[civilian_number_two]

Hey I finally got around to watching this. Worst movie ever? Or at least, worst M Knight Shyamalan film, and with The Village and Lady in the Water behind him, that's something. What a load of dogshit. This one, impossibly even more than Lady in the Water, suffered from the fallacy that protagnists are more interesting to everyone than secondary characters. Everyone seemed so interested in Mark Wahlberg, from the lady that gives her cell phone to him in the middle of a call to her own daughter, to the strangers that pick him up and start asking about his personal business, to the teenager with such curiosity about his relationship and whether he'll have kids, to the crazy lady who is only there to reintroduce some tired horror tropes about crazy ladies who live alone. Oh yeah! And when they encounter the defensive guy behind the shutters that actually could not have protected against a gas attack, he shoots the two kids and leaves Wahlberg, Zooey and the girl alone, even though they don't run away. Add to that that the ending makes no sense; if this is what passes for environmentalist fiction then no wonder there isn't much of it.

This movie almost inspired me to watch it again and to blog everything that bugged me, but it wasn't even interesting enough for that. I am steering toward the theory that this guy is like the Andy Kaufman of filmmakers, consistently trying to see how much he can confuse and annoy people by turning out films that are incomprehensibly bad and barely watchable, one after the other.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 10 November 2008 - 10:28 PM

[TruJade]

Yeah but you no longer dislike The Village
so i think his work is done

maybe M. Night will make a movie even worse
then the Happening, then what?

the Apocalypse? Probably

[Heccubus]

I gave up on watching his bullshit after "Signs" made me want to vomit, eat the vomit, and then vomit again. His best movie was "The Sixth Sense" and even that was pretty mediocre. The best part about it to me was ruining it halfway through for a friend by going "I bet Bruce Willis turns out to be dead or something stupid."

This post has been edited by Heccubus: 11 November 2008 - 01:00 AM

[civilian_number_two]

Well, agreed. What I think is interesting is how his films are getting progressively worse. I was certain he'd done it with Lady In the Water, which is just idiotic beyond imagination. But The Happening is the absolute bottom.

I will go out on a limb and declare that even M Knight Shyamalan cannot make a film worse than The Happening.

[J m HofMarN]

I saw the review on Something Awful quite some time ago. Bad movies are a fetish of mine, but I can't stand it when a bad movie thinks its clever and tries to have twists.

[too-chic]

Lol yeah, I had a blast watching Troll 2 with Icey when we had our fling thing going on. Never saw The Happening tho, I really wanted to go too. Pooh. But yeah, it kind of looks too bad to even be fun to watch. shame really.

[Solar Powered Walri]

The commercial made it look cool, what with the guy lying down in front of the lawn mower & what not. I was still tainted by Signs though so I didn't see it.

[J m HofMarN]

environmentalist horror is always kind of dumb since the message gets fucked up in the fact that plants are killing us. It basically amounts to terrorism by vines, and we all know that we cant negotiate with terrorists, for some reason.

I noticed the same fallacy in Frogs, which preceded signs by quite a few years and also had Sam Elliott.

[looktothesky]

The beginning was cool when everyone was killing themselves with no actual explanation, but come on. PLANTS!? I didn't bother watching the rest of the movie.

That shitfest Jumper did the same thing. Great premise, but that's it.

[civilian_number_two]

The worst thing in these Shyamalan movies, no matter how stupid they all are, is the terrible dialogue. Everyone talks like some terrible parody of small-toen America. Take SIGNS: forget the nonsense about how Joaquin is good at baseball, and all the half-full glasses of water all over the place, and the asthma and the various other coincidences that culminate at the end. That movie for me was laughable because of lines like

"It was just Lionel and the Wolfington brothers messing around."

"Old Mrs Kendelman twisted her ankle, as she puts it 'diving for her life when a bunch of schoolkids rode down the sidewalk on skateboards.'"

Why is every small town in America plagued by a pair of mischievous brothers and the police botherd by an over-complaining Old Mrs something or other and her running complaints about schoolchildren? The writing in Shyamalan movies puts Ed Wood on a pedestal. This guy reached that Lucas-like success where noone edits his words. I am surprised he keeps getting decent actors to be in his shows given how stupid they are.

Also this running gag in all of Shyamalan's films of having something just out of frame that a character can't see until we reframe the shot: that has just got to go.

[Heccubus]

I'm surprised he keeps getting studios to back these ridiculous movies, never mind convincing talented actors to play the roles. Though I heard somewhere that he has had some trouble with studio backing for his last couple of projects.

I wonder why...

[Lord Aquaman]

What can I say that hasn't already been said? You guys pretty much summed up what I was thinking regarding this piece of crap excuse for a film.

M. Night must be stopped.

[civilian_number_two]

I say let's let him direct the STAR WARS sequels. !!!!!

[Slade]

I'm surprised he keeps getting studios to back these ridiculous movies, never mind convincing talented actors to play the roles. Though I heard somewhere that he has had some trouble with studio backing for his last couple of projects.

I wonder why...

Why are you surprised? They keep funding Wayans' brothers movies, as well as those Epic/"Date/Scary/whatever movies of very similar ilk.

[Otal Nimrodi]

A few of the "Scary Movie"s were good. And "Superhero Movie" was good, but it wasn't the same sort.

I hear they've commissioned MORE of those.