Lady In The Water Is Listless Fairy Tale Storytelling

Lady In The Water was a game-changer for M. Night Shyamalan but not in the ways he intended, good Lord no. His previous movie, The Village, may have generated a divisive response that resulted in strong but frontloaded box office but at least that one has its ardent fanbase. Lady In The Water, on the other hand, has spent its eleven years of existence under intense derision and has been widely seen as a turning point for Shyamalan from titan filmmaker to the nearly decade long stretch he'd spend in the land of awful cinema before The Visit revived him. I wish I could say I was going against the tide and found Lady In The Water enjoyable, but alas, I found it be a kind of interesting but mostly boring misfire.

Goosebumps And Crimson Peak Blaze Uncertain Box Office Trails On Thursday Night

This weeks three new wide releases got their box office runs started last night, though it's hard to use their Thursday night numbers to foretell how exactly the films will do in the coming weekend for a variety of reasons. The largest of last nights performances was Crimson Peak, which grossed $855 thousand in Thursday night screenings. That's about 14% below the Thursday night grosses for Universal Studios most recent previous horror film The Visit, which grossed $1 million at these showings last month. It's likely Guillermo Del Toro's fanbase came out to see it last night, potentially making the film have a frontloaded weekend, though it's still too early to tell if that'll come to pass.

The Visit Review

Recent directorial efforts from M. Night Shyamalan have stirred up enough fury that they might as well be a road that Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron drive down. Truth be told, the negative reception for such features has been much deserved; After Earth and The Last Airbender are astounding examples of what happens when a motion picture ceases to merely be a film and transforms into an exercise into discovering how abysmal one film can become. Interestingly, aside from the 2008 feature The Happening, Shyamalan has mainly avoided the realm of horror and thrillers that gave him a career in the first place, instead channeling his creativity into the world of sci-fi and fantasy.

The Perfect Guy Has A Dreamy Opening Weekend While The Visit Becomes A Horror Movie Hit

After weeks of listless box office, finally some much needed life got injected into the proceedings this weekend, as two new titles overperformed and became the sort of sleeper hits the box office has been lacking lately.

Unbreakable Review (Classic Write-Up)

Break Away

When I saw Unfriended this past weekend, I was shocked to see a trailer I (GASP) hadn't seen seen on the internet beforehand. The trailer was for The Visit, a found-footage(?) horror film from M. Night Shaymalan that was chock full of stupidity and terrible dialogue (the best bad line is easily "Would get into the oven to clean it?", which is delivered in a way that briefly makes it seem like the sentence will conclude with the word over) and reminded me of how far M. Night Shyamalan had fallen in recent years.