They All Lived Happily Ever After? Quiz

Answer: Hudson

Okay, it was never the happiest ending for most (after all, everyone else had been dispatched by the aliens over the course of this critically-renowned film; Hudson ended up getting pulled through a floor grating by an alien), but in the end Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Hicks (Michael Biehn), Newt (Carrie Henn), and their milk-filled android, Bishop (Lance Henriksen) ended up making it back onto their ship with Ripley sending the alien queen into space and they all went into stasis for the return trip and lived happily ever after.

Well, I guess they didn't. Six years after James Cameron's "Aliens" was released, earning over $130,000,000 in the box office and resulting in numerous Academy Award nominations (including one for Sigourney Weaver as Ripley), 20th Century Fox wanted more and released the David Fincher-directed film "Alien 3" in 1992. The film started with their escape ship crashing on a prison planet, killing Hicks and Newt (guess the trip back to save the latter may not have been worth the risk). To top it off (uh oh!) Ripley was impregnated by an alien facehugger. It seems it didn't work out after all.

Answer: Decapitation

Although the last "Halloween" film to star Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode was in 1981, "Halloween H20" was still popular for horror fans looking to once again face Michael Myers, one of the trademark horror killers with masks. In the end, it seemed that Strode would finally be able to overcome her brother's terrorizing and murdering sprees as she hijacked an ambulance, pinned him to a tree (after rolling down a cliff), and decapitated him with an axe.

The joke was on her. In the next movie in the series, 2002's "Halloween: Resurrection", director Rick Rosenthal (who also directed "Halloween II" started the film with Laurie Strode attempting to escape a mental institution. It turned out she killed a paramedic driver, after Myers switched bodies at an extremely convenient moment (go figure). In a fifteen minute prelude to the rest of the movie, Strode was killed on the roof of the building by her brother and casually tossed off the side. Now who do we root for?

Answer: Mexico

You have to hand it to Roland Emmerich, a man who loves his explosions and catastrophes more than Michael Bay. "The Day After Tomorrow" was another excuse to destroy international monuments after "Independence Day" and before "2012" and it played on the fears of global warming, generated by the science community shortly before the release of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". The truth was, Emmerich's film was fairly implausible. With a large ensemble cast, a number of random people tried to survive the super-blizzards, mega-storms, and large-scale clouds of doom and flash-freezes in this movie, and for the most part quite a few did. Stupidly, Dennis Quaid's character decided to go into the blizzard to find his son in New York City (I guess he was kind of insane) traveling from Philadelphia after the Big Apple was hit by a massive tsunami. The good news was that he found the kid hiding in the New York Public Library in Manhattan. Good thing, too! Everyone lived happily ever after!

Well, I guess they didn't if you counted the millions, (nay, billions) rendered homeless or fatally defeated by the virtual cataclysm of the world plunging pretty much the entire Northern Hemisphere into an ice age, sending much of the United States to live in the already over-populated Mexico City, the death of the U.S. President, and the destruction of countless priceless artifacts, buildings, etc. I guess we could all learn a lesson: never create superstorms.

Answer: Charlie Bucket

"Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", released in 1971, took five kids from different walks of life and let them run amok in the delightful world created by Roald Dahl in his original story. In the end, the kids were weeded out and young Charlie Bucket proved himself to be trustworthy and charming enough to take over the chocolate factory when crazy Mr. Wonka (played by Gene Wilder, of course) would no longer be able to work. They took off in the Great Glass Wonkavator and everything ended happily. Hooray!

Well, maybe not. There's no real way of knowing what really happened to the other kids. While Roald Dahl's illustrations in the book showed their eventual transformations (eg. one kid was pulled through a taffy puller...do not try that in real life) the movie did not; in effect, the kids may never have learned their mistakes and flaws (and boy, were there flaws) AND they walked away with lifetime supplies of chocolate - perfect for healthy boys or girls with spoiled brat complexes, overeating habits, etc. And what about the Great Glass Wonkavator?! When Charlie Bucket pressed the button 'Up and Out' (in a bright red 'DO NOT PRESS'-type circle, they broke through a glass skylight and soared into the sky. How on Earth did they get back 'Down and In'? Did they crash? Did they just keep soaring? We'd never know; the movie ended there.

Answer: Kazan, the autistic

This cult classic was filmed within a single cube. It followed a group of people who didn't know where they were, who their captors were, who each other was, or how to get out. All they knew was that some adjacent cubes would contain deadly traps while some would be safe, and eventually, some of the cubes would shift. Soon, after a few people were dispatched, Leaven noticed numbers on some of the doors and decoded a system to give not only a safe route, but a possible exit; they also discovered that Kazan, the autistic, could identify prime numbers in an instant (major help). Things were looking up and they eventually did reach the exit...

...but things weren't so easy. Quentin, the police officer, went mad and started attacking the others. They found the exit and Kazan, the autistic, escaped but everyone else met their fate via the traps or each other. The end scene showed Kazan walking into 'the light', but we never really found out what the heck that meant...or who made the cube...or why they were there...or anything else for that matter...

...that is until "Cube 2: Hypercube" was released in 2003. If anything, this made things worse. A nonsensical cube system was created in the fourth dimension and someone escaped, defying the very space-time-continuum that kept them there in the first place, and they emerged in a pool in a government facility...only to be shot in the head. I guess Kazan didn't really have a chance after all. Sigh.

Answer: None of it ever actually occurred

In "Stay", a series of events was caused by a car crash on the Brooklyn Bridge, culminating in a slew of odd, sometimes confusing and impossible occurrences experienced by Ewan McGregor and his girlfriend, played by Naomi Watts. The viewer knew that weird stuff was going on; McGregor wore really short pants, for example, and elements from early on in the film recurred like deja vu later on. All the while, McGregor needed to figure out why a patient, played by Ryan Gosling, anticipated his own suicide. In the end, it turned out that it was all a dream and everyone was okay.

Or not. The dream, it was discovered, was crafted in the last moments of Ryan Gosling's mind, and everyone in the movie was there at his death on the Brooklyn Bridge watching over him. Sure, everyone else got out okay, but he was fatally killed.

Answer: Yes

Of course! This quiz is about happy endings in film. The main character, Maddie, ended up surviving until sunrise, at which point the demons had seizures and retired to the underworld. Isn't that what we like to see?

Well, if you recall the rest of the movie, then no. All of Maddie's friends were locked in the house and transformed into demons, after Maddie found a number of bodies in the basement and cut herself on a gold tooth. This happened even after Maddie and co. found what was regarded as a safe room. It didn't matter - everyone died except her, and she needed to prevent herself from becoming the final demon needed to bring upon the apocalypse. In the end Maddie appeared to have hanged herself, just as the sun began to rise; the good news was, she was faking it. In the end she simply walked off the property claiming that demons were stupid and letting others walk into the house to pick up some party rentals.

But what about everyone else? It turned out, once they died as demons, they never came back. Sure, Maddie seemed happy and giggly to leave alive, but what about all of her best friends?

Answer: The plants stopped releasing pheromones.

Certainly a poorly-received film, "The Happening" was a lot of nothing. Sure, people killed themselves, but only because the wind blew neurotoxins through the air. Camera shots showed the scary wind and once-nurturing leafy trees in ominously lengthy scenes, as the protagonists and others raced across the eastern seaboard of the United States searching for solace. Everyone started to realize that the plants started attacking people in the largest clusters, so the more dispersed everyone was, the safer they were. By the end of the movie, none of that mattered.

In the end, Wahlberg, Deschanel, and a little girl decided to face their fate and walk out into the wind, but alas, too little too late. The plants decided to give up having felt at that arbitrary time that people had learned their lesson (I suppose...I don't know the mentality of these plants). They all returned to a slightly-less-populated Philadelphia to live out their days.

Without even delving in to the countless graphic casualties caused in the northeastern States as a result of this plant rage, the ending wasn't so happy as expected. After things got back to normal in the U.S., the same bad plant vibes started to happen in France. That tricky pollen!

Answer: By helicopter

Quite soon into the flagship tour of Jurassic Park, paleontologists, played by Sam Neill and Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and the owner's two grandkids ended up getting themselves caught up in a dino-rific (not a word) mess. After some sabotage, one employee decided to shut down all of the protective fences of the park and some of the more dangerous creatures decided to take advantage of this faulty security. The latter half of the movie was a scramble not to get eaten.

In the climax, the main characters fled from the overrun visitor's center of the park (clever velociraptors) and headed to the island's helipad to take off and return home, having survived the ordeals on Isla Nublar.

But wait! The dinosaurs survived for millions of years before they went extinct! Couldn't they just 'leave' the island? They are bigger than we are. Furthermore, most of the characters came back to the Jurassic stuff in later sequels; Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill both went to a second dino-island, Isla Sorna, in the second and third in the franchise. Didn't these people learn their lesson? At the end of the third film, the main characters got out in an aircraft again only to see pteranodons flying over the sea. That couldn't have been a good thing!

Answer: Aliens

In early July, alien battlecruisers situated themselves over the major cities of the world in this 1996 summer hit (which took in hundreds of millions of dollars and jump-started the sci-fi genre in the 1990s). By the time Independence Day (July 4th) rolled around, many major cities around the world were decimated by blasts from the ships and millions had been reduced to ash. It was a shame, really. On that fateful day, of course, Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum flew into space and blew up the mothership next to the moon, Randy Quaid figured out the secret to blowing up the ships hovering over the cities, and the world was saved. Hooray and Happy Fourth of July!

Wait. Millions were dead and gone. The Earth would NEVER be the same. What about all those ships? They had to have landed somewhere! I'd guess down. Was that really the end of the aliens (you know, the ones who had psychic powers and technology this grand)? Let's just say that this film ended off with tons of possible non-answers and there were a lot of explosions. And hey, explosions made it feel like a regular Independence Day. Kudos!