The Happening (2008)

Idea: After an assumed terrorist attack hits Central Park, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) decide to leave Philadelphia to hide out in the country with Elliot's best friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). When Julian decides to ditch Jess with Moores to go find out what happened to his wife, it's up to Elliot to protect them from what's happening.

Oh, you love it.

I think I am just going to come out and tell you what the Big Bad here is. It's all over the damn intertubes these days anyway, so you might as well hear it here last: it's the plants. There you have it. The plants are pissed because of pollution or global warming or some such, so they decide to get together and rapidly evolve some toxins to kill everyone in a tight north eastern corner of the US as a warning (or something). A guy (Horace, as he'll always be to me) who runs a nursery figures it out and just straight up tells Elliot, so there's really no reason for me not to just tell you.

Given that writer-director-producer M. Night Shyamalan himself lowered my expectations going into this thing, I even can't say that the bar was set too high walking in. Even so, I found myself in minor awe over how bad it was. I spent a good chunk of the movie (you know, after we all figured out that it was evil trees), looking at how bad Sanchez was, how completely out of left field Leguizamo's line readings were, how risible Deschanel's performance was, and how wildly unconvincing Wahlberg was at every turn, and thinking about how I would like to take the opportunity to have Wahlberg in particular meet me over at Camera 3 to discuss how he, himself, is better than this and that he, himself, should know better, when it occurred to me that this was all on purpose. The tin-eared line readings, the ridiculous turns of phrase (e.g. "the town of Princeton." Oh, thanks for that. None of us have ever heard of bleeding Princeton before, so I am glad you explained that it is a town. Maybe you should have also told us that it is in New Jersey in case we forgot about the whole nor-east thing), the habit of having Wahlberg look directly into the camera and utter things like (and I am not making this up), "Why are you giving me one useless piece of information at a time? What's going on? Hey, why would you just stop?" It was all on purpose.

And when you look at it that way, it's actually a pretty good B-movie. If that's the level on which it is meant to function, it succeeds for the most part (we'll get to the other parts in a minute). It's got a good combination of camp and gore, not wholly unlikely the seriously underrated Supernatural, minus the hard bodies, deep wells of angst, and tough guy jazz hands. For that reason, it's really only Shyamalan himself that I'd like to see over at Camera 3.

Camera 3: Dude, wtf? You think this is a B-movie? Have you seen a B-movie? Do you know why this doesn't cut it as a B-movie? Because it has moments of legitimately good filmmaking, which makes the rest of the laughably bad running time all the more difficult to bear. It's mean. You know, I get that it must be hard to be you, that you don't want to be the guy who does the movies with the twists nor do you want to be the golden child gone to seed. There's something almost Welles-ian about what's become of you, and that must suck. Too bad, so sad, let's move on already. First off, if you are going to make a B-movie, I would recommend that you go for broke, Grindhouse-style. Make the gore ridiculous instead of horrifyingly gross. Don't give us occasional sequences of genuine terror, like when the bodies come raining down on poor Richard. It should be silly. The bodies should have, I don't know, bounced or something. Do me a favour. Watch that scene where Elliot tries to talk a houseplant into not killing his family. Watch it again. Watch it a third time. That scene is funny. We weren't laughing because it was bad. We were laughing because it achieved its goal of being funny. Build from there. I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it until you listen: find a writing partner. Heck, find a story partner. Find someone whose opinion you trust and you'll listen to, and stick with that person. I have every confidence that you'll get richer rewards if you do.

As for the rest of you, if mostly laughing at a crappy movie and sometimes having to cover your eyes appeals to you, go for it. C-