Terrible Thursday: The Happening

The Happening
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, and John Leguizamo
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan

Style: Unexplained happenings
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 4
Weapons of choice: Anything nearby to the afflicted
Overall rating: Terrible

Philadelphia has never been a wonderland of joy ever since Benjamin Franklin robbed that cobbler for the Washington Elite series clog. However, Elliot Moore (Wahlberg) finds himself having to flee the city after New York is hit by some sort of attack when people outside suddenly all kill themselves in whatever way happens to be handy. Soon, other cities and towns are affected, targeting smaller and smaller groups of individuals. Where can you escape to, if you can't go outside?

There are several fundamental problems with this film. Many people criticize its ridiculous nature, which Shyamalan has countered by saying he was making a B-movie. This seems like an excuse, but let's approach the film as a B-movie. We'll even ignore that the marketing department in that case mispromoted the heck out of that, because that's not Shyamalan's fault.

Firstly, Shyamalan took the completely wrong tone to his film for it to pass off as a B-movie. Yes, all of his actors are ridiculously over the top, from Wahlberg doing his best Napoleon Dynamite impression to Zooey Deschanel having moon eyes the entire film to Betty Buckley showing up as an batcrap insane recluse, everyone is hamming it up. Where this tone fails is that at no point does the movie insinuate that it is purposefully bad. There is no subtle wink to the audience. Combine this with the fact that the rest of the production strives to be realistic, down to graphic death scenes, and you have actors who look out of place rather than ones who are laughing it up.

Next, you have the fact that Shyamalan does not know how to do violence. In interviews he gave about this film, he talks about how he wants to break all conventions and hit audiences with things that they felt they would be safe from. This translates to I am going to kill kids in the film, and you'll never see it coming. Except for the fact that it happens when they are trying to break into an inhabited house and suddenly go from normal character kids to hooligan tactics. Not two minutes before, they were waxing philosophical about respect and relationships, and then they are trying to kick down doors. In fact, the first violent deaths occur about 2 minutes into the film, and the convention is set that when things go wrong, people will kill themselves. Knowing that convention tips his hand, and from then on, nothing we see will shock us as much because it's is completely and utterly expected. By the time you get to the lawnmower incident, the part of the trailer that people found most shocking, it is a ho-hum effect.

I'll skip the ridiculousness of the science in the film, because it is B-movie, so it doesn't matter, but what this film comes down to being is a very boring, rather uninventive movie about the possibility of humanity ceasing to exist. It's not fun, unless maybe you are very drunk. It's not exciting, because everything is telegraphed. And it's not scary, because nothing sneaks up on them. They are chased by wind in a scene reminiscent of when frost chased people in The Day After Tomorrow. So what is it then?

Terrible. Just terrible.

Terrible Thursday: Lake Placid 2

Lake Placid 2
Starring: John Schneider, Sara LaFleur, Sam McMurray, Chad Collins
Directed by: David Flores

Style: Creature Feature
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 4
Weapons of choice: Firearms, biting
Overall rating: terrible

Anytime your town suffers from an attack by some giant killer animal, odds are that you should just nuke the entire town afterwards and start from scratch. Why? Because there are always offspring, and these offspring will inevitably seek revenge, even if the people from the original incident pass on appearing in the sequel. This brings us to Lake Placid 2.

Once again, giant killer crocodiles have returned to Lake Placid. Once again, the sheriff (Schneider) and Fish and Wildlife Services (LaFleur) must do battle with these killers to save a town too stupid to move away from the lake, even though people continue to disappear there for years. Throw in an ornery old woman, who happens to be the sister of the ornery old woman from the first movie, and a big game hunter (McMurray), and you have yourself a race to see who can be the last one chewed on.

For the most part, this film is terrible from beginning to end. All of the characters lack any sort of enthusiasm or intelligence at all, to the point that the first ten minutes talk about how everyone is vanishing on the lake. One character even strips off her clothes and goes diving in her underwear, and she is the EPA / Fish and Wildlife person. I was hoping for some sort of skin infection to punish her with. Everyone else has one goal and will ignore all sorts of rational thinking to achieve it. For example, the sleazy reporter is led to the edge of the dock and left there as an old woman runs away, yet he fails to be suspicious.

The crocodiles are decent but look so out of place. All of the violence is from people writing on the ground pretending to be eaten as digital blood and croc mouth surrounds them.

To give you an idea of what this film is like, the characters just happens to have a grenade launcher lying around. And then, they try to not use it as much as possible. Terrible.

Terrible Thursday: Intermedio

Intermedio
Starring: Edward Furlong, Steve Railsback, Cerina Vincent, Amber Benson
Directed by: Andrew Lauer

Style: Supernatural
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 0
Laugh Factor: 4
Weapons of choice: Crappy CGI spirits, mining tools
Overall rating: Terrible

Welcome to Terrible Thursday. This is the weekly dissection of a terrible film. Something that, if you make it through, you should get a T-Shirt or some sort of medal. Our first offering is one near and dear to my heart: Intermedio.

The movie follows four friends on an ill conceived tour of a tunnel between Mexico and the US. Ill conceived because they never quite explain why this is a good idea. Also, there are random drug dealers down there. Oh, and there is also a murderous old man who controls equally murderous spirits. Well, maybe not spirits. I would say more like poorly executed flare effects with faces on them.

One of the reasons this film is so terrible is that there never seems to be any coherent story to drive it along. These kids decide to go down into the tunnel, then decide to try and rob the drug dealers, then other things happen, and then it ends. It is so bad that when I read the synopsis online to refresh my memory for this review, I thought somebody had seen an entirely different movie. I swore the kids went down there to make a drug deal, not randomly meet drug dealers.

What's worse, Edward Furlong's character appears to be constantly out of breath, as if walking at a moderate pace could result in a combination heart attack and aneurysm. Every line he delivers requires several moments of wheezing and gasping. I kid you not. Cerina Vincent's shirt is constantly shrinking throughout the film, something the movie makers did ON PURPOSE. How cheap can you be? This is how the filmmakers show how "cool" and "self-mocking" they can be. I instead wanted to break their camera hand.

Then there are the filters. It's like the director couldn't decide whether he loved filters or whether they are things you use for making coffee. The opening scene, for example, keeps changing shades of orange because the sun was in various states of setting when they were filming. They have filters to fix that. In retrospect, maybe the director just couldn't decide what color filter he wanted to use. Whichever is worse, that was probably the reason behind it. Then, filters come out of the woodwork, with every underground tunnel feeling like some high schooler's AV project. I was waiting for some scene to be double filtered, as goodness knows there was nothing else to pay attention to in this film.

Finally, the movie ends after a gloriously craptacular death by the old man controlling the spirits (if you use digital blood, you need to be slapped). If anyone can explain the last shot to me i.e. what it means and where the characters are, I congratulate you. I sure as heck couldn't, as it is so tacked on that I expected the next shot to be the director winking at the the camera, saying "Clever, huh?"

This movie is an ordeal. It is a bane to those who stumble across it on TV late at night and don't see just how terrible it can be. Throw it into a chasm. Burn every copy. Just don't watch it.