The Happening (May 2nd at the Cedar Lee Theatre as part of 12 Hours of Terrible)

[THE HAPPENING screens Saturday May 2nd at the Cedar Lee Theatre as part of 12 Hours of Terrible.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

M. Night Syamalan’s THE HAPPENING is sort of a modern version of those seventies “nature gone amok” movies like KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS and DAY OF THE ANIMALS. The difference is those movies knew they were cheese, so they didn’t take themselves too seriously. They hired scenery chewing hams like William Shatner and Leslie Nielsen to star, kept the budgets low and, while still getting their ecological messages across, had fun. Unfortunately M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t realize how painfully silly his screenplay about killer trees is, so he treats this material with the same air of funereal seriousness as all his other films.

After Earth

Review by Matt Finley

M. Night Shyamalan has a new movie out, co-written with Gary Whitta (THE BOOK OF ELI), called AFTER EARTH.

In it, humans have ruined the planet, skedaddled to an off-world colony, gotten predatored by aliens who can smell human fear, and fought back by training select individuals – an elite force called the Rangers – to psychologically suppress their fear response (a process called “ghosting”). Real-life celebrity father and son Will and Jaden Smith (the former of whom has a story credit) play famous Ranger, Cypher Raige, and his determined wanna-be Ranger son, Kitai.

When they crash land on the abandoned Earth, which has become a lush, neo-prehistoric forbidden zone of ferocious animals and ruthless climatological fluctuations, a crippled Cypher sends Kitai on a five-day trek through the wilderness to retrieve the ship’s lost beacon – their only means of summoning Cypher’s Ranger buddies.