The worst movie... ever.

Ok, so we saw "The Happening" tonight and I just have to say that even referring to that thing as a "movie" is... well, it's just wrong. I'm not going to waste time looking up the definition of "movie" on wikipedia, but I'm almost certain it would use words like "story", "plot", "acting" and "climax", all of which were conspicuously missing from whatever it was we just saw. M. Nyght Shamwow has definitely played himself out. I would give a "spoiler" warning before I move on with this, but I am being dead honest when I tell you that nothing I say about this movie can make it any less enjoyable than it already is. It doesn't even have camp classic potential, it's just... bad. It's so bad I can't even hold it in my head. Every single part in the movie was so entirely disconnected from every other part that it's like trying to hold a bunch of oiled BBs together in a fishing net. I'm forgetting more and more of it as I type. Oops, there goes another meaningless, unrelated, silly little bit of stupidity. Bye bye wasted grey matter. I hardly knew thee... bleh. So, back to trying to decipher the point behind this tragedy. Ready? Go.

As nearly as I can tell, everyone on the left coast is now in a race to see who can get their Eagle Scout Envirowonk badge first, and M.N. Shammy is now vying for the lead with this movie. I would like to add here that I am actually an environmentalist in the original sense of the word, in that I believe we should try to take care of the planet. I have children, and I would like for them to have trees to play in and air to breathe. I am *not*, however, an environmentalist in the new sense of the word, which apparently includes the belief that humans are some sort of geo-rash on the surface of the earth, just waiting for a good creme to come along and clear us up... which is, coincidentally, the closest I can come to finding a point in Mr. Shama-lama-ding-dongs movie. Apparently, the plants are really mad at us for being here, and spontaneously evolve a neuro-toxin that causes us to kill ourselves with the closest and/or most macabre tool available (because evolving a poison that would kills us directly would have been just mean, not to mention clearly outside the realm of possibility). All these plants must have missed the reports on how much the earths biomass has increased over the last few decades, but then again, they are just plants. Plants that are capable of developing and un-developing neurotoxins in a matter of hours, communicating over long distances among varied species, and also apparently capable of summoning up a pretty darn vicious wind, ala Moses and the Red Sea. Pretty much everything but read an environmental report noting that plants are doing pretty well right now. Maybe they should have taken a Rasmussen poll before going off the deep end... You know, dangit, this movie was so pointlessly stitched together that I can't even figure out how to work in some paragraph breaks in a review about it. I'm just going to start throwing them in at random, unless my lawyer advises me that tossing in random and meaningless style elements in a story might somehow constitute a blatant plagiarism of M. Nyghts movie. Next Paragraph:

Sometimes I like to use the phrase "heavy handed" when describing a movie or book in which required plot elements are just slapped onto the metaphorical table in front of you, with no preamble or finesse. Well, that analogy doesn't cut it for this story. It was more like watching a pre-teen boy who grew three shoes size in the last month trying to walk down a broken sidewalk with one leg asleep, his shoelaces tied together, and a Wild Kingdom tranquilizer dart sticking out of his neck. It just stumbled along drunkenly, crashing into various and unrelated story elements, until it finally just gave up and sank down against a wall somewhere. Ironically, the very first person to speak in the movie can't figure out who she is, can't complete a meaningful sentence, and finally decides that the best thing to do with herself is to jab a wooden stick into her neck. Perfect analogy for the movie. I'll buy the stick.

So, the story was lame, the elements disconnected, then how about the acting you ask? Yeah... no redemption there either. I'm guessing that the story was so bad that it just sucked the life out of the actors. In fact, I'll bet that in the original script the people didn't actually commit suicide when the neurotoxin hit them. I'll bet that idea came from the actors, shortly after they read the script for the first time. I'll even go further and suppose that in the uncut version you'll find a part about actor agents being brutally murdered by plants that were angry at where they had been cast... I mean placed.

The net net on this movie is that it's just about the worst excuse for a one line environmental message that has ever been perpetrated on an unsuspecting audience. Sadly, I would have been perfectly happy to listen to this one line message if it had been even slightly dressed up with a decent story, but alas, it was not. It was just... badness. I could go on for hours on this, but seeing as I already wasted an hour and a half my life tonight I think I'll just wrap it up with this deep and meaningful message which I think could, in itself, become an hour and half long feature film:

Do. Not. Go. See. "The Happening".