The Happening, Starring Mark Wahlberg, Gets the Honest Trailer Treatment

Screenshot via YouTube

In honor of M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming horror comedy The Visit, Screen Junkies revisited The Happening, reinterpreting it as “one of the best laugh-out-loud comedies of 2008” rather than the supernatural horror film it was meant to be.

The Happening‘s plot revolves around a mass suicide phenomenon caused by an unknown airborne substance. Intriguing, right?

Not so much. Here’s the Screen Junkies’ bottom-line version: “It’s a film about a thing that happens… then stops happening.”

The YouTube channel’s “honest trailers” deliver a blunt take on hit movies and TV shows, and the one for The Happening takes jabs at every aspect of the film, from plot to dialogue to cast.

Mark Wahlberg is described as delivering a “Donnie Wahlberg-like performance” (calling all Blockheads—how outrageous is that?) as a science teacher named Elliott Moore “with one facial expression who’s so inquisitive, he phrases everything like a question.”

Zooey Deschanel’s performance as Moore’s wife Alma (a nod, perhaps to the Wahlberg matriarch) comes off as uninspired, with the trailer describing her as “dead-eyed” and “a mannequin.”

The trailer also awards The Happening with the honor of featuring “the least scary monster in film history—gently rustling leaves.”

Spoiler alert: It was the plants all along, a fact revealed very early on in the film, leaving plenty of room for “awkward dialogue, awkward pauses, and not much else” as you wait for the classic Shyamalan twist that never actually comes.

See the trailer in its full hilarity below.