival gets back to his village, where everyone including his girlfriend dance with joy... and as he drives back joyfully in his now-unloaded truck, he gets too excited, loses control, veers off the side of the mountain, and is killed.
    • He did accomplish his original objective, though.
  • The Final Destination series of films is about a group of people who see a premonition of their own death, and manage to escape it with this knowledge. However, Death does not give up on trying to claim them and looks for other ways to kill the protagonists. The protagonists then spend the rest of the movie trying to escape dying again and again, only to in the end fail and die, making all their efforts till that point fruitless. And anyone that escapes a movie experiences Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome.
  • Munich. "In the end, did we really accomplish anything?"
  • Easy Rider ends suddenly when Billy and Wyatt are blown off their bikes by two rednecks in a pickup, for fun. Not to mention that George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) meets a similarly pointless end in a redneck attack about halfway through the film. How was this missed, etc.
    • During a scenery / music / driving montage, no less! And... Boom Up And Out over the burning heap of motorcycle on the banks of the Mississippi to the tune of Bob Dylan singin' about flowin' rivers and star-spangled deltas.
    • But even that's not the truly dead shaggy dog. The final line of dialogue in the film is when Wyatt says to Billy, "We blew it." What "it" is exactly is never said, but the film's tagline was, "A man went looking for America. And couldn't find it anywhere."
    • The "We blew it" line is a reference to the disillusionment that would come to the aging hippies of the 70's. The we Peter Fonda is referring to are the Baby Boomers as a collective whole. The promises of the peace and love generation that took root during Woodstock ended at the Altamont free concert. The entire film was a commentary about how the sixties weren't living up to these promises, and a number of the themes addressed in Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" are also present in "Easy Rider".
  • In ~[REC]~ nobody survives the mysterious virus. And if they don't pull a retcon with [REC]2, Angela is getting dragged into darkness at the end to be either infected or feasted on, or even BOTH.
  • Cold Mountain. Civil war soldier ditches the army, travels through adverse weather conditions, and goes through absolute hell just so that he can get home to his girlfriend. Finally gets home to his girlfriend, and then a soldier comes along and shoots him.
    • At least in the movie, they managed to conceive a child before he got offed. So that wasn't a complete Shoot The Shaggy Dog.
    • Of course, there is a lot more to the story than that. It's more of a Bittersweet Ending, really.
  • The Jammed is about a woman who tries to help three illegal prostitutes in Melbourne. Then end up (mostly) worse than when she found them. One commits suicide, one runs off and one ends up in immigration detention. This is an attempt at Truth in Television.
  • The film Carnosaur is about a small town that is attacked by bio engineered dinosaurs. Our heroes, manage to survive by using a forklift to disembowel a T-Rex. Then THIS Happens. Making everything pointless.
  • This trope is deliberately invoked by the film Gallipoli in order to deliver an anti-war Aesop. In it, two young Australian men go to great lengths to join the army during World War 1, go through some training that doesn't seem to be taking the war seriously (for example, their drill sergeant gives them a lecture on contraception), and, in the final three minutes of the film, the characters actually go to war and are promptly killed. Roll credits.
    • In the original script, the main character was meant to be shot and killed within a minute of him stepping onto Gallipoli beach. The worst part is that the film is closer to what actually happened than most war films.
  • All Quiet on the Western Front is similar. It follows war movie conventions rigorously right up to the third act, where the main characters are picked off one by one in trench warfare, until they are all dead. The Audience Surrogate survives long enough to stand up while sketching a butterfly in the trenches on the day of the Armistice, promptly getting shot and becoming the last casualty of World War I. The closing title card? "All Quiet On The Western Front." All this is, of course, true to the spirit of the book.
  • Legends of the Fall. Several ineffectual people end up dying, including most of the Ludlow family, and the tragic heroine. The protagonist himself, in exile and old age, gets eaten by a bear at the end.
  • Averted before release in First Blood (the first Rambo film). The ending, as originally taken from the novel (yes, there was a novel), scripted and filmed, had John Rambo dying in the closing scenes by indirect suicide. He pulls a gun out of Trautman's jacket, places it in Trautman's hand, and moves the hand to point the gun at him, and presses Trautman's finger against the trigger. Test audiences hated it, so the ending was reshot with Trautman convincing Rambo to turn himself in (paving the way for the sequels).
  • Open Water is two hours of people stranded at sea waiting for a rescue that will never come.
  • The Denzel Washington film Fallen, where he plays a police detective, has him spend the whole film trying to figure out a way to stop the demon Azazel, who can possess people just by having his host touch them, and move on to a new body within a few hundred feet if his host is killed. At one point in the movie, he murders the main character's brother using poison. Eventually, the protagonist lures him out to an isolated cabin, and smokes cigarettes laced with the poison his brother was killed with, before shooting Azazel (who was currently possessing his friend and partner). Azazel than possesses the protagonist and stumbles around in the snow for a bit, before dying. The camera than pans out as Azazel narrates how pathetic and pointless the protagonist was, before its revealed that he manages to survive by possessing a kitten underneath the cabin. Whats worse is how pointless the whole thing was; Azazel was only antagonising the character for his own twisted amusement, and nothing is ultimately accomplished, except the protagonist's name being besmirched, and his nephew being left without any family.
    • Even worse is that this is all lampshaded in the movie First at the very beginning of the movie when Azazel as the narrator tells you that he is going to tell you the story when he was almost killed, and then at the end he says "I told you this was the story when I almost died, didn't I?" Bastards.
  • In the horror movie Catacombs, we have an example of this trope. The protagonist visits her bitchy sister in Paris, and she is brought by her to a sort of rave party in the labyrinth-like catacombs under the city, along with a group of French goths. Then the two of them get lost, and the sister is apparently killed by an axe-wielding serial killer wearing a goat mask. The protagonist is then stalked by said monster in the catacombs for a whole hour... until it turns out that it was all an overlong joke of dubious taste planned by her sister and friends. Unfortunately, this is revealed after the protagonist has killed one of them in the darkness. The sister then proceeds to yell at and insult the barely-sane anymore protagonist, who then proceeds to slaughter the rest of them, including her sister, and leaves. Some people just can't take a joke.
  • Angel Heart - It turns out that Mickey Rourke has been hired by the devil to condemn himself to hell.
  • Titus - with Anthony Hopkins, based on the play by William Shakespeare ... Let's just say that it inspired the Scott Tenorman episode of South Park and leave it at that.
  • Se7en Detectives Mills and Summerset achieve exactly nothing, and indeed are an essential part of the serial killer's master plan. John Doe kills Mills's wife, prompting Mills to kill him, leading to Mills being arrested.
  • Dancer in the Dark - subverted. It might appear as the most depressing movie ever, anywhere, and ultimately pointless. And ends with the execution of the innocent, blind main character. As is typical of Lars von Trier, it's really about a gigantic Heroic Sacrifice on part of a female heroine. She does accomplish her goal of preventing her son from going blind by getting him the operation he needs, which is all she wanted anyway. Plus she wasn't exactly innocent, she did in fact kill her neighbor.
  • In another Lars von Trier movie called Dogville, the protagonist is running away from The Mafia, which is also her home, and seeks shelter in a tiny American village during the Great Depression. She ends up discovering that poor people can be just as evil. They do some pretty terrible things to her, for their own benefit, throughout the entire movie. After nearly two and a half hours of this, The Mafia shows up and Grace participates with them in killing everyone in the village. YMMV on how to take that, but it's made clear that Humans Are the Real Monsters, and she has earned nothing for the pain she went through. It's also argued that they all deserved it, including her, making this a trope subversion.
  • Another one of Lars' movies -- Melancholia, Part one: a woman is completely undone by depression and is abandoned by everyone, save for her sister (who really hates her sometimes) and nephew. Part two: she kind of starts to get better and then a giant planet destroys the Earth which was "evil anyway", so no biggie. Naturally, it's considered to be one of his most uplifting films.
  • Drag Me to Hell: the old gypsy dies (but of natural causes), the demon escapes, and our heroine, who doesn't deserve it in the least, gets, well, dragged to Hell.
    • And don't forget the medium who waited 40 years for a chance of redeeming her failure to save a young boy by meeting the Lamia again and killing it. Her assistant screws up the plan due to having a lousy aim, she fails to break the protagonist's curse and she ends up dead for her efforts.
    • One of those is debatable: Sam Raimi has stated that the heroine committed a sin and avoided the consequences, thus deserving what she got. He does concede that she may have been "a little over-punished."
      • She obviously had it coming. But her co-worker who stole the fruits of her labor to betray both her and the bank, well, he can be redeemed with a little waterworks display.
  • Employee Of The Month - a Black Comedy about a man who breaks up with his fiancee after getting fired from his dream job at a major bank chain, and cheats on her with his coworker, Wendy. After a night of hard drinking, chatting with his estranged friend Jack (a coroner), and multiple attempts to mend his relationship, the protagonist (David Walsh) walks back into his workplace with a pistol, insults his former coworkers, puts a gun to his former boss's head (but doesn't kill him), and promptly walks out of his office directly into a bank heist. Dave manages to foil the robbery, at the apparent cost of his own life. This turns into a quintuple twist; the robbery was part of a two-year plan to erase David's identity and leave him and his friends filthy rich. Dave, Jack, and Wendy meet up in a motel room, prepared to divide their earnings and part ways. Dave kills Jack. Wendy kills Dave and runs off with Dave's ex-fiancee (Sarah) with whom she's involved in a lesbian relationship. All of this sex and mayhem is finally rendered moot after the credits, when Sarah and Wendy's car is hit by a bus, killing them both.
  • Happy Times uses this trope. After the main character spends the entire movie unsuccessfully trying to start a relationship, he is left in a coma after being hit by a garbage truck. The hope that he might have at least helped someone else is destroyed since she runs away because she feels like a burden. Neither character knows what has happened to the other character and neither will obtain their dream.
    • It's really a Bittersweet Ending more than anything. Despite the main character going into a coma never knowing of where the blind girl has gone, there is a bit of reward in the fact that she experienced some of the happiest times of her life, according to her, and has inspired her to go out into the real world and find her place in it. Ambiguous, and sad, yes, but not completely without hope or purpose.
  • More Dead Than Alive fits very nicely into this trope. The entire movie focuses on a guy known as "Killer Cain" trying to settle down with an honest living after spending 18 years in jail for a string of murders he committed prior to the movie. Being an ex-criminal, it's hard for him to find work. The only job he can keep is one at a shooting show. However there, he has to put up with an insolent young co-worker of his. To make things worse, he's made plenty of enemies in the past. By the end of the movie, he not only gets the ranch he wants, but he gets to marry the woman he loves in a classic Western movie fashion. But then one of his old enemies (apparently the guy's father was one of Cain's victims) shows up and guns him down.
  • The Halloween series. Laurie is believed to fit this trope, but Jamie definitely does. She gets mocked for being related to Michael, becomes mute due to a powerful connection with Michael, has all her friends, her sister, and her dog killed, gets kidnapped by a cult and is forced to have sex with Michael, and she's finally impaled by farm equipment.
  • Arlington Road is practically the god-king of this trope. The movie stars Jeff Bridges as a university professor who is an expert on domestic terrorism, and whose wife died in a failed FBI mission some years earlier. He has a young son, a girlfriend, played by Hope Davis, and keeps in touch with his wife's former FBI partner, played by Robert Gossett. One day he begins to suspect his next-door neighbors, played by Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack, to be terrorists, based on a number of incidents that have occurred around them, including his son being hospitalized after an accident involving a firecracker. Nobody will believe him though, finding his ideas crazy and paranoid, pointing the finger at his being unable to recover from the trauma he experienced when his wife died in the manner she did. Things only get worse for Bridges when his girlfriend ends up being murdered by Cusack right after she starts to believe in Bridges' suspicions. Her death is subsequently covered up as a car accident. Not one to be let down, Bridges continues to go after the terrorist couple, when his son is taken hostage by them. He goes after them, following a van he is led to believe to contain his son to a parking garage, with Gossett tagging along. He arrives at the garage, but finds out that he was following the wrong van. After that, he opens the trunk of his car, only for a bomb that had been carefully planted inside to go off, destroying the building he had been baited to, killing Bridges, Gossett, and hundreds of other people. How can things get any worse than that? Well, Bridges is posthumously framed for blowing up the building, and now is forever demonized as a terrorist/suicide bomber, Robbins and Cusack get away scot-free having accomplished what they set out to do, and Bridges' son lives now fatherless and motherless with relatives, never knowing of his father's innocence. And it's implied that the alleged terrorist Bridges talked about early in the film, who he was never convinced was guilty, had a similar stunt pulled on him by the couple. Many people, including renowned movie critic Roger Ebert, have been highly critical of the way this movie ends, due to the ridiculous contrivances and complications involved that led up to this point, not to mention the fact that, in order for this plan to be successfully carried out in real life, you'd need to practically be Born Lucky or have Psychic Powers, your target acting in every exact way you want them to, moving in on the right locations at exactly the right time. In short, the shaggy dog was shot by a blatant Xanatos Roulette.
  • In The Incredible Melting Man the titular character is an astronaut who has been irradiated on his way back from Saturn and who is slowly melting to death. There is no cure whatsoever. Only killing and consuming people stops his pain, even briefly. In the end, during a confrontation at a power plant, his best friend is endangered and the astronaut regains a bit of humanity and saves his life - only for said friend to be shot to death by a pair of random security guards. The astronaut kills the guards, collapses and expires. A janitor cleans him up what's left of him the next day and throws him in the garbage. Oh, also? More astronauts are headed to Saturn.
  • What else would you expect from The Grey Zone, a Holocaust movie whose main characters are Sonderkomandos (the Jews in Nazi death camps whose chores included leading other Jews into the gas chambers and then burning their bodies afterward), a Jewish doctor who works for Josef Mengele ... and Mengele himself?
  • This trope is displayed in the movie Knowing starring Nicholas Cage, most notably in the complete and utter futility of John's (Cage) obsession with the numerical code, and later, his attempts to save his son and Abby. Further, Diane, Abby's mother, dies while attempting to rescue the children from the Strangers who are actually able to save them, and who were planning on doing so without the interference of either parent. Oh, and the Earth literally gets burned to a crisp.
  • The fan-made Warhammer 40,000 feature film Damnatus - our heroes find themselves hopelessly outclassed, but still fight on. They defeat the 'enemy' leader, but he was actually a rogue inquisitor, and in doing so, they screw up his plan to bind a daemon, with the result that it is instead summoned without any restrictions. They are all killed attempting to escape, and then the planet is wiped out from orbit in an Exterminatus order by Inquisitor Lessus.
    • This is pretty much par for the course in anything having to do with the Warhammer 40,000 universe though.
  • The Omen. Everybody dies, except Damien the Antichrist.
  • Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. The other films of Korean director Park Chan-wook's "Vengeance Trilogy" aren't so bad (which is not to say they're "good"), but for this one, he sets his dog-shooting gun to full automatic and doesn't let up on the trigger once.
  • The Warlords. The three main characters (and a woman that two of them fought over) die in vain as it is revealed they were only being used as pawns by corrupt politicians to do their dirty work.
  • The 1970 film The Love War with Leslie Nielsen and Angie Dickinson pretty much defined this.
  • Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (AKA Doppelgänger). Turns out it's a mirror Earth. Literally; the exact same things happen, the exact same people are there, all of the writing is just backwards. The hero is thought to have aborted his mission to the mysterious planet on the other side of the sun; instead, he's arrived on it, but since the mirror Earth sent an identical astronaut to our Earth, both Earths believe their own astronaut has chickened out and returned home. The hero spends most of the film trying to prove he's not crazy, finds the evidence in orbit (his spacecraft with right-sided lettering- all other evidence was destroyed when his landing craft explodes), loses radio contact before he can tell anyone else of his evidence, crashes and dies immediately thereafter, and the only person who semi-believed him throws themselves out a window at the very end. The hero is dead, never vindicated, still no one knows what the planet on the other side of the sun is, and due to the inextricable mirroring of events, this happens on BOTH Earths.
  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After searching for the Holy Grail almost the entire movie, Arthur, Lancelot and Bedevier are all arrested by the police, and the camera is shattered by one of the policemen. In fact, to make it "worse", this ending occurs just as Arthur and a miraculously-appearing army are about to assault the Castle Aaaagh where the Frenchmen are guarding the Holy Grail itself, presumably. The ending is, of course, a cop-out. This is a Monty Python trademark, and is practically expected in each and every one their works.
    • Monty Python's Life of Brian - Loosely based on the life of Jesus Christ, you know from the start that the story can't possibly end well. Of course, there's somewhat of a Pet the Dog moment at the very end to brighten it up".
    • And Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: We are all shaggy dogs, because life has no meaning. Now, piss off!. That pretty much also sums up everything the group's done during its long existence, and is the last film they ever made as a group.
  • ~ A.I.: Artificial Intelligence~. The end (the last one) was much more than a Downer Ending—it was completely pointless.
    • Yes and no. David was trying to become a real boy so he could get his mother to love him. He does not achieve the goal of becoming a real boy. However, it turns out that he did not need to achieve this goal anyway. He does get one day of happiness with his mother and she tells him before she dies that she loves him and always has. He dies shortly afterwards (Why? Well, maybe he ran out of battery juice or maybe by that point he had gotten everything he wanted and so he 'shut down' as a result of this). So the ending does not quite qualify as Shoot the Shaggy Dog, because David got what he truly wanted in the end. Also, he went to "...that place where dreams are born" (i.e. the afterlife). That should be impossible for a robot that is not human to achieve. But the fact that he did indicates that he did become human in a sense. So he ended up achieving more than he set out to do, which is another reason the ending does not quite qualify as Shoot the Shaggy Dog. It does, however, qualify for Fridge Horror when you consider what David has done to his mother to achieve this.
  • Rosemarys Baby. All of Rosemary's attempts to escape her husband and the Satanic cult he's allied with before she gives birth fail completely, and she gives birth in their clutches. Not that it would've made the slightest bit of difference if any of her escape attempts had succeeded since her baby is Satan's child, the Anti Christ. For all the difference it made, Rosemary might as well've wolfed down the entire ice cream the night before her baby's conception, and been a blindly trusting idiot afterwards (not that she really is a blindly trusting idiot, mind you, it just would've made no difference if she was).
    • Two things to point out here...1. Yes, the movie ends like this, but the book has Rosemary naming her kid Andrew instead of the cult leader's name (essentially giving the cult the finger) and she decides to raise her kid to be a good person (essentially giving the cult the finger again). 2. There is a sequel that has Andrew grown up and being a good person...in the end, he uses his awakened powers to rewrite history and make the events of both movies or books just a dream Rosemary was having. Yes, the sequel is considered cruddy and the resolution can be considered a copout, but at least everything got completely turned around in the end.
  • The Ruins. One of the Americans survives, makes it to the jeep and presumably gets back to society... while being infected of the same malevolent vine that has killed all her friends (you can see the spores growing on her clothes), and now is poised to do the same to the world at large. Meanwhile, the friends of the Greek associate of the Americans happen upon the eponymous location, presumably doomed to the same fate. The book didn't have this problem, as everyone died and the vine was contained.
    • An alternate ending makes the Shoot the Shaggy Dog even more explicit, showing Amy's eye filling with blood and the vine appearing under her skin, and then the flowers of it growing on her grave.
    • Depends on the ending. The European version of the film has an ending where Amy escapes but it cuts away before the shot of the vine appearing, implying she is not infected. So she gets away after all.
  • Both House of the Dead movies end this way. The first, after battling across an island and a castle and some tunnels, they finally fight the Big Bad, the girl gets impaled with a sword and they get picked up by a helicopter immediately afterward. The second movie, a much crueler plot, where a team of special ops goes into a college campus which is infected with the undead. After losing all but three members, they get the McGuffin, only for it to be lost in the process of escaping. So they have to go back and get it again. After its secured, only one member makes it back. He's then stopped by a now crazy member who was forced to cut off his own hand and the McGuffin is lost again when he blows up their escape vehicle with a grenade after the female lead shoots and kills him. Now that this is over, they head toward Los Angeles, which is now smoking with destruction.
  • Cabin Fever does this with one of the most hilariously cruel endings ever.
  • A little known movie called Dead Men Walking featured every single person in the film dying except the main protagonist. As she gets outside, she starts running toward the gate to escape. Freedom and safety are in her sights. And then she's gunned down by an FBI sniper from the roof of the prison. Who then gives a resounding, triumphant fistpump. The end.
  • In The Collector, Miranda has a chance to escape from Freddie, but she's too weakened by pneumonia to do so. Of course, she dies. And Freddie buries Miranda in his yard. At the end of the movie, he is seen stalking his next victim at a nursing school.
  • ~Dr. Strangelove~. A film about the dangers of nuclear armageddon. I think you can see where this one is going...
  • The film Jedda focuses on the titular character, an orphaned Aboriginal woman raised by white farmers, being kidnapped by a tribal Aborigine, and the efforts of her love interest to track her down and bring her home. At the end of the film, Marbuck pulls her over a cliff, killing them both.
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These four people spend the whole movie running and are picked off, one by one. We think one might escape (albeit without the woman he loves) but no, he gets caught, and at the end his doppelganger catches out the last known human. Nothing is accomplished. Everybody dies.
  • In The Shining, several scenes are spent following Dick Hallorann who, following a psychic premonition of the peril at the hotel, travels all the way from Florida, making his way through the storm of the century until, after against all odds finally reaching the remote, snowed-in hotel...where he gets about ten feet past the front door before taking an axe to the back and being instantly killed. This differs from the book, where Hallorann manages to rescue a seriously-wounded Wendy and Danny and escape the hotel.
    • While the character arc may have been completely pointless, Hallorann does ride in on a tractor that is eventually used by Wendy and Danny to escape the hotel.
  • Saw The main plot in every film ends with the protagonist dying, whether or not they actually learned anything. They never actually accomplish whatever their goal was and always fail, hard. Saw VI has the worst case of this in that the main character clearly learned the lesson, had developed as a character, and was going to go out into the world and make a difference with his new found appreciation for life. Then he melts into a puddle of goo.
  • Barry Lyndon tells you with the opening title card that Redmond Barry/Barry Lyndon's going to amass a fortune and then lose it all. He does.
    • Let's not forget the final epilogue. It was in the reign of King George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.
  • A rare upbeat version of this comes in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Ostensibly, Dr. Parnassus and Tony go through Hell and (in Dr. Parnassus' case) back (literally) to protect Lily from Mr. Nick, but in the end, Tony's a con artist who gets killed, and Mr. Nick wins the bet and gets Lily's soul. Even Mr. Nick is surprised at the outcome. But not really, because then we learn that Mr. Nick claims not to know where Lily is, and we later learn she ends up Happily Married to Anton and living a happy life in the real world. To make it all even more upbeat, the final shot is Dr. Parnassus smiling at Mr. Nick, proving all of this is just their little game, and there are no real, lasting consequences for any innocent characters, really.
  • In ~12 Monkeys~, Bruce Willis travels through time in an attempt to stop The End of the World as We Know It. In the end, he not only dies in the attempt, but his younger self sees it happen, which he was shown earlier in the movie to still have dreams about. Everything happens the same as before, not in spite of Willis' actions, but because of them, as everything he did had already happened.
    • Doesn't quite count. Although Willis was mislead into attempting the action that led to his death in the end with the belief that he was saving the world, his real purpose was not to save the world but merely to locate the virus so that a scientist could go back into the past, collect a sample of the virus and then develop a vaccine so that people living underground in the (futuristic) present could return to the surface and reclaim the world from nature. Thus, his mission and purpose was considered successful.
  • Black Swan: Nina goes progressively more insane over the course of the movie, and seems on the verge of some kind of breakthrough at the end, only to die from a self-inflicted wound after her first performance. Of course, given the aforementioned insanity, it's impossible to know how much of the movie is real and how much is only in Nina's head, thus making the story potentially even more pointless.
  • The Departed: Big Bad Costello gets killed by his own mole over being an FBI informant, who is hailed as a hero. Eventually, all four of The Moles and Reverse Moles, including the protagonist, the captain, and a cop minor character end up dead.
  • Bat*21: An Air Force Para Rescue team attempt to extract Lt. Colonel Hambleton after he is shot down over Vietnam, but their helicopter is shot down, and the entire crew is killed soon after, either by being shot or being made to walk through a minefield.
  • Mad City (starring John Travolta) had an ending like this. The protagonist spends the whole film trying a desperate (but admittedly stupid) move to get his job back. In the end, it not only doesn't work, but he commits suicide to boot.
  • The Parallax View ends with not only the protagonist, Frady, failing to publicly unmask the true nature of the Parallax Corporation and also failing to stop another assassination of a senator ordered out by them, but is also killed at the scene trying, and on top of that is falsely accused of being the assassin solely responsible by the official investigation committee for the senator's death. The protagonist in all his efforts essentially accomplished nothing but getting himself and those associated with him killed, with his memory tarnished by the committee, and the Parallax Corporation able to continue its murderous operations unscathed.
  • In Blind Faith, Charlie tells what really happened, that the murder he's accused of really was in self-defense. It shows the judge receiving and considering his testimony on the events and his father finally deciding to help him. However, it was all pointless since Charlie hung himself with his shirt in his cell anyway as one of the guards freaked him out with a story about the electric chair, which he would be headed to, burning the flesh off of one inmate. This was pretty much the end.
  • Bereavement: Allison's uncle and boyfriend are both killed trying to save her, neither getting any closer to doing so in the process. Allison manages to escape the serial killers's clutches, with his hostage/protege/kidnap victim, and make it back to her uncle's house. The killer beats her there and kills her aunt, then sets the house on fire. Allison defends her cousin from the killer, then is killed by the little boy, who then goes and kills the serial killer. The house burns down with Allison and her little cousin inside, and the boy setting up a new murder room for his own use.
  • Urban drama Prison Song paints a grim, hopeless picture of inner city life for black males. The protagonist loses his father to police brutality prior to the film's opening, then gets an extended Humiliation Conga - his step-dad gets arrested by police harassing him over his photography business not being licensed, he and his childhood friend are fooling around with a laser pointer, his mother being declared insane (and then heavily sedated) after she tried to break him out of prison. He gets a brief Hope Spot when he gets admitted to a good college, but he can't pay the tuition, forcing him to drop it. He then gets accused of murder because (in self-defense) he pushed a man attacking him into subway tracks, thus electrocuting him. The main character gets twenty-five years to life as a result, and ends up having to deal with corrupt guards and abuses, only to attempt a prison break - which fails miserably, and he gets blown away by the guards after the getaway car leaves without him.
  • Threads.
  • A Russian War Movie The Crossing (not to mix with the USA film) depicts a Soviet atti-tank platoon, which is retreating towatrs the titular crossing, where the Soviet troops are regrouping. They travel obne whole day towards the crossing, then on the dawn of the next day they are attacked by a German armored troop, and are wiped out, without managing to inflict any (serious) damage to the enemy. A tragic and pointless end.
  • Subverted in the Based on a True Story film The Brest Fortress. The whole garrison is killed (with exception of a few captured soldiers) and the enemy continues to advance into USSR. However, during the time of siege (first week of the war) they manage to kill more enemy soldiers then the rest of their whole army group did in this time, and this sets an important example to the demoralised Red Army, prompting it to stand ground and thus contributing to the ultimate victory.
  • The Grey is a film about a Dwindling Party. By the end, the only man left stumbles into the wolves' den and puts up a Last Stand.
  • Sintel spends the entire film searching for her pet baby dragon Scales, who was taken from her by an adult dragon. After finding her way to a dragon's lair and slaying the owner, Sintel sees an identifying scar on the dragon's wing, revealing that she'd just killed Scales.
  • Atonement Only hours after he finally confessed his love to the beautiful Cecilia, Robbie Turner gets falsely accused of having raped a 15-year old girl and is sent to prison. He's given the choice to join the army and invade WWII Europe. Cecilia promises to wait for him. He makes it through the battles and half of the French countryside, back to the beaches only to die of septicemia the night before the evacuation.
  • The Cabin in the Woods: The good news is that two of the five students survived. The bad news is that, since one of them had to die in a sacrifice to appease the Ancient Ones and the rituals all over the world have failed as well, everyone in the world dies.
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