 (spoilers, but if you're going to watch the movie instead, you're a brave, brave soul) I'll admit it; when I'm watching a horror movie, the more gore the better (and I'm not talking about the current VP). It's not that I'm a sadistic guy, but just that when I'm going to the movies to see a horror movie, I wanted to be at least slightly terrified. When it was released in theaters, I stayed away from it, because the trailer really didn't hype the film all that well. ("Infinite space, infinite terror"? THAT'S real original.) But when a friend watched it on video and said it was too gory for his tastes, that caught my attention. Boy, was I wrong. A movie CAN get too gory (and they say this version was toned DOWN to meet MPAA regs). But despite it all, it didn't scare me. It all starts out with the "Event Horizon" (even more original), a spaceship that reappears off Neptune, Marie Celeste-style, seven years after it disappears. Sure enough, against all common sense, a rescue ship is sent out to see what happened. Now, if it wasn't for the star power, this movie would DEFINITELY fit all the qualifications for being a B-movie. You've got Lawrence Fishburne, Kathleen Quinlan, and some gal I recognized from "the Patriot" on the rescue ship's crew, as well as Sam Neill playing the guy who designed the ship. But in these cases, it looked as if all of them mailed in their performances. I'm not looking for any character expansion or anything, but for God's sake, work a LITTLE for that salary! The ship (which looks like a cross between the Discovery from 2001 and a couple ships from Babylon 5) has returned without any of its crew, but instead has taken on a life of its own. Sounds scary? It isn't. In really predictable fashion, the crew gets taken down since the ship can "sense" all the crewmen's weaknesses, and plays upon them incessantly through mirages that fool them. But the really horrific stuff is supposed to come from the log kept by the original crew, showing the crew all bloody and gory at their destination. But since the image is so choppy, you really can't tell. Use your imagination, I guess. The crewmen are stuck in a virtual "Hell", which is ironic, since in the latter half of the movie the crew finds out through the ship's log that the ship went to Hell. (Boy, if that's not a reason to demote the ship's navigator, I don't know what is.) Anyway, I said "the crew finds out" because the viewer knows it all along. Of course, one of them (Neill) gets "turned over to the dark side", and the remaining crew members fight to get out of this nightmare. Predictably, the leader(Fishburne) makes the ultimate sacrifice in getting the crew...well, what's left of them to safety. Or did they? The end of the movie shows the rescue crew's rescuers trying to bring one of the surviving members out of a nightmare haunted by Neill, always opening up the possibility of a sequel. And that, my friends, is the one thing in this movie that scared me. About the author: Bill's currently an engineering grad student, which he uses to exercise his pain threshold for movies like this. You may read another review, submit your own, or return home. |
