5. The Happening (2008)
The Twist: People across the United States suddenly start killing themselves at random, and it turns out... ohmyGod,
plants are releasing a strange toxin that is forcing them to do it. Because nature is angry at us.
Why It's Unpopular: "Plants did it." It sounds incredibly dumb. And it doesn't help that M. Night Shyamalan tries to make this all seem scary by shooting close-ups of trees blowing in the wind accompanied by tense musical cues, which is what happens - a lot.
Why It Deserves More Credit: As with so many M. Night Shyamalan ventures, the man's ideas aren't necessarily terrible - it's the way he executes them that kind of spoils everything. Take this idea, which sounds ridiculous in premise, but definitely could have worked had it not felt so slap dash. Shyamalan was onto something when he decided to make a movie about the wrath of nature, but he went about it in the wrong way: this reeks of Stephen King and the kind of concept that he might've worked wonders with on the page. So had the writer/director insisted on a
specific type of plant releasing the toxin, and not just "plants on the whole" (which just sounds "blah"), it might have been a little more buyable - we could believe that one plant had evolved to the point where it could release a toxin or something, right? So although it's easy to scoff at this idea,
The Happening was spot-on as a relevant take on man vs. nature, it was just clumsily laid out on the screen. And at least he had the balls to reveal the "plot twist" halfway through the movie and not at the end this time.