I knew M. Night Shyamalan's latest misfire, The Happening, was going south when Marky Mark Wahlberg --  who has deduced that Mother Nature is taking revenge on humankind -- begins sweet-talking a house plant so it won't do anything rash.

Or maybe it was when Wahlberg is trying to convince a locked-in homeowner that he's sane and therefore unaffected by an airborne toxin created by plants. He does so by singing a few bars of a Doobie Brothers hit to the stranger with a little softshoe tossed in. Yeah, I'd trust him to not be crazy.

Or maybe it's when Betty Buckley -- looking more Grizzelda by the minute -- starts screaming like a banshee because her hermit lifestyle has been disrupted by Wahlberg and his fellow refugees. "I don't like this woman," Zooey Deschanel says. "There's something Exorcist-y about her."

Or maybe it's when a high school student body is sent home after the first toxic outbreak occurs in Central Park and none of them have a cell phone or are logged onto a computer so they would know what happened. Or when Wahlberg starts spewing a torrent of eco-babble to over-explain everything.

Those are the kinds of things Shyamalan does, proving once again that he can have a great idea and absolutely no idea of what to do with it.

The Happening isn't as lousy as Lady in the Water, or pointless as The Village, or silly as the second half of Signs. It's actually an enjoyable bad movie, if you aren't buying a ticket, as I didn't. The first half-hour is a terrific set-up: a series of grisly suicides -- many not shown but suggested with Hitchcockian restraint -- that made my jaw drop and stomach churn. This is new territory for Shyamalan, in his first R-rated movie. He obviously has fun being gross, as do we by being grossed-out.

But The Happening isn't the return to form his dwindling number of fans have sought since The Sixth Sense, which is looking more and more like one of the biggest flukes in modern movie history.