The Happening vs Tremors

I read an interview this week in which M. Night Shyamalan called his new movie, The Happening, the best B-movie ever made. Uh, no. If M. Night Shyamalan has ever made a great B-movie, it was Signs, which takes the conceits of all the Cold War spaceman flicks, and adds subtly, great acting, and genuine scares. And since Signs is a big-budget Hollywood affair with Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix, I feel fairly dubious in any attempt to play it off as anything lesser, and I’m not the one who directed it. So, M. Night, since Mark Wahlberg has his name above the title, millions of dollars were put into filming, and The Happening opened on thousands of screens, you are not allowed to call it a B-movie. Especially since so many of us in the audience know an F when we see one.

In Central Park, people suddenly begin speaking gibberish, freeze in place, walk backwards, and then commit suicide. Maybe they had just watched The Village? And they don’t just commit suicide, they Commit Suicide, meaning they’re creative about it, to the point of inducing cringes and unintended laughter. A lot. For the entire movie. Oh, and for the record, it’s not just in Central Park, but also Philadelphia. Uh oh, don’t tell that train of characters headed to Philadelphia.

Seriously, don’t tell them. The Happening would have been a better movie for it, and much shorter.

Let’s just get this out of the way. The Happening is the worst movie so far this year, and the career-worst of both M. Night Shyamalan and Mark Wahlberg. It’s the most unintentionally funny movie since Showgirls. It contains inexplicably gratuitous violence (a child is shot point-blank, a zookeeper feeds his arms to tigers, someone else feeds himself to a lawnmower), and confusing, eye-rolling plot holes, the details of some glossed over (if you were going to instantly kill yourself, would you tie a noose and hang yourself stories up in the forest? With a dozen other people?); and others that are overexplained to the point of parody. The characters seem to know they’re in a movie, and that they’re all playing characters dumber than themselves. Wahlberg especially is saddled with some clunker questions and expository lists. For a fun game, take a drink any time he widens his eyes, cracks his voice and asks any of the variations on “What’s happening?” “What happened?” “Is this really happening?” “This can’t be happening”, etc. Make sure you have a ride home. This is a stinker of a script, a stinker of a performance, and a terrible, awful, embarrassing directing job. Even if you had a problem with Lady in the Water or The Village, you’re likely to have found them inventive or visually memorable. Nothing here grabs hold. There’s a chase scene involving Wahlberg and his group of survivors being pursued by…the wind. And another moment of esteemed actor Betty Buckley…head-butting windows. At one point, when the characters think terrorists might be to blame for the suicides, one of them, shocked, says “What kind of terrorists are these?”

Oh, and a sidenote to my pretend girlfriend, Zooey Deschanel. Dude. It’s over. It’s not me, it’s you.

I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve already made plans with a friend to watch Unbreakable again soon. The Happening isn’t powerful enough to push me off Shyamalan’s previous good work (although it’s plenty to steer me away from his next new movie.) I think you’re just gonna have to build back up your immunity to stupid a little, and rent an actual B-movie. The best I can think of, and one that makes quick work of The Happening’s attempts at community paranoia, people on the run and unseen scares is Tremors.

Tremors has essentially the same plot as The Happening. Something in nature is killing humans, so the humans split into groups, trying to outrun and outsmart it. In The Happening, the groups get smaller, thinking that nature is angry at overpopulation. In Tremors, the groups get smaller, because the heavier you are when you travel, the more noise you make and the more noise you make, the more likely it is that A GIANT WORM WILL COME OUT OF THE GROUND AND EAT YOU.

Tremors is scary, funny, cheap, short and the connection from Kevin Bacon to Reba McEntire. It was directed by Ron Underwood, who also directed City Slickers, but mainly works in television now. I bet he’s got some great stories about filming Tremors. What would you like to bet none of them include excuses?

The Happening: D-

Tremors: B