[Dr.Kelvinstein]

Thus far The Village is easily the worst film of the year. I mean we all know what to expect from fodder like White Chicks and Anchor Man, but there's no excuse for something this bad to be passed off on the unsuspecting public. Mr. Shyamalan is a somewhat talented director, at least visually. He knows how to build dread and suspense with minimalist backgrounds and slightly askew angles, and by letting conversations play themselves out in strangely set-up two-shots. But that's as far as it goes, and after three suspense movies even his style is predictable.

As a screenwriter, he is simply horrible. His dialogue is atrocious (actually laughable in The Village, like he aped the Bronte sisters), and his plots are simply gimmicks. He should be working in a thirty-minute TV format, not film. A plot twist does not make a movie.

In The Village he apparantly doesn't even understand simple narrative logic. You can't reveal that the monsters are fake and then throw one on the screen to scare us. Even Scooby isn't scared after he unmasks the baddie.

The Village also has the bigget gimmick scare in film history---the blind girl falls down and the music imitates a gunshot. Everyone in the theater jumped, not realizing it was the jarring music cue and not the tumble that hooked them. Ridiculous. You could play the same music cue during any scene in White Chicks and get the same response.

The end was so predictable I was angry. I hate movies when what you expected from the first five minutes in actually turns out to be true. And I would have known that the monsters were bogus, but people concerned with the making of the film have been doing interviews and saying that the monsters are real (even in this month's Fangoria). Put simply, the plot is so flimsy and the tiwist so predictable that the cast and crew are actually lying in a pathetic attempt to mislead the viewer. At least they tried, which seems to be more than m Night Shyamalan did.