It takes a Village to spoil a movie...

Ever read I am the Cheese? I read it in my ninth grade English class and I thought it was great. It was a nice adventure in the whole What-the-hell-is-going-on? genre that can be pretty effective. That's how I'd equate the Village.

Not that anyone's reading this, but if you are, then spoilers are ahead.

I watched The Village Sunday night courtesy of my brother, Bill, who cooled off long enough to let me borrow the movie on DVD. I'm really glad I didn't spend money to watch it. Not that The Village was a bad movie, but in terms of let downs, it was a HUGE disappointment.

Don't get me wrong. It has a rather interesting story, with interesting characters and interesting twists, which is played out like a quirky drama with some suspense thrown in. That would have been fine if that' s how it was potrayed in the TV commercials and movie trailers. Not even close.

The movie trailers made the movie seem like the scariest movie of the year. It had all of the elements of creepiness. A town isolated from the world in a large valley. They can't leave because of the truce that exists between them and creatures in the woods. The trailers make it seem that the truce is broken and a blood bath ensues. The scenes you see are of spooky creatures moving about with the townspeople huddled in a floor trapdoor begging the person at the door not to let the creatures in. That would have been a nice thriller if that's how it played out, but it doesn't play out that way.

Every scary part of the movie has already been shown to you in the trailers and commercials for the movie.

There are two twists to the movie. One is that the creatures that you see early on in the movie are a farce potrayed by the elders of the village to keep their inhabitants from leaving. As to why they do this is the other twist.

Joaquin Phoenix's character gets stabbed by the village idiot played by Adrian Brody because he's going to marry his sister, whom he loves and is afraid to lose. Because they don't have any medicines, his fiance begs to go into town to find medicines to heal her future husband. The fiance is a blind woman, by the way, who is one of the more interesting characters of the movie.

Her father, the town preacher, shows her the secret of the forest and tells her how to get to town. Of course, there's a lot of "How could you?" lines by the other town elders in on the sham. She gets to the end of the path in the forest and this 1800's village is actually in the middle of a wildlife refuge in modern times!!! Nice twist, but not scary.

That's what I had a problem. I was expecting a scary movie and instead I get a cozy drama pretending to be a scary movie.

This would be like seeing a trailer for a movie promising the hottest love scenes and steaming adult action and instead you get mostly pillow talk and clothes humping. Or if you saw a trailer for a non-stop action movie, but then most of the action you see in the trailer occurs in the first 10 minutes and the characters sit around and bitch at each other for the other two hours. Or if you rented an adult movie, but all you saw were shadows behind a screen with people moaning for the whole movie.

I can understand why this movie fell off the radar fast. People felt ripped off and I don't blame them.

Besides the fact, what people start a village up in modern times and then not come up with a stash of essential items like medicine? You could have stored a huge parsel of them in the shed you don't allow the townspeople to enter. Since the town doctor is also in on the sham, you could trick your naive townspeople that the medicines they have were procured from the town years ago before they were born. That'd be the first thing I'd stock up on if I was going to isolate myself like this. What's more, it's mentioned by those on the outside that the estate makes sure that no aircraft fly over the refuge. If you have someone looking out for you on the outside, why wouldn't this person make sure that every few months a parsel of goods and medicines is thrown over the wall of the refuge. The town elders could have come up with an excuse that only a certain blessed person could go into town to get the goods, or better yet, act like they've always had them. How would the naive townspeople know?