The Visit (2015)

I frickin loved it. Big screen and surround sound would definitely be a factor in the experience. Don't watch without all this, it wouldn't be the same. That bitch crawling around under the house, pitter patter on your left, then your right. Lordie. My wife dug her nails into my chest lol. I was terrified too, it was fun. The theater was reeling big time, everyone was scared, then silent, then screaming, then laughing.

The odd humor was great IMO. Keeps you on your toes. The kid was weird, but that's what kids are. It's real.
 
I think he had a good idea for a movie trailer, and that kinda snowballed into a 9-figure production that wasted a few years of his life.
 
BisexualMMA said:
Sigh...

What a sad, sad, miserable piece of shit.

So this was the heralded return of M. Night Shyamalan to his thriller twist roots...

I can say with no reservations that of all the Shyamalan films, this is the one I would least want to watch again. I would actually rather re-watch The Last Airbender or After Earth than ever sit through The Visit a second time. And that is saying a lot. Because I utterly despise those two films.

This was M. Night Shyamalan's Desperation: The Movie. It was the film equivalent of a recently divorced housewife crying her way through an intro video for a dating site.

M. Night does "found footage." If I hadn't known this was Shyamalan, I would have 100% believed you if you told me it was from the makers of any of the Paranormal Activity films.

The dialogue made up one of the worst scripts I have seen played out in recent memory. Boy = white rapper. Girl = avid filmmaker. Boy's lines = pop culture references. Girl's lines = filmmaking jargon.

M. Night has resorted to found footage and pop culture references. What a miserable experience. It felt like he was uneasy, nervous and shaken putting this whole thing together.

Characters were hanging onto their cameras and filming everything long past the point where they would have dropped their cameras and shit their pants. The bloody villains started picking up the cameras and filming things.

Shyamalan had no idea what he was even going for. That whole message in the end about forgiveness with the Mom's confessional about how she left her parents? Who cares? That had nothing to do with the actual movie we just watched. Why is it the entire denouement?

Kid rapping through the end credits... Yay, one last visit to that great rapping thing that we all loved throughout the whole movie, that rapping that really invested me in that kid's character, that I hoped I would get to see one last time.

As terrible as After Earth and Airbender were, at least if I ever had to sit through them again, they are visually interesting. This was a script on par with or even worse than those, and it looked terrible.

People had some good things to say about this movie so I was rooting for Shyamalan here and wanted to like this.

So much worse than I was expecting.

3 / 10.

Come at me, M. Night Juggalos.
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<mma4>
 
goodfella69 said:
I think he had a good idea for a movie trailer, and that kinda snowballed into a 9-figure production that wasted a few years of his life.
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Wasted how? It got his career back on track and made $93 million on a $5 million budget.

This movie was the best thing that had happened to him in a long while.
 
shadow_priest_x said:
Wasted how? It got his career back on track and made $93 million on a $5 million budget.

This movie was the best thing that had happened to him in a long while.
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Maybe not professionally wasted, but artistically wasted. I thought it sucked... and I actually saw this one (twice)
 
shadow_priest_x said:
Why watch twice if you disliked it so much?
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Lol I had to. The first viewing didn't get my full attention due to some bullshit. I just wanted to emphasize that I gave it my attention after shitting on Cloud Atlas without having seen it (Still haven't; I stand by my review anyway).
 
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Almost as bad as the Babadook or whatever that shit was called
 
BisexualMMA said:
Sigh...

What a sad, sad, miserable piece of shit.

So this was the heralded return of M. Night Shyamalan to his thriller twist roots...

I can say with no reservations that of all the Shyamalan films, this is the one I would least want to watch again. I would actually rather re-watch The Last Airbender or After Earth than ever sit through The Visit a second time. And that is saying a lot. Because I utterly despise those two films.

This was M. Night Shyamalan's Desperation: The Movie. It was the film equivalent of a recently divorced housewife crying her way through an intro video for a dating site.

M. Night does "found footage." If I hadn't known this was Shyamalan, I would have 100% believed you if you told me it was from the makers of any of the Paranormal Activity films.

The dialogue made up one of the worst scripts I have seen played out in recent memory. Boy = white rapper. Girl = avid filmmaker. Boy's lines = pop culture references. Girl's lines = filmmaking jargon.

M. Night has resorted to found footage and pop culture references. What a miserable experience. It felt like he was uneasy, nervous and shaken putting this whole thing together.

Characters were hanging onto their cameras and filming everything long past the point where they would have dropped their cameras and shit their pants. The bloody villains started picking up the cameras and filming things.

Shyamalan had no idea what he was even going for. That whole message in the end about forgiveness with the Mom's confessional about how she left her parents? Who cares? That had nothing to do with the actual movie we just watched. Why is it the entire denouement?

Kid rapping through the end credits... Yay, one last visit to that great rapping thing that we all loved throughout the whole movie, that rapping that really invested me in that kid's character, that I hoped I would get to see one last time.

As terrible as After Earth and Airbender were, at least if I ever had to sit through them again, they are visually interesting. This was a script on par with or even worse than those, and it looked terrible.

People had some good things to say about this movie so I was rooting for Shyamalan here and wanted to like this.

So much worse than I was expecting.

3 / 10.

Come at me, M. Night Juggalos.
Click to expand...


You really thought it was that bad? I thought it was better than everything from The Village on. The germaphobe kid and what happens to him was hilarious! Overall, it was enjoyable for me.
 
goodfella69 said:
Maybe not professionally wasted, but artistically wasted. I thought it sucked... and I actually saw this one (twice)
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Did you remember all the lyrics so you could rap along with the end credits the second time?
 
I liked it. It was fun. Cool premise, spooky at times. To compare this to the Last Airbender and After Earth is insane. Those were truly bad movies. This was a low budget smart and clever movie. Was ir perfect? No way, but it was worth the watch.
 
Adamant said:
You really thought it was that bad? I thought it was better than everything from The Village on. The germaphobe kid and what happens to him was hilarious! Overall, it was enjoyable for me.
Click to expand...

I gotta say I actually did dislike it that much. If I hadn't known it was Shyamalan's comeback movie, I would have bailed after 10-20 minutes.

I will grant that the middle hour is better than the opening and the ending, but it was still pretty painful for me.

I enjoyed the kid getting poop in his face, but really just as punishment for making me watch him up until then.

There were occasional scenes that worked at times, like the creepy grandma playing hide and seek under the house, but even the scenes that worked were plagued with problems. With the hide and seek, the kids were still filming themselves in unnatural ways, and I think the girl crawled away from the approaching grandma, and once she "got away" she just stopped and stayed under the house (halfway to the exit) and kept filming, and waited for the grandma to catch up and scare her a second time before *actually* trying to escape. Gotta get that footage for the documentary!

That and the kids never really helped each other, at least not until the very end. They never went back for each other. They would both just kind of run for their own lives and then, once they were free, kind of check to see if the other kid made it (eg. hide and seek). Having them help each other in these crises would have made them more likable characters, but it was sacrificed to get two separate angles / scenes for this POV documentary thing.

Like I said in the OP... The movie just reeked of desperation. I'm glad for M. Night that it did well, but this was really him pulling out all the stops to go to the well of what had worked before, plus desperate additions to tack on things that he thought would sell.

From the recycled book of M. Night Shyamalan Tricks:
- Thriller / horror
- Directing kids in a horror (hell, he's the guy that directed Hayley Joel Osment to an Oscar nomination)
- Twist ending

Tacked on in a hope to be trendy and relevant:
- Found footage POV filming
- Kid filmmaker
- Rapping (kids like that, right?)
- Pop culture in the dialogue (older sister mocks boy for YOLO, etc)

It really seemed like his sad attempt to recapture the Sixth Sense. Just with one extra kid and a different twist. Packaged in a bunch of trendy stuff.

It reminded me of the author Peter Benchley. After Jaws was a massive success (like the Sixth Sense), Benchley never really wrote another successful original story. And it wasn't long before he was going back to the well of underwater thrillers, but without the magic that had made Jaws work. He really only had that one idea up his sleeve. But he kept trying to do little variations on what had made him big, hoping that he would recapture lightning in a bottle. So he wrote stuff like The Beast, which was Jaws with a giant octopus instead of a shark. You'd have though it was from the writer of "Piranha" or "Grizzly" but it was from the actual writer of Jaws itself.

It was just kind of sad for me to see Shyamalan, all these years later, doing a Paranormal Activity style reinterpretation of the Sixth Sense.

But the worst thing for me was the characters. M. Night Shyamalan doesn't know how to write characters, or else he forgot how. He keeps throwing in these characters that are completely normal and nondescript, except they have one or two bizarre quirks that no human would actually do. Like that guy from Lady in the Water that only lifted weights with one side of his body. Why? Just because. That sets him apart and that's good enough - some surface behavior that distinguishes him, that nobody would ever do.

The Happening - that guy that loves hot dogs. That's his thing. That's his character, period.

The Visit - the boy decides he's going to yell female singers' names when he stubs his toe instead of swear words. Why? That's his "character" behavior. But nobody would ever do that. It's like bodybuilding with one side of your body. M. Night keeps throwing in these kinds of characters and quirks...I think because he's out of ideas.

With The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, he didn't need to paint up his characters with that weird surface bullshit because they were real people in a real story. Just like he did the found footage thing here because "contained thriller" wasn't enough, he threw in "pop singers as swear words" because "white rapper" wasn't enough. It was just desperate superficial window dressing to me.

The movie just kind of made me feel bad for M. Night Shyamalan, that he had to resort to this creatively.
 
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I Am Legion said:
I liked it. It was fun. Cool premise, spooky at times. To compare this to the Last Airbender and After Earth is insane. Those were truly bad movies. This was a low budget smart and clever movie. Was ir perfect? No way, but it was worth the watch.
Click to expand...

What did you find smart and clever about it?
 
shadow_priest_x said:
You see, I think Unbreakable is generally overrated.
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Ryan-Gosling-Oh-No-You-Didnt-Half-Nelson.gif
 
I agree it was terrible. My wife and I went to see it at the theater and we were literally the only ones there. It's only redeeming quality was when the old man hit the kid in the face with the dirty diaper.
 
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