10 Awesome Musical Scores That Deserved Better Movies

Although Signs and The Village had proved a little divisive, it was really with self-indulgent (and self-insert) fairy tale twaddle Lady In The Water that M. Night Shyamalan really squandered all the good will his first couple of indie genre flicks had given him.

Still, at least he brought his regular composer James Newton Howard along for the swimming pool Narf ride.

Howard scored every Shyamalan film between The Sixth Sense and After Earth and his work as composer has remained markedly more consistent in quality than the director's. In fact, despite the quality of Shyamalan's performance here as writer, director and actor, Howard is on top form.

While Shyamalan's "bedtime story" is almost crude in its narrative simplicity, Howard's score is the most delicate and complex of their long-term collaboration. Shyamalan's watery themes are almost impossibly shallow, where Howard's have depth, with subtle waves of rhythm and harmony going on beneath the surface.

Still, it's not all subtlety, Howard's ominous strings and crashing crescendos also suggest a scary side and action packed thrills that Shyamalan's script simply can't deliver on.