Saw this last night with a girl friend of mine who is perfect person to see horror with, as she jumps and screams at nearly ever scare. Due to some scheduling conflicts we ended up in the lower tier theater and shopping center, which is like the Friday night 22 and under crowd, which was more or less fine. I'd say 70% of the audience had NO idea who M. Knight was, and were only tennously aware of his movies. The audience seemed to react well, laughed a lot, jumped, threw a lot of remarks at the screen. Which was ok, because this is a movie no one needs to respect.
This was offensively bad, Knight is basically saying fukk you to the audience at this point, and laughing at them, taking pride in his ability to put forth such an astonishingly bad movie, and still draw a crowd.....but the 'twist' is I think this disgraced egomaniac, reduced to mocking a crowd that doesn't know who he is, in a shoe string budget bullshyt movies.... still thinks he has 'it', evidenced by the roughly 7 minutes of forced, cliche 'emotionally resonant' material he shoves, without reason or provocation down the audiences throat. Like he always does in his bullshot movies. Some overarching message of hope, faith, anger management, family conflict resolution, whatever the fukk. Then goes back to bad shock value violence, gross out gags, and found footage filming style, which hasn't been a 'thing' for at least 6 years. It's a mess of a movie. And the rapping kid was offensive on a number of levels. The first may very well be how embarrassing it is he thinks this is funny or cute. Or is it another twist, that he expects his obviously plebian audience to appreciate it? Whatever.
There is a moment where the aspiring documentary maker says she won't do something because of her cinematic integrity. The rapping 13 year old responds that no one cares about cinematic integrity. Thats the movie in a single line. I see you Knight.