I remember the night as though it was yesterday, December 26^th 2006.  Whilst my brother and I sat down to enjoy a snifter of porto, we thought to ourselves what better way to wind down the day than to enjoy a movie.  What could possibly go wrong?  Lady In The Water is what went wrong, and it set in motion what was to be a brief stay in the hospital for yours truly.

So far I’ve reviewed a lot of “shitty” movies, but in doing so I’ve always looked for something worthy of critical reassessment, the silver lining to the shit cloud as it were.  I can say with as much certainty as I can possibly muster that Lady In The Water offers no such lining, and in reality is the worst film ever made by anyone from this galaxy.  All you really have to do is look at the opening scene of the film; it basically serves as the shit-prism in which everything else can be viewed.   Apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep, played by Paul Giamatti, attempts to crush a bug under the sink while a family cowers in the background, screaming in terror as he tries to smash the bug.  It’s filmed in one continues take, and it goes on forever, and you really do think that it’s a joke.  Everything from the overtly stereotypical Mexican family wailing in horror at the violence being committed in front of them to a fucking bug, to Paul Giamatti’s incomprehensibly awkward Porky Pig stutter, to the camera’s static position and insistence that what you are seeing is somehow significant, all led me to believe at the time that the film was a parody.  Whether people are aware of this or not, the opening scene of every film is the most important; it sets up the tone and the visual language which will inform the rest of the film.  Think of The Godfather, The Dark Knight, Pulp Fiction, etc.  In a way this scene does just exactly that, just not in the way that benefits the narrative.  What it sets up is the same sense of disbelief that you will continuously encounter throughout the film over how goddamn stupid every single writing and directorial decision truly is.

Seeing as though I hate this film I won’t bother producing my own plot synopsis. I’ll just steal it from IMDB.

Apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep rescues what he thinks is a young woman from the pool he maintains. When he discovers that she is actually a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the journey back to her home, he works with his tenants to protect his new friend from the creatures that are determined to keep her in our world.

That’s the plot, and in reading such a concise write up you can see that it actually isn’t bad at all, perhaps even original.  And herein lays the root of every single, cringe worthy moment in the film.  M. Night Shyamalan is so concerned with setting up a mythos to his self-constructed fairy tale that he confuses bad ideas with originality, bloating a simple idea for no other reason than to stroke his own ego as cinematic auteur.  You want proof?  The name of the mythical nymph that he saves from the pool is “Story”.  How meta.  Oh, and he also casts himself ala Hitchcock as a writer, who will one day write a book that changes the world.  You gotta be fucking kidding me.   It’s filled with horrible plot contrivances like this, but I digress.  This isn’t a review as much as it is an account of the violent bodily reaction I had to it.  There are just way too many instances of utterly offensive stupidity to fit in this measly review.  Also I find that talking about this film at length gives it too much credit.  Watching it was a waste of time, writing about it is almost a bigger waste.   I have a bad habit of not turning off movies that I don’t like because I always try and give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe, just maybe, there will be something worthwhile.  By the end of the film I needed my whole body to hate this thing, so much so that I noticed a slight discomfort forming in my chest.  I thought nothing of it, and I went to be bed.

In the morning the pain hadn’t gone away, but had gotten worse.  Sharp stabbing pains in my chest, pains in my upper arm, I thought I might have had, or was presently having a heart attack.  I went to the clinic, they sent me to the emergency room as a precaution were they plugged me up to all kinds of Weapon-X styled machinery to measure any fluctuations in my heart beat patterns.  On day two they gave me an angiogram where they injected a dye into my blood stream and tracked the flow via a real time x-ray machine.  They tried to inject the dye several times through my arm; thankfully it worked in the last attempt.  Otherwise,  it would have had to go through an artery in my groin.

SO.  Turns out I didn’t have a heart attack, or any blocked arteries.  What I had was a virus called pericarditis which inflames the heart muscle, thus explaining the constant pain.  They put me on anti-inflammatory and eventually it all went away after a few months, with a follow up 6 months later just to make sure that it had been eradicated.  Like with many illnesses, it’s difficult to pinpoint the specific moment where one comes into contact with the contagion.  However, I don’t think that there is any question as to how I got sick; this movie is a fucking disease riddled, prostitute corpse that molested me for 2 hours, thus transferring the virus.  I don’t care if the science doesn’t add up. I know that I was the picture of health beforehand.

I’m not a Shyamalan hater.  The Sixth Sense is an effective ghost story, Unbreakable is a highly original take on superheroes, but that’s about as far as I can go in supporting his filmography.  The quality of his films seems to be directly proportional to the growth of his ego as a “writer/director/producer”.  Not many filmmakers get a marquee title above the actors’ names in the promotion for their films, and it’s gotten to his head.  He has the chops to develop concepts that regardless of execution are at least attempts at originality.  He should just learn when to shut the fuck up and maybe direct from another writer’s script whose head isn’t as far up his own ass.

Oh and that header is an actual line of a dialogue from the film.  Check mate Shyamalan.