The 10 movies that fooled Dann Gire

Movies play pranks on us all the time and we love it, don't we?

Clever plot twists and surprise endings have been a staple of movies since the beginning of the art form.

But April Fools' Day got us thinking: What movies have pulled off the best fooled-you moments? What twists and turns truly caught us off guard — and made us rethink everything we'd seen before?

There is an art to April fooling an audience, you know.

I'm not really impressed with twists in such movies as “The Game” and “Donnie Darko,” because we're always waiting for something to explain the strange events on the screen, and we're expecting a bizarre twist to make sense of it all.

If we expect a twist, can it really be a big surprise?

The best cinematic twists are the ones we don't see coming. The ones that blindside us. Real out-of-left-field kind of stuff.

So, in the spirit of April Fools' Day, here are 10 of my favorite movies with a twist.

Fortunately, most were created before e-mail, Twitter and Facebook, so it was a lot easier to preserve the purity of the film-going experience for their original audiences.

Note: No major movie twists or surprises will be ruined for anyone here. Violations of this professional code of critical conduct are punishable by death of a critic's career.

However, just by pointing out that a movie contains a twist sort of undermines the whole point of the code, doesn't it?

Sorry. It's the nature of the business.

10. “The Sixth Sense”#8212; I admit it. I was one of the zillions of viewers who didn't see M. Night Shyamalan's narrative pretzel twist coming a mile from the Twilight Zone.

Oscar-nominee Haley Joel Osment plays the little boy who sees dead people. Bruce Willis plays the dogged psychologist who doesn't.

9. #8220;Planet of the Apes#8221;#8212; After those darned dirty apes take their hands off Charlton Heston, he and Linda Harrison head off into no-apes land. Only one thing's for certain: The French sure know how to build things that endure.

8. #8220;Brazil#8221;#8212; Terry Gilliam's cult movie is a retro-futuristic, bureaucratic, Kafkaesque nightmare. But that's not the fun part. At some point, the story detours from reality, and even if you know about it, you still won't be able to spot when it happens.

7. #8220;Seven#8221; #8212; When a serial killer chooses victims on the basis of the Seven Deadly Sins, a veteran homicide detective (Morgan Freeman) and a hotshot rookie detective (Brad Pitt) have no idea what can of wormy twists they're about to open as they race to stay ahead of the killer.

6. #8220;Memento#8221;#8212; From Christopher Nolan, the filmmaker who gave us #8220;The Dark Knight#8221; and #8220;Inception,#8221; comes this 2000 thriller starring Guy Pearce as a man suffering from short-term memory loss who cannot retain new information longer than a day and must rely on body tattoos and Polaroid photographs to tell him who he is and how he must track down his wife's killer.

Oops. I almost forgot an important element. The whole story is told backward.

5. #8220;Angel Heart#8221;#8212; Mickey Rourke plays detective Harry Angel. Robert De Niro plays his employer Louis Cyphre, who wants Harry to find a guy named Johnny Favorite who failed to live up to contractual obligations.

The finale wasn't the movie's only surprise. Lisa Bonet, star of TV's #8220;The Bill Cosby Show,#8221; performed such a hot sex scene with Rourke that the film originally received an X rating.

4. #8220;The Others#8221;#8212; Alejandro Amenabar's spooky tale stars Nicole Kidman as a mother who begins to suspect her old dark house just might be haunted. She has no idea.

3. #8220;The Usual Suspects#8221;#8212; A docked cargo ship explodes. Criminals have been killed. What really happened? All the clues are brilliantly laid out right before our eyes, but they don't come together until Chazz Palminteri's police detective stumbles over them and Wow!

2. #8220;The Crying Game#8221; #8212; Freak me out! The April Fool in Neil Jordan's nifty little romantic drama is one for the ages. I can't even tell you about the Academy Award nominations this film received without ruining the surprise. All you need to know is that British soldier Stephen Rea falls in love, and that proves to be just a tad bit blind.

1. #8220;Psycho#8221;#8212; Back in 1960, the idea that the main character would be killed in the shower a third of the way into the story wasn't just a shocking turn of events.

It was revolutionary.

Who were we, the audience, supposed to follow now?

Hey, how about that strange guy who runs the Bates Motel, Norman? He seems a little weird, but he's so sweet to his poor mother, he's probably a really good person in a bad situation. Right?

#8220;Psycho#8221; isn't called Alfred Hitchcock's black-and-white suspense masterpiece because it played by Hollywood rules.

And if you think I just gave away the April Fool, you're obviously one of the two people in the Daily Herald universe who has never seen #8220;Psycho.#8221;

Rectify the situation ASAP.