The Muck Walk
Dr. Daniel's review of Event Horizon

critical condition

Starring Sam Neill, Larry Fishburne, Joely Richardson, Kathleen Quinlan, Richard T. Jones, Jack Noseworthy, Jason Isaacs, Sean Pertwee.

Directed by Paul Anderson. Rated R.

    Okay, here's the deal. Let's go for a walk, shall we? Take my hand, gentle reader, and let's walk back through time. A small jaunt back to the late '70's and early '80's. Disco's dying, everybody's wearing those Urban Cowboy silk shirts and boots. And the trend in movies right now is the slasher film. There are two getting all the buzz: Halloween and Friday the 13th.
   Both of these flicks were dandy deeds done dirt cheap. They starred no one worth talking about at the time. In fact, Donald Pleasance, Lord love him, was the biggest "star" in either movie. But they had one thing going for them that absolutely no one could deny. They scared the absolute living hay-ull out of you. They grabbed you like a hernia exam. They were violent, they were bloody, and they had the cohuengas to just slap it out there and say, "You think it's over now? Bah! Not hardly." The baddie would get killed, then sit up and keep right on butcherin' nekkid teenagers. Hit him in the head with an axe, he keeps going. Run him down with a monster truck, he keeps going. Shoot him buttways with a sawed off 30-30 and hollow points, he keeps going. Every time you'd relax, it would start again.
    And this formula has been the key for a gazillion imitations and sequels of imitations since. You had the pretty good ones, like Nightmare on Elm Street, but it careened occasionally into some Police Academy-type stupidity, where you had a horrifying murderous spirit that took the time to dig up a Milton Berle joke before he did a kid in with his Ginsu Glove. You had the positively dreadful stuff, like Chopping Mall and Pieces, that were imitations of imitations of imitations of imitations, and were the biggest waste of guitar picks to ever see the inside of a cineplex. But the people kept on coming.
    Now, let's walk back. The whole business folds in on itself. The slasher movie becomes a joke. So much so that one of the best movies of last year, Scream, made its legend by making fun of the slasher movie while being a slasher movie. The in-jokes and eye winks were wonderful. And, now, everybody wants horror movies again.
    Somebody was looking through the vaults one day and said, "Hey! Alien was a scary movie. Let's do a horror movie in outer space!" And they did. And they called it Event Horizon. And they made a slick, loud trailer that stirred up everybody's interest, and it looked great for its two-minute blitz before almost every movie that came out this summer. And, then the movie came out...And, boy did it bite.
    In this future, the Event Horizon is a prototype spaceship that has been lost for seven years, 'til it suddenly reappears in the galaxy, and a rescue mission is sent out to recover it. Scientist William Weir (Sam Neill) is the designer of the Event Horizon, so the skipper of the rescue ship, Miller (Laurence Fishburne) allows him to come along. Good idea, since no one else knows how the Event Horizon works....
    The rescue ship meets up with the EH around Neptune, and Dr. Weir decides to share with the others that the EH was equipped with a device that allowed it to travel faster than light, so there's absolutely no wiggly way to tell where the ship's been. It could've hopped anywhere. And, in this case, it went to the far side of hell and returned with a heapin' helpin' of duty-free nastiness.
    If you haven't thrown the "stupid" flag by now, you are a patient individual. The ship is somehow (don't ask me how) possessed, and it feeds off of human fears. It can manifest terrors and make them occur, over and over and over.
    All spaceships aside, this is not some sci-fi movie gone awry. This is a high-budget, high-concept, low-rent bloodbath...nothing more. Director Paul Anderson's biggest claim to fame before this was Mortal Kombat, and, boy does it show. He works through the blood-by-the-barrel method, and loves to test the theatre sound system by keeping the sound effects turned to Spinal Tap Eleven. Heaven help those who sit too close to a speaker, 'cause you'll learn first-hand how it must feel to be Pete Townsend. Anderson also suffers from slasher-envy, 'cause he cannot let this thing die. He builds climax after climax, only to start over after the big bang and build again. It becomes a tired, deaf joke after a while, and it was most unnecessary.
    A sidenote to rookie screenwriter Philip Eisner: if I ever see you on the street, remind me to give you a smack on the chin with my classring. Phil, buddy, there have been enough clichés this summer. We did not need you to dig back to Shatner 101 for this exchange: "I need time." "That's exactly what we don't have, doctor!" C'mon, Phil. Call me at home if you have to. I could remember ten better clichés for you than that, even after a six of Coors and two pickled eggs.
    I'd like to write this thing off as a tired retread, but it's not even that admirable. Outright theft of plots from everything from Alien to Elm Street, complete wastes of high-caliber actors like Neill and Fishburne, and armed robbery of the opening scene from Star Wars pushes this Star Drek to the limits of toleration. Dang, Paul, you put Kathleen Quinlan in this movie, why not steal the undressing scene from Alien while you were at it? At least we could have seen something from the past that was still beautiful.
    So all I'm saying is...if you see Event Horizon on the marquee...take another walk back in time...to your car in the parking lot.