Watching a movie like The Happening is always heartbreaking. Much like Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, The Happening is a slow-motion train wreck in which the power of one man's ego collides with a terribly executed idea.

Some directors, no matter how brilliant, need someone to reign them in and protect them from themselves. A quick reread of The Emperor's New Clothes will show you exactly what goes wrong here, as a director -- in this case M. Night Shyamalan -- who has bought into his own hype tries to tackle something he clearly does not understand. And once you sift through the carnage of the DVD, you can see why. Every terrible decision is laid out piece by piece for you to pick up, examine and wash your hands of as you discover why this project went completely off the rails.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, The Happening is the story of a mysterious virus that infects talented actors (like Mark Wahlberg, John Leguizamo and Zooey Deschanel) and forces them to stare blankly into the camera for minutes on end. Their senses dulled, they are made unaware of the terrible dialogue and story they have somehow stumbled into, which involves long expositions, nonsensical reactions, and the occasional scene of characters trying to outrun the wind. And worst of all, they are struck silly, unable to conjure the simplest emotion or deliver a line of dialogue without it spilling out as uninteresting, diarrheic gibberish.

As the virus spreads, actors flee the cities, hoping to get away and maintain a sense of composure. But they are stalked the whole way by a megalomaniacal director who believes himself to be Alfred Hitchcock reincarnated and who puts his actors in sillier and sillier situations until a magical deus ex machina ending sweeps in to return everyone to normal.

And, as if the movie weren't mind-numbing and terrible enough, the special features are even worse, with a very excited Shyamalan explaining in excruciating detail every single bad decision he makes. There's a featurette on why they decided to make the movie a hard R, a decision that resulted in some of the most painfully awkward and unintentionally funny moments of the film, most notably when a guy comically force-feeds himself to lions. Then there's a feature on the third act twist, in which the producers gleefully delight in how the film temporarily becomes another movie entirely -- which, incidentally, is one of the film's many glaring flaws.

Most strange is a featurette called A Day For Night, in which we follow around M. Night for a day -- where we see how easy this guy has it. I've been on a number of sets for a number of different types of films, and I've never seen a filmmaker so happily detached and so focused on simply getting the shots done quickly instead of getting them done right, nor have I seen a director so confident in his first two takes. There are a few moments when people try to speak up, but they are ignored as Shyamalan continues on, blissfully making an unspeakably awful film.

It's a very strange experience all around. There's a gag reel, but it mostly features people palling around as opposed to funny bloopers or "gags." There's not a laugh to be found in the whole segment. Mercifully, the one thing they did right with these extras was enable viewers to turn off Shyamalan's self-serving, deleted-scene introductions. For the last 10 years I haven't been able to watch an M. Night deleted scene without M. Night first completely explaining, dissecting, and ultimately ruining it beforehand. The guy loves himself on camera and detests voice-over commentaries. So, the fact that someone in the DVD department arranged the deleted material without M. Night yammering on for five minutes before 30-second scenes felt like a godsend. One glance at this stuff and you don't need explanation. Everything deleted is even worse than what appears in the film.

This disc is a miserable experience. It's willing to show you just how this gawdawful film became so bad.

The Happening is available now from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

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