Halloween is fast approaching and if you are like me, you are scrambling to find a film cram-packed with spookiness. This can be difficult, because more than likely you would want to see a horror film that you have not seen before.

   With all the new horror movies coming out, that should not be a problem. The trouble is, how do you know if it will be good or not? I am here to be your guide in this year’s horrible holiday movie going goodness. One of the movies that had recently come out for the holiday is “The Visit” by M. Night Shyamalan.

   “The Visit” opens up with a video recording of two children getting ready for a trip to their estranged grandparents’ house. When their mother embarks on a cruise for the week, the children meet up with their grandparents. As the movie progresses, their grandparents start acting strange, giving the children more questions than answers as they continue to learn about them.

   The first thing to be said about this film is it is a found footage film. That means “shaky cam,” so be careful if you get squeamish from that sort of film making. It is very easy to make an ugly movie by doing this.

  The shaky cam in this film isn’t as bad as other of its genre’s predecessors since it keeps a constant shot for more than five seconds. There were times, though, that the camera work got out of hand and you really just wanted the scene to stay still.

  Did M. Night Shyamalan finally make amends by making a movie that was actually good?

   To be fair, I have to say this movie was better than the usual Shyamalan slop that he brings to the screen. But saying a film is better than “The Last Airbender” is not that hard to do.

   In my opinion, it was garbage.

   The kids in the film can be super annoying at times. What hurts their performance is the dynamic of brother and sister. Shyamalan tried to portray the siblings having different lingo and styles due to age. An example of this is the younger of the two throwing some “hip” words out and the older sister not understanding them. I am 22 years old and I even knew some of the slang the kid was using. Besides, there wasn’t even that big of an age difference.

   But the thing that really lagged this film down was the writing. It was a simple enough premise that the company had to work with: kids go to grandparents they have never met and their grandparents are weird. I don’t care if a horror film as a simple premise, just write in some good scares.

   The only remotely scary moment in this film was a scene where the girl is locked up in a room during one of the grandma’s crazy fits. If I were in that scenario I would be a little creeped out, let’s be honest.

   A constant staple in Shyamalan’s writing is he always has to throw a big twist ending into the mix. I usually found this amusing in his films, but he made the twist in this film so blatantly obvious, I figured it out in the first five minutes.

   If I can figure out the end of the movie from the beginning, there is no reason I need to pay attention.

   “The Visit” is nowhere near the worst horror movie I have seen, but if you are planning to see a good horror flick, I would put my money somewhere else. With this said, everything is open to interpretation, and you might like things in the film that I didn’t.

   “The Visit” is just not a movie to go see if you are an avid enjoyer of the spooky scary. Stick to seeing dead people, Shyamalan.