EVERYONE HATES M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN.

The era of the M. Night Shyamalan flick is over. I should have said that, like, a long long time ago.

But seriously, M. Night Shyamalan thrilled us with The Sixth Sense (released in 1999; 1999, gawd dammit!), Unbreakable (released in 2000) and Signs (released in 2002), but Shyamalan's "brain farts" started to surface from 2004's The Village, which received mostly negative reviews but still did well at the box office, making US$114.2 million in the US and US$142 million overseas. Shyamalan blamed it on the way the film was being marketed. The nightmare's long from over, dude.

The director's crap continued to show through 2006's Lady in the Water and 2008's The Happening, both films harshly panned by film critics.

In 2007, MTV Films and Nickelodeon Movies announced that they had the director to write, direct and produce a film based on the hit Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. The Last Airbender was eventually released in early July 2010. I totally knew that this was a bad idea from the start.

And it was a bad idea: the film was widely panned and received countless negative reviews from film critics, criticizing the film's script, casting and everything else in between. M. Night Shyamalan has broken the hearts of Avatar fanboys in the US, and will eventually break those residing in Singapore when the film hits local theatres on August 5. Brace yourselves, kids; you'll be disappointed. In addition, it will be a trilogy. Oh God, help us.

Now, Shyamalan has a new project in the works: The Night Chronicles, a film trilogy involving the supernatural within the modern urban society. The first film of the trilogy is Devil.

Directed by Drew & John Erick Dowdle, written by Brain Nelson, and produced by M. Night Shyamalan and Sam Mercer, Devil revolves around a group of people who get stuck in an elevator with the Devil.

The trailer for Devil was shown before Inception (I want to see Inception so badly, by the way), and everyone in theatres all around the US reacted pretty badly when M. Night Shyamalan's name appeared on the screen. True story; movie-goers are really reacting like that. Devil opens in the US on September 17, 2010.

[NOTE: M. Night Shyamalan DID NOT direct Devil; he only wrote the story (not the screenplay) and produced it.]

So I can safely say that the era of M. Night Shyamalan flick is over. You see what I did there?? Ending with the beginning... Twist ending! Haha. I know, that was cheesy and lame.