'The Happening' (R)(out of four)

Most likely, moviegoers will flock to see the latest from mystery film master M. Night Shyamalan in hopes he's churned out another edge-of-your-seat thriller like "The Sixth Sense." But soon after the violin-heavy movie music plays during the opening credits and Shyamalan's film starts to roll, the disappointment sets in that he's delivered something more like "Lady in the Water" than "The Village."

One fatal flaw in "The Happening" is its dialogue, which is spoken in short, choppy sentences. It's supposed to make everything very dramatic, even when it's not. "What's going on?" Elliot says with the wide-eyed, deer-in-headlights look that he wears throughout the entire 90 minutes of the movie. "We lost contact," says a train conductor, who has dispensed Elliott and a trainload of people into the middle of rural Pennsylvania in a fictional town called Filbert.

"With whom?" Elliot says even more quizzically.

"Everyone," says the conductor.

Dramatic music plays.

The movie stars Marc Wahlberg as Philadelphia science teacher Elliot Moore, who uses words like "bro" and "dude" when he addresses his students, but gets mightily serious when he talks about the unusual disappearance of bees. They have vanished without a trace, a definite foreshadowing of a scary event that's going to happen to change the course of events in everyone's life.

After he's called out of his classroom, he learns with the rest of his colleagues that an airborne toxin is affecting people in New York's Central Park. (By the way, the deliverer of the bad news is the principal, played by Alan "Cameron" Ruck, of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" fame.) He explains that hordes of people suddenly stop in their tracks, grow disoriented and then kill themselves.

Shyamalan has a few peculiar suicide techniques: one woman stabs herself in the neck with a sharp hair decoration, while a group of construction workers leap to their death from tall buildings. These and other gruesome suicide scenes are what earned Shyamalan his first R rating. But are they worth it? Not really.

As the toxin spreads up and down the East Coast only -- it is never really explained fully why it's only affected that part of the U.S. -- the science teacher figures out that the situation hasn't been caused by terrorists.

Elliot, his wife, Alma (an equally deer-eyed Zooey Deschanel), a brief appearance by John Leguizamo as nerdy math teacher, Julian, and his child, Jess, who utters nary a word throughout the entire film, go by car, train and foot to get as far away from the toxin as possible. After Leguizamo leaves them to find his wife who's taken her own life-saving route to Princeton, N.J., the trio stumbles on crazies living in rural Pennsylvania, including a very whacked out Betty Buckley as Mrs. Jones and some hermits with shotguns who kill two pre-teen boys at close range.

What's so frustrating, besides the gratuitous body count, is that there's no logic to Shyamalan's film. A quick scene shows two women watching television wearing gas masks. If they can be saved with gas masks, why can't Elliott and the rest of the folks figure out a better solution than trying to outrun the toxin?

Even Shyamalan who makes a cameo appearance in his films doesn't show his face in this one. He lends only his voice for a brief second on the other end of a cellular phone as Alma's affair, Joey.

Nonsensical, hokey and with no redeeming qualities, "The Happening" is downright scary for one reason only: that a film this bad ever made it to the big screen.