VAULT VLOG Father's Day Edition! B-Sol & Son Review The Sixth Sense...

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VAULTCAST: Conversations in the Dark... w/BC

It's a thrill this week to be joined by the one and only BC of Horror-Movie-a-Day and Bloody-Disgusting, one of my true blogging inspirations. He had an opportunity to attend Comic Con last weekend, and now that the geek explosion has come and gone, I figured I'd have him on to talk about all the stuff that went down in San Diego. While I had his attention, we also went off on random tangents about M. Night Shyamalan's downward spiral, and our cautious expectations for Matt Reeves' Let Me In.

So take a listen to the embedded player below if you dare, or head on over to the new Vaultcast home page, where you can download this installment directly...


Horror-Movie-a-Day: http://horrormovieaday.com
Bloody Disgusting: http://bloody-disgusting.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/BrianWCollins

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The Happening a Razzie Favorite

The 29th annual Razzie Award nominations are in, honoring the worst of the worst of 2008, and M. Night Shyamalan's soul-questioningly bad The Happening has deservedly been given more attention than any other film of the year.

The baffling end-of-the-world flick was nominated for Worst Picture, and M. Night was nominated for both Worst Director and Worst Screenplay. Also, Mark Wahlberg's stultifying performance earned him a Worst Actor nomination. Personally, I thought he did a much better job talking to animals on Saturday Night Live.

In other horror-related Razzie news, Jessica Alba was nominated Worst Actress for her work in The Eye, and Paris Hitlon Worst Supporting Actresss for Repo! The Genetic Opera.

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"The Happening" Is Anything But

It's pretty disconcerting to watch a once promising and inventive young writer/director run out of ideas and devolve into tedious self-parody. But that's exactly what seems to have happened with M. Night Shyamalan--and that's coming from a long-time booster of his work, who would go see anything with his name attached.

At one time I would've considered him the finest director in horror and/or sci-fi. The Sixth Sense was a revelation. Unbreakable was my favorite of all his films, the most true-to-life superhero film ever made. Signs was flawed, but still highly effective. And I even enjoyed the unfairly maligned The Village. Then came Lady in the Water, a movie so bad I couldn't even get through it. Surely, it had to be an aberration. I would give the man another chance. That chance was The Happening.

A terrific concept--an unexplainable epidemic of mass suicide--is pitifully squandered. The script is the kind of ham-fisted tripe that would get a first-time screenwriter booted from a producer's office, and the acting is laughably bad. This is especially true of female lead Zooey Deschanel, who gives one of the worst performances I can remember seeing in a major dramatic film. Even Mark Wahlberg, who is usually excellent, was painful to watch. I guess you can chalk it up to the crucial influence the right director can have on his actors.

And the big bombshell plot twist, the cause of the epidemic? Don't even get me started. The word "lame" doesn't even begin to do it justice.

Clearly, Shyamalan was aware of the reaction to Lady in the Water, and was out to prove something. This is evidenced by The Happening's R rating--almost as if the director was saying, "OK, now I mean business." That's why it's so shocking the extent to which he dropped the ball. There are a couple of powerful moments, including a tense scene outside a locked cabin, and some of the suicide footage is genuinely disturbing. But all in all, it's hard to imagine this is the same guy who was nominated for an Oscar ten years ago.

I will not be running to the theater to see the next M. Night Shyamalan movie, you can be sure of that. I've learned my lesson. I'll wait for Netflix--if that. And I doubt I'm the only one. Something tells me there's going to be a mysterious mass epidemic of people ignoring Mr. Shyamalan's movies. However, this epidemic is far from unexplained.

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M. Night Tries to Redeem Himself with The Happening

A new R-rated trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's first R-rated thriller, The Happening, has hit the internet. And it's pretty damn chilling:



I've been a big Shyamalan supporter/defender since day one, and although I have my problems with Signs, I always enjoyed his films very much. That is, until a little picture called Lady in the Water was excreted into the world last year, promptly taking its place on the same list as movies like Howard the Duck, Ishtar, Showgirls and Waterworld.

That last disaster was a film of nearly career-threatening proportions for the relatively new director. But now he has the chance to win back the faith of moviegoers with this new harder-edged tale of an epidemic of mass suicide. But there's a lot riding on it. If it's another filmic catastophe, it will certainly peg Shyamalan as a one-trick pony hack, rather than the truly great filmmaker he once seemed to have the potential to be.

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