Crap movie, awesome ending

Rating: 3/10 (28 March 2008)

No, I won't give away the ending, but let's just say that it ended exactly like I hoped it would. Just imagine what's going through the mind of that character...
I haven't read the novella by King, but judging from this movie there wasn't enough meat in that short story to last a full two hour movie. It started out okay, but after a while it started to become a bit dull.
Considering that it's a fairly new movie, it has some of the worst special effects I have ever seen (The Langoliers, another King fare, comes to mind), which is either a result of a poor budget or shoddy craftsmanship by the CG artists. I think that the major mistake that they do is showing too much of the monsters, and way too often. Just think of Jaws or Alien, where we barely see the monsters (it you can call a shark monster), but they are a whole lot more suspenseful than this movie.
In fact, the look and feel of the entire movie screams of low budget. I know, 18 million isn't a whole lot of dough, but there are ways to stretch a dollar to make it feel like a bigger budget. The Usual Suspects, which had a budget of 6 million, is just one example (although admittedly that movie isn't special effects-laden). One of Darabont's previous films, The Shawshank Redemption, was made for only 25 million, and that's a period piece, which isn't exactly cheap.
For the life of me, I can't understand why this movie's got a 7.6 rating. Maybe it's the ending. Judging the movie by the last ten minutes, I would easily give it an 8, but looking at the whole thing, it's not worth more than 3.