Everyone loves a twist in their movies (really?), but all to often the attempts fall flat as a decent movie goes sour with cheesy turns that leave you angry and feeling that two hours of your life have just been flushed down the shitter. Here at The Playlist we thought it was about time to look back on those films that in their attempt to be clever and shocking fell flat on their over budgeted faces.
The Village: M. Night Shyamalan’s epic tale of a group of hippie professors from the University of Pennsylvania who buck society and decide to move to the woods was D.O.A. Marketed as a horror film, audiences were understandable disappointed when they went to see a monster movie without a monster and a contriving plot built soley to reach the shocking twist ending. The setting of the movie was not actually a remote village in 1897 as we were led to believe (as well as the majority of the characters in the movie) but really a commune deep in the forest in the present day! [ed. OMG] The monsters that were threatening the villagers the entire time were actually fabrications made up by the town elders to keep the offspring from wandering off. The real horror here for audiences was realizing that they had just paid to see this shit excuse for a movie.
Unbreakable: In this follow-up to the successful “Sixth Sense“, Shyamalan fooled us again into buying tickets for this monstrosity, by casting Bruce Willis as the sole survivor of a horrific plane crash and Samuel L. Jackson as the avid comic book nerd who insists that Willis must have latent superpowers. As the film progresses, Jackson helps Willis develop his powers only to reveal at the end: Ta daa! Jackson is a super villain who was trying to find his purpose in life – an arch enemy! James Lipton-like in its breathless ridiculousness.
Lady in the Water: A writer who hopes to change the world with his words (played by Shyamalan himself just in case you couldn’t get the message) must sacrifice himself and an asshole movie critic who has his doubts about the young man’s genius then gets killed (subtle). Cleveland Heep (played by Paul Giamatti), is a super attendant in an apartment complex that is forced to find the chosen people who live in his building that posses the power to save the water nymph that is inhabiting their swimming pool from a mysterious predator (jigga what?). The Chubby Checker-like twist: we learn that the characters originally thought as the chosen ones are all wrong, and the true ones were under our nose the whole time (and that tricky M. Night was dropping hints the whole time!). Magical.
Signs: In this Shyamalan flick an unstoppable force of Aliens attack the earth, but wait, we find out in the end the Aliens were allergic to water the whole time. Why did these creatures invade a planet thats surface is 70% water, and attacking humans whose bodies are saturated with the stuff? Apparently these aliens were mentally retarded extra-terrestrials.
The Sixth Sense: The plot follows a child psychologist who helps heal an funny looking, emotionally damaged kid who “sees dead people,” only to discover at the end that he’s a ghost who was dead the whole time. An interesting device to use a protagonist that is clueless, stupid and in complete utter denial – kind of like an existentialist Casper the friendly dumbass. While less insipid then Shyamalan’s later work, it still has major holes. Who would send their kid to a dead psychologist, and come on, at some point one would realize that NOBODY FUCKING TALKS TO THEM (expect the kid that sees dead people).
Signs does not have a twist ending.
in Unbreakable, that’d be an er, um, train crash.
and uh, i found a gang of spelling/grammer errors ex: “A writer who hopes change the world”.
Through sheer need for coke+popcorn+a/c, I saw The Happening last night (no jokes, I live in Mexico, alright, it was either that or the stupid panda movie).
If the wanna-be Steven-Speilbergy-but-more-like-George-Lucasy cheese were thrown away, rescripted and re-shot by Carlos Reygadas in long flowing takes of people standing in fields with blowing trees and grass, it could be a very beautiful movie.
but it isn’t.