I
made it this far into The 31 Days of Horror-Ween without watching a single Found
Footage horror movie. My luck had to run
out sometime. To add insult to injury, it
was directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Even
though I’m not a fan of his, I have to admit, making a Found Footage movie
seems kind of beneath him. As far as his
films go, it’s nothing abominably bad like The Village or Unbreakable. It’s just a rather ordinary and forgettable
shaky-cam shitfest.
Two
kids make a documentary about spending the week at their grandparents’
house. At first, they seem like your
typical old people. The first hint
something’s wrong is when they impose a strict 9:30 curfew. Naturally, when the kids leave the room, they
begin witnessing their grandparents’ increasingly bizarre behavior. They try to chalk it up to dementia (and in
one instance, incontinence), but they eventually come to realize there’s
something seriously wrong with their grandparents.
Because
your film is literally in the hands of two annoying kids, that means you have
to sit through long scenes of them arguing.
Unfortunately, you also have to sit through the one kid’s
awful amateur rapping. (“It’s a form of
modern poetry.”) That’s not even
mentioning the scene where they play hide and seek while holding cameras that features some of the most nauseating shaky-cam I’ve ever witnessed.
As
for the obligatory Shyamalan twist, it’s sorely predictable. I’m sure, you can probably guess what
happens. I mean I guessed the ending to
The Sixth Sense in the second scene, but at least it was delivered
competently. Here, it just sort of
happens, and then the movie goes on for another useless half-hour or so.
The
finale might’ve been effective if only for the fact that Shyamalan splits the
kids up. That way, instead of watching
one shaky hard-to-comprehend sequence, we have two to suffer through. The cutting back and forth between the kids
doesn’t help either scene’s payoff. In
fact, one of the sequences (the grandma scene) could’ve actually worked had it
not been for the atrocious camerawork.
In
short, it’s yet another case of Found Footage, Get Lost!
Yes thank you for ripping apart this horrible piece of shit film, why critics like this is beyond me, this is easily the worst thing Shyamalan has ever made(and that's saying something). Though honestly I think one star is being generous, for me this is easily a zero star film, among the worst horror, nay worst films i've ever seen period.
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