Good in concept, poor in execution, "The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan" was plagued by terrible acting, amateurish directing, and the easy comparison to "The Blair Witch Project" which did a similar type of promo on the Sci-Fi network. The 3-hour (!!) "mockumentary" was nothing more than a giant infomercial for Shyamalan's body of work and his new movie "The Village". The worst part of the film was the acting. The old woman who supposedly knew Night as a child came off like one of those old ladies you see in commercials trying to sell you life insurance. The real estate agent overacted so badly that I can't believe she wasn't recast. The believability factor of the script was also quite low. Why would the director talk to a pizza guy about M. Night Shyamalan? Why would anyone care if Johnny Depp was considered for the lead in "Signs"? If electrical equipment strangely stops working around Shyamalan, how does he work around all that equipment on a movie set? I could go on, but you get the idea. Perhaps if this movie was shorter and perhaps if the acting and script were better, this could have been a decent "horror" film along the lines of a "Twilight Zone" episode. As it turned out, it was about as scary as "Manos, the Hands of Fate".
The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan
(2004 TV Movie)
Entertaining in a MST3K sort of way
20 July 2004