You know how everyone complains that movie trailers give away too much information, leaving audiences with virtually no desire to see the film itself?

The Village is not one of those movies.

As a matter of fact, the best part about this film was its preview, which ended up being almost a thousand times scarier than the movie itself.

As it goes in Hollywood, filmmakers repeatedly try to out-do their previous efforts and set themselves to near impossible standards. This is why the film's writer/producer/director M. Night Shyamalan has crafted his first scary movie disaster: His expectations of his own work were just too high.

After the blockbusters The Sixth Sense and Signs, Shyamalan must have thought he had nowhere to go but up when he dreamt up a period piece about mysterious creatures living in the woods. Those two previous films became synonymous with the phrase "twist ending" and left viewers stunned that they could have missed something that was right before their eyes the entire time. In short, those films worked.

But as Signs displayed near its own end, sometimes even a twist ending isn't enough. A film cannot rest its entire concept around cheesy knock-off aliens who are afraid of water and expect to be taken seriously.

Shyamalan must not have learned from that example, nor did he have to. The movie was an outright success and it gave him the freedom to take phoniness to the next level in The Village.

The concept must have sounded great: Shyamalan doing a story about monsters in the woods. You know a place where sullen silence and unexpected things lurk around every corner. And a place where nearly anyone, old or young can get themselves lost if they don't keep careful watch of their footing. A place where one of the scariest films in the last decade - The Blair Witch Project - took place. This could not miss.

But by sacrificing his unique style of getting viewers frightened for yet another shocking twist, Shyamalan takes what could have been a scary concept and turns it into near comedy. The movie isn't scary, and the romance it tries to create will leave viewers bored and wondering why they came to see this film in the first place. I certainly didn't go in expecting love triangles and sappy dialogue, but that's most definitely what I and the rest of the audience in attendance got.

While there are unique parts to this film, namely Shyamalan's visual style of direction, even they grow tiresome with a story that simply suffers from poor writing. The main characters, including Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix), Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Noah Percy (Adrien Brody), are given very little by way of dialogue. If the speeches they deliver sound familiar, that's probably because they can be found in the Screenwriters Guide to Hackneyed Prose.

My thinking is that Shyamalan has been led to believe that he can put anything down on paper, as slow moving and self-indulgent as he wants, and audiences will buy it. Maybe this was true in the past when his films still had a bit of entertainment in them, but judging by The Village, Shyamalan may want to seek out other ways to expand his fortune.