The Happening / The Crappening

Writing a CF review of this Hollywood cash and burn is kinda like picking on the retarded kid at school. Aside from John Boorman (Zardoz, The Exorcist II), I can think of no other Hollywood director that has gone from being considered a brilliant new voice to out-of-his-mind in such a short span of time. Sure, lots of brilliant directors have made bad films, but Shyamalan has made two in a row. In fact, The Happening takes things a step down to the lows dredged by Lady in the Water.

The plot is ludicrous, but on paper, it actually sounds as though it would make a pretty cool low-grade science fiction movie, like the ones they cranked out back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. People mysteriously go into trances and begin killing themselves in major East Coast cities. Is it biological terrorism? Urban nihilism? A covert government test? Unfortunately, the cause isn’t nearly as interesting as any of those scenarios – it’s (ludicrously) the trees and plants, which have suddenly decided that they hate humans and have evolved ways to get rid of us.

Mark Wahlberg, who is not necessarily a bad actor, is our everyman, and even he doesn’t really seem to know what to do with the material he’s offered. The opening scene with him playing a high school science teacher is painful, and I wondered if they hadn’t slipped in some rehearsal footage by mistake. His brother will come off looking cooler in front of a half-empty stadium during the New Kids on the Block reunion tour.

It’s not all Marky Mark’s fault. The dialogue is such that Knight basically sent his actors down the road in a car with square wheels. What we have is a clear violation of screenwriting rule #1 – “show, don’t tell.” One scene, for instance, has a group of people being shot, and we see Wahlberg close his eyes and tell himself, “Think you’re a scientist, look at the variables…”

You expect straight-to-video movies to be bad, but it’s rare when a major Hollywood director ends up making something as Mystery Science Theater-worthy as The Happening turns out to be. This movie is so poorly-directed and acted that if you took all of the scenes that actually worked and combined them, you may get a minute and a half of running time. Shyamalan’s first mistake was believing in his heart when the whole world told him he was brilliant. Yes, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable are well-made films, but Knight’s hubris clearly got the better of him, and one wonders whether he even passes his scripts off to editors any more. When the public began to get skeptical of his films, Knight got a bit snarky. Disney turned this one down after reading the script, and it has been reported that his own assistant was not confident in the script.
Towards the end of the film, the plot veers into gothic horror territory. Wahlberg, Deschanel and the kid with them stumble across a decrepit farmhouse that time forgot, complete with the standard crazy doll-collecting caretaker who may or may not have something to hide.
Unfortunately, Shyamalan’s stilted dialogue and inept scene structuring ruin what could have been a few effective scares. The set piece really doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the movie; I actually wonder if Shyamalan was having difficulty stretching the killer trees and weeds plot into a feature film, then added this sequence as an afterthought.

Is this movie worth your $2?: The Happening is one of those that really should be viewed for its monumental flameout value, if nothing else. You almost wish Shyamalan would have checked himself before he wrecked himself, because only the most mean-spirited among us would really want to see him fail. It is certainly not good, nor is it entertaining or interesting enough to be bad-good. Masochists need apply.

Burial Ground: This cloth smells like death

At this juncture in time, even non-horror fans can be remotely familiar with parts of the Italian zombie canon, thanks to the wide availability of this stuff on DVD. At the very least, you shouldn't be surprised to talk to the "normal" people who can remember seeing that distinct giant box for Fulci's Zombi 2 (AKA Zombie) turning white on a video store shelf of a bygone rental store.

If you really want to test an Italo-schlock fan's mettle in a contest of "yes, but have you seen this," you'd do well to bring up Andrea Bianchi's Burial Ground, a considerably lesser-known Italian horror clunker from that glorious year of 1981. The '80s truly was the decade that proved to be the swansong for anti-PC tax write-offs that were dumped straight to the shelves of video stores, but, thanks to DVD, we can enjoy films like Burial Ground until the apocalypse.

The story begins with some guy (we later learn he's a "professor") wearing a glued-on beard chipping away at a bunch of dirt. He's been hard at work studying some mysterious runes, which look more like Internet emoticons (seriously – look carefully - there's a smiley face carved onto the tablet!). Lo and behold, zombies emerge from the wall. Before they start munching on him, he tries to reason with them, screaming, "No! I'm you're friend." This would be stupid enough, but the bad dubbing that plagues the rest of the movie just makes it that much better.

Next up, you get your typical cast of ugly Italian zombie fodder driving up to the mansion where the professor was conducting his studies. The credit sequence is accompanied by some of the worst nu-jazz this side of Kenny G / pornography. The acting is awful, and the dialogue is so unbelievably bad that you can rest assured not a soul on the set spoke a lick of English. Actually, this pushes the movie even higher, as the characters deliver one howler after another. It truly is magical.

The vacation party is there to frolic, and they do just that for a good chunk of running time. I've seen reviews level the charge of "boring" on these sections of the movie, but I really have to question what they're doing watching bad Italian zombie films if they're there solely for the mayhem. Slow down, smell the roses, appreciate the finer points of bad filmmaking – we get hilarious dialogue between characters, sleazy, uncomfortable sex scenes, and totally laughable editing. The centerpiece of the movie turns out to be this weird "child" named Michael. You see, for the purposes of the script, he's supposed to be around the age of ten, but due to the unavailability of a real kid (pesky laws), the director opted to cast what appears to be a thirty-year-old man with some kind of dwarf condition, and then had him dubbed by a guy attempting a falsetto. He has to be one of the scariest, most bizarre things I've ever seen in a horror movie – and it's completely unintentional!

Michael's overall creepiness is compounded by the fact that he has a strange Oedipal fixation on his mother. At one point, she rebukes an advance from him, and he responds, "What's wrong?! I'm your son!" You can see where this is going. I'm not sure who urged this subplot be added to the "script," but you will not soon forget it.

The zombies in the movie look cheap, but simultaneously effective. I can certainly appreciate a director who works with the effects he's got. Bianchi's living dead, clad in moldy cloaks and covered with green pus and maggots, are the "smarter" breed of zombie that are able to use tools; this is the only zombie film I can think of where we see the undead teaming up to knock down a door with a battering ram. Thankfully, they're not modern athletic zombies like those found in 28 Days Later or the Dawn of the Dead remake. This doesn't matter, though, because the characters in the movie are so incredibly stupid when faced with their impending doom that they sit in one place and wait to get eaten. There are some memorable yet cheap gore scenes, including one obviously inspired by the eye impalement scene in Zombi 2, and another involving the creepy "kid" that will remain with you for the rest of your life.

Burial Ground is a terrible movie. Entry-level film school students would have a field day picking apart the inconsistencies and moviemaking rules that are violated, but that's precisely why it's so easy to love. The pace moves along at a fast clip, and the stupidity hits monumental levels.

Is this movie worth your $2?:

Yes – if you're a zombie movie or Italian trash cinema fan, Burial Ground is absolutely worth a rental. I recommend ownership – it ranks with classics like Riki-Oh, Robocop, Commando and Bad Taste as one of my favorite "party movies." Throw it on, and then watch your friends clear out of the room or question your sanity!

Zeder - Watch out for those "K Zones"

Pupi Avati is one of the most underrated directors of Italian horror, largely due to the fact that he only has a handful of horror movies in his oeuvre, and many of them are difficult to find in the United States. His 1976 film The House With Laughing Windows, which happens to be my favorite giallo after the Fulci / Argento entries, was given a very brief DVD release by Image. Zeder did not fare much better in the U.S., although it at least saw a cut release on VHS under the misleading title Revenge of the Dead during the 1980s. If one were to believe the box, the movie could reasonably be expected to be an Italian zombie bloodbath in the spirit of Zombi 2 or Burial Ground. Avati, however, is not that kind of a director; having worked primarily in the art house realm, his horror movies are unsettling, slow and fraught with paranoid developments, rewarding patient viewers long after those with ADD weaned on MTV-style modern horror will have tuned out.

The story begins in France in 1956, where cops are turning up mangled bodies and attempting to solve the crimes by digging around basements for corpses. Paolo Zeder has discovered a way to defeat death, and to prove his theory, he buries himself in one of his "K Zones," or areas where the natural laws of death don't apply and bodies will resurrect.

We then flash forward to Italy, where a struggling writer everyman Stefano gets a typewriter as a gift from his wife. It doesn't take him long to find information on Zeder's research still imprinted on the ribbon, piquing his curiosity and leading him into a mystery that will open doors which we all know he will regret having opened by the end of the movie. Despite pleas from his wife and warnings from other parties, Stefano's investigations become obsessive; dogged by a shady government society bent on continuing Zeder's research, he discovers a link involving a former priest with a mysteriously empty tomb and an abandoned vacation camp surrounded by electric fences in the Italian countryside.

As in The House With Laughing Windows, Avati uses atmosphere and mystery, telling rather than showing, to build his horror methodically until everything comes to a boil in the final fifteen minutes of film. The ultimate horror is once again concealed in a creepy rural location, and the protagonist exists for little reason other than to move the plot along by uncovering strange secrets. Avati is good at using shadows and desolate locations to convey mystery and unease. Riz Ortolani (Cannibal Holocaust) composed the soundtrack, which sounds like a mix between something Goblin would have done for Romero or Argento and the theme from Psycho.

Unfortunately, Zeder's main drawback is that its events are very similar to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, published the same year that the movie came out. Although the similarities are undoubtedly a coincidence, this movie will attract savvy horror fans who have already seen and / or read King's work, making some of the events in Zeder fairly predictable and drastically reducing the shocks that the movie should be delivering.

Is this movie worth your $2?:

The House With Laughing Windows is much stronger (and ends on more over-the-top note), but Zeder is definitely worth checking out for fans of Italian horror and intelligent, underrated, creepy movies. Steer clear of the unwatchable U.S. DVD and check out the European disc instead. Avati returned to the horror genre in 2007 with The Hideout, which I have yet to see.