M. Night Shyamalan’s newest horror-flick-slash-unintentional-comedy, The Visit, opens this Friday, and to honor the occasion Screen Junkies has graced us with another Honest Trailer. This time they’ve turned their critical gaze on The Happening, Shyamalan’s 2008 train wreck of a film in which trees (yes, just regular trees) were the monsters. The trailer pulls no punches, skewering Mark Wahlberg for a “Donnie Wahlberg-level performance” as a science teacher with only one facial expression: brows raised, forehead wrinkled, nostrils flared. Zooey Deschanel plays Wahlberg’s “dead-eyed mannequin” of a wife, and together they run through several shots of gently rustling leaves.
Even Wahlberg knows the movie was bad. During his 2010 press tour for The Fighter, he admitted that his costar Amy Adams, who was up for Deschanel’s part, had dodged a bullet: “It is what it is. Fucking trees, man. The plants. Fuck it. You can’t blame me for not wanting to try to play a science teacher. At least I wasn’t playing a cop or a crook.”
At least the monsters in The Visit—a set of creepy grandparents—are mobile.
