If 'The Happening' Was 10X Shorter and 100X More Honest

FADE IN:

EXT. NEW YORK CITY - PARK

People walk around in the PARK while two unimportant characters have INANE DIALOGUE.

BORING CHARACTER 1

That was weird. Suddenly all of the people in this park stopped dead in their tracks and started acting like brainless robots.

BORING CHARACTER 2

Large groups of people behaving as though they have no personality whatsoever? That can only mean ...

BORING CHARACTER 1

Oh shit, we're in an M. Night Shyamalan movie!

They both KILL THEMSELVES.

EVERYONE ELSE

An M. Night Shyamalan movie! Our careers will be ruined!

EVERYONE ELSE kills themselves as well.

INT. PHILADELPHIA - CLASSROOM

MARK WAHLBERG teaches SCIENCE to a classroom full of middle school students. It's exactly as believable as it sounds.

STUDENT

Hey Mr. Wahlberg, how come bees have been dying off in record numbers lately?

MARK WAHLBERG

Well, you see, it's an act of nature that nobody will ever understand. Those crazy scienticians will come up with something just to put it in a book, but ultimately they're just chumps.

STUDENT

What? Who wrote this script, Kirk Cameron?

MARK'S friend, JOHN LEQUIZAMO, enters the classroom.

JOHN LEQUIZAMO

Hey, there's a suicide epidemic in New York. People think terrorists are releasing some toxin in the air that's causing people to kill themselves.

MARK WAHLBERG

Awesome, disasters in movies tend to serve little purpose other than to unite families with problems. Perhaps this can fix my rocky marriage.

JOHN LEQUIZAMO

This is serious. This toxin doesn't just make you stop breathing or anything, it makes you go far, far out of your way to kill yourself in the goriest, most dramatic way possible.

To illustrate this, JOHN and MARK watch a high-resolution video on top of a color printout of a hand holding an iPhone, which depicts a guy getting lions to rip his arms off at the zoo.

MARK WAHLBERG

Holy shit, did I really just watch a guy perform Jax's fatality on himself? Are we in Toxic Avenger 5 or something?

JOHN LEQUIZAMO

We need to get out of the city. Go home and get your increasingly distant wife and meet me at the train station. We need to get on a train, because if there's one place we know terrorists won't attack, it's a vehicle carrying hundreds of people.

MARK goes home to find his wife ZOOEY DESCHANEL.

MARK WAHLBERG

(yawning)

Hey honey, let's go to the train station to awkwardly progress the story forward without any character motivation. Or whatever. Is it lunchtime yet?

ZOOEY DESCHANEL

Alright, but only if I can pretend I have depth by illuminating a completely superfluous side story about a guy I met at work.

They meet JOHN LEQUIZAMO and travel by train out of the CITY.

JOHN LEQUIZAMO

I can't get my wife on the phone. I need you to take care of my daughter while I go look for her.

ZOOEY DESCHANEL

No problem, I'd love to help.

JOHN LEQUIZAMO

I wasn't talking to you, you cum-guzzling cunt.

ZOOEY DESCHANEL

My apologies. I'll just politely ignore your rudeness and take care of your daughter anyway.

MARK WAHLBERG

And I'll go ahead and not even defend my wife like the whiny little bitch I am.

JOHN LEQUIZAMO

It's a good thing you guys are such likable protagonists instead of, for example, completely uninteresting assholes that audiences would hate watching for two hours.

MARK WAHLBERG

Good luck finding your wife. Make sure to drive everywhere with the windows down since we know that this is an airborne toxin.

He DOES, then listens to MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE and CUTS HIMSELF.

MARK, ZOOEY and JOHN'S DAUGHTER take refuge in an abandoned house for a minute, then for some reason decide to go back outside where the DEADLY TOXINS are.

ZOOEY DESCHANEL

Look, I need to come clean with you. I ... I had dessert with some guy I met at work.

MARK WAHLBERG

Oh my God! Is 'dessert' some kind of euphemism for letting him take a shit in your mouth after he fucks you or something?!

ZOOEY DESCHANEL

Er, no. We had cheesecake.

MARK WAHLBERG

Oh. Well I'm going to go ahead and act like it was the other thing!

MARK and ZOOEY sleepwalk their way through some more scenes as the plot progresses itself forward without their involvement.

ZOOEY DESCHANEL

You know, for a movie called 'The Happening,' there is surprisingly little actually going on.

MARK WAHLBERG

No shit. Alright, Shyamalan. Where does this painfully boring roller coaster take us next?

M NIGHT SHYAMALAN

Let's see here. The next thing that happened in "War of the Worlds" was Tom Cruise finding that crazy hermit guy. I guess we should do that for a few minutes, since I'm such a fucking hack.

MARK, ZOOEY and JOHN'S DAUGHTER try to outrun the air and eventually make it to a boarded-up HOUSE with a CRAZY HERMIT and stay with her for a bit.

CRAZY OLD BAT

Woohoo, tiger stream junket floating can purse lily munch! Turd fighter glass breaking eardrum turnip, John!

MARK WAHLBERG

I wonder what totally unexpected twist will happen as a result of your wackiness!

NOTHING happens, and eventually the CRAZY OLD BAT dies.

MARK WAHLBERG

Oh. I guess her only role was to illustrate that the deadly toxin is, in fact, deadly. Go close the doors and windows, Zooey.

ZOOEY DESCHANEL

(quizzically)

Why?

MARK WAHLBERG

Why? Did you seriously just ask me that? Are you watching a different movie or something? Listen up ...

(pause)

The fucking air. It fucking kills you. It's fucking deadly. Don't fucking breathe it. Was this script written by a fucking monkey?

Suddenly, THE HAPPENING stops HAPPENING, largely because the audience members left to go get a REFUND.

An EXPERT comes on TELEVISION to explain the movie for the benefit of any RETARDED PEOPLE in the AUDIENCE.

TV EXPERT

You see, it seems that plants became tired of the way we treat our environment, so they started releasing a deadly toxin.

TV ANCHORMAN

Why didn't they just stop producing oxygen?

TV EXPERT

Well where's the unwatchable pile of garbage of a film in that?

MARK WAHLBERG

I don't get it. We found out it was plants like an hour ago. Aren't M. Night Shyamalan movies supposed to have some crazy surprise at the end?

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN

Surprise, I managed to make a movie worse than "Lady in the Water"!

END