Did it suck that bad?

Ten years ago, ‘The Happening’ … happened

A friend and I have had an over-a-decade-long running (though now less frequent, sadly) habit.

Bad Movie Friday.

When we were more faithful to the tradition, we’d plop down on the couch with smokes, cheap booze, and the occasional guest to challenge our enduring taste for trash cinema. Always a double feature, with an obligatory taco run during intermission. Al pastor from Don Francisco’s on Eleventh Street, if you’re curious.

I was still writing reviews on Myspace then for a small but encouraging group of friends, and I noticed a trend toward writing exclusively about movies I liked because they were objectively good. Kind of like a food critic.

Hence, Bad Movie Friday. The goal was most certainly to watch a bad film. Just the kind that knows it’s bad. Crafted on a crazy idea, rubber bands, bubble gum, and people not getting paid much to have what is clearly a good time. They didn’t necessarily have to be cheap, either—the ‘80s was a treasure trove of cheesy movies with a budget—but they did have to have heart.   

We saw “King Kung Fu” (a Kong rip-off set in Wichita, Kansas, where Kong knows kung fu); “K-9000,” a Stephen E. de Souza-penned buddy cop comedy in which the buddy is a telepathic dog; “Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter,” where Jesus … you get it. Sure, something as famously bad as “Battlefield: Earth” is truly batshit in the sense that it has a stunning production budget and makes you wonder how anyone thought it was good during the making. But it’s also a fucking bore. First rule of any movie (or anything, really): Don’t. Be. Boring.

All that to say, it should come as no surprise that, on a Friday ten years ago, we watched “The Happening.”

Mark Wahlberg is Elliot Moore, a dorky science teacher, living in Philadelphia and married to Alma (Zooey Deschanel), who, unbeknownst to Elliot, has cheated on him by going out once for tiramisu with a guy who won’t stop calling (and leaving voicemails). Fortunately for Alma, a supposed biological terrorist attack causes everybody around to start killing themselves in increasingly extravagant and violent ways.

Construction workers fall like lemmings from skyscrapers. Everyone with a gun kills themselves. And anyone who notices picks up the same gun. A zookeeper decides to play with the lions and is dispassionately torn to pieces.

It’s incumbent upon me to pause here and mention that all of this becomes hilarious after the first five minutes.

When the contagion spreads from a subtly-placed Ground Zero in Central Park to a park in Philadelphia, Elliot decides it’s best to get out of town with Alma, his best friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) on a train though the heavily-forested woods of Pennsylvania, where they meet a crazy botanist (Frank Collison) who’s convinced that every chlorophyll-based, C02-breathing asshole in the Tri-State Area is out to kill them. And, as it turns out, they are.

In a target-rich environment of bad and/or nonsensical writing, questionable performances, and Shyamalan’s subtle-as-a-fart-in-a-hot-elevator direction, it’s really Wahlberg who takes the gold as the most unconvincing hero ever—at least until his role as Jack Salmon in Peter Jackson’s aggressively terrible adaptation of “The Lovely Bones” the following year, where he managed to sound like more of a whiny teenager than his dead, teenaged ghost-daughter. Deschanel doesn’t help matters, either. Maybe all acting is reacting, but she just reminds me of a super cute, very confused rhesus monkey.

But it does turn into sublime comedy when Elliot tries to think too hard and finds himself making friends with a plastic plant. Or leading his ever-shrinking band of survivors into even worse decisions because he’s, well, not smart. At all. Or how Night fumbles his intentions, awkwardly jamming together rote drama, heavy-handed environmental themes, and gory counterpunches of violence (it is his first R-rated film) into a tonal clusterfuck of thinly-sketched characters unconvincingly running in fear from windblown trees. Someone called it “The Birds” without birds. I prefer to think of them as Nazi Ents. Either way, we’re being generous.

But here’s the problem. I like it.

Ten years ago I thought this was a baffling misfire. This is where the joke of his golden boy, post-“Signs” downfall really took hold. Is it bad? Most certainly.   

But now I can see it for what it is. A super-violent, relatively fun “Twilight Zone” episode. A rude answer to the reception of Night’s “Lady in the Water,” itself a narcissistic pseudo-critique of critics of “The Village.” All of those movies banked. Critics don’t matter. The only sad part is that the idea of homicidal flora wiping out humanity is a great one, ripe for exploration not found here.