Let me first start off by saying that any negative feelings I feel for this movie (and there are quite a few,) were in fact greatly influenced by the high expecations I had after literal years of recommendation and hype from close friends. I won’t pretend that the preceding synopsi, reviews, and opinons that I had been given prior to vieweing had no bearing on my staggering dissapointment. However, given this influence I still feel that it would have been difficult to set the bar low enough to have enjoyed Event Horizon. What I expected to be a chilling, psychological and cinematic work was really just, IMHO, a sorry knock-off of several styles and works.
Essentialy, EH follows a squad of space-soldiers in the distant[ish] future on a mission to recover the Event Horizon, a spacecraft that was built to fly through black holes and had dissappeared years earlier. The crew make there way onto the ship after a series of textbook accidents render their craft inoperable. Once onboard they find lots of gross clues that something very bad happened to the former crew, and that the ship has taken on its own evil persona.
Now, I understand that many people I love revel over this movie and think it one of the scariest ever. I appreciate but disagree with this view. Here’s my reasoning:
- The movie had very few “ligitimate” scares. What I mean by ligitimate is a scene where tension is built by imagination, scenes where we the audience are trying to peek around corners to see what’s out there, where we’re hiding under the blankets to escape the monster that we can’t see yet. Scenes that draw the viewer in, make you feel like you’re the one inside the room, holding your breath and shivering. Smart, clever, creative scares. EH did not deliver this. EG delivered 2 scenes of ligitimate tension (and the medical lab scene with the tent was scary as all get out.) However, the scene in the weird green crawlspace was on every trailer and TV spot for the movie. I had basically seen that little startler about a bajillion times in advertisements since 1997. Not a good way to build tension.
- Instead of finding ways to make us feel terrified and afraid (a la Carpenter, Kubrick, hello?) the movie has us covering our eyes to avoid the next sudden sequence of pointless gratuitous violence and gore. There is no way around it: gore is cheap. The decision to load a movie with scenes of graphic violence or gruesome death shows that even the filmmakers didn’t feel as though their script was strong enough to stand on its own. The flashbacks, the airlock sequence, the “butterfly;” these are cheap thrills. These are fart jokes; these are boobies. These are how you “buy” an audience without giving them anything legit.
- While we’re on the subject, most of the gruesome tension was lifted straight from the works of Clive Barker. From the way every object onboard the EH looks like a gothic torture device, to having a long hallway that looks like and functions as a meat grinder? Again, buying us off. The tension comes from us not wanting to see someone get impaled, ground, or otherwise mutilated. People are afraid of monsters under the beds, by evil waiting around the corner. Being sucked out of an airlock and having my arteries burst open is not a fear of mine, it is just gross. Showing these kinds of things is horrible, and disgraces the genre.
- The hooks in the “butterfly” scene were straight out of Hellraiser, and the sequence tried to capture what we felt in “Silence of the Lambs.” Only it was just gross, not scary.
To be frank, I wish we hadn’t watched this movie. It gave me nothing but an upset stomach and a sense of overwhelming dissapointment, and to me the movie suffered from its attempts to utilize the elements that made “The Shining,” “Alien,” and “Hellraiser” the landmarks of horror that they are. Unoriginal, disgusting. Lame.
