The Red Banded HAPPENING

The titanic ego of M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN has cursed his every move in recent years. The blossoming promise shown in his earliest films has disintegrated before the bewildered eyes of moviegoers everywhere. The trust is broken, replaced by a palpable resentment. It's like admiring a charismatic uncle as a young person, only to go behind the shed one day to see him sodomizing a dead cat; the relationship never quite recovers. It's an understatement to say that Shyamalan has a lot riding on his newest pseudo-intellectual horror film THE HAPPENING. After the twin disasters THE VILLAGE and LADY IN THE WATER, this new film needs to really click, or Shyamalan will find himself trying to sell his patented twist-ending stories on streetcorners for nickels. Unfortunately he decided to title this make-or-break endeavor THE HAPPENING, one of the worst titles I have ever heard or imagined. Depending on my mood, the title sounds either pretentious, boring, or pointless. What the fuck is a "happening" anyway???? This title means so very little that it threatens to evaporate right off of the one-sheet.

Then uber-genius Shyamalan releases a trailer that features the characters using the word "happening" over and over again. "Something is happening," says a news reporter. "What is happening?" asks star MARK WAHLBERG. "Something has begun to happen," is the reply he receives. It feels like a lame attempt to embed this blobular, meaningless word into our heads, but the net effect of this repetition is to reinforce how fucking insipid the title sounds. Nice job, dipshit. Thanks to the absolutely poisonous advance word on the film from previews, we now have a red band trailer for the film. This is Shyamalan attempting to appeal to the hardcore geeks out there by showing gruesome images. This trailer just screams: "See guys? I'm fucking radical and hardcore like Eli Roth! Dude!" Unfortunately, Shyamalan managed to slip into this trailer one disastrous scene featuring Mark Wahlberg. In it, Wahlberg says, "There are forces at work beyond our understanding." He intones this terrible line like an unholy cross between Forrest Gump and a two pound package of ground beef. It's easily the worst line reading since Anakin and Padme stood on that balcony in REVENGE OF THE SITH and talked about being in love. Instantly, all of the tremendous work Walhberg did over the years to make us forget that he used to have "Marky" in front of his name suddenly disappeared. Nice job, Wahlberg; go back to modelling underwear for a living. Here is the trailer. It's not for the faint of heart, but not in the way you might expect:

If not for SPEED RACER, this thing would be my obvious pick for worst film of the summer. I still have hope that Shyamalan can beat SPEED to the bottom of the barrel; if there's one thing we know, it's that geniuses who think they are geniuses are usually the ones who end up looking the dumbest.