The Many Days of Horror! - Event Horizon

Event Horizon

I've watched this movie on several occasions, each time trying to piece together exactly why it is I don't like it. Event Horizon has everything I technically could want in a movie: the tale of a haunted starship, the first FTL craft to be built, apparently on an infinite budget and designed by mad scientists (including Sam Neill) with no OSHA oversight so they can make it as spiky and dangerous as they want. The ship disappears on its maiden voyage, and years later resurfaces. A deep space rescue team led by Lawrence Fishburn is dispatched with Sam Neill to recover the ship. No one apparently worries about the distress signals being received, which sound rather ominous. Naturally the ship has some serious haunting issues, and as the crew begins to act strangely and hallucinate the gravity drive at the core of the Event Horizon begins opening to somewhere else...

So why don't I like Event Horizon? It's not really a bad film, but my wife made a comment early on in the latest viewing that Sam Neill (Dr. Weir) immediately made her think of Jurassic Park. This was during a scene in which he tries to explain to a crew of space rescue specialists the concept of a warp drive that folds space to travel. As usual the guys who work on a spaceship appear to be oblivious to the physics of space travel, as a way of giving the untrustworthy scientist a reason to explain in second grade language to the audience how this whole premise is supposed to work. As my wife pointed out, though, the scene was reminding her of Jurassic Park, when Sam Neill, in a more benevolent role, does the same thing with dinosaurs.

That was when I realized that Event Horizon is a patchwork movie, made up of a bunch of derivative elements from other films. You can find a bit of Hellraiser, Alien, Amityville Horror, Jurassic Park, and many more mixed in at different times. It's a weirdly low-key movie as well; for a story about a haunted spaceship that opens portals to hell there aren't nearly as many "hell moments" as one would like. Sam Neill does get to play a villain (who is a riff on Hellraiser's cenobytes, let's be Frank here*), so there is that. The FX are fairly decent but never quite as impressive as in other similar movies, which draws comparisons of course (but hey it still looks better than Super Nova). Like Alien its full of average Joe dudes working in space, and like Amityville Horror spooky things happen and there's a lot of blood.

The movie also suffers from what seems to be a director who doesn't really know how to film for good effect in horror. Before I say more, let me point out this movie was released in 1997. Guess who the director was. Go ahead, guess! If you read last year's 31 days of horror series you may sense a returning theme....yep, it was Paul W.S. Anderson. With that in mind, I have to give him credit: he gets better, at action films if not horror, and let's face it, he's also better as a producer (for example Pandorum), too.

I won't knock Event Horizon because I find it not-scary; and not in a "I've seen too much of this stuff" sort of way, more like a "this movie doesn't know how to set up events to surprise you, nor does it know how to make you care for these characters" sort of way, instead. I will knock it for being badly derivative and failing to creatively riff on what has come before in a way that makes it stand out as its own thing. I will blast it for somehow managing to misappropriate Sam Neill and Lawrence Fishburne, both of whom can do better than this if someone is directing them properly. I can and will blast it for managing to make such a great potential story so....ordinary.

C

*see what I did there?

The Many Days of Horror! - Dead Space 2

It's October again, and so it is time once more to delve deep into the realm of horror films and games, to elucidate, tantalize, traumatize, terrorize maybe even inform about what's worth watching, what's worth playing, and what's worth jabbing with a rusty knife and burying in the back yard...there's no way in hell I can keep up with the daily routine I did last year, so I'll stick to my Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule but make it horror themed all month long instead.

Dead Space 2

The sequel to the original Dead Space was destined to be bigger, although one could argue that the thematic advantages of the original were in the claustrophobic domain of the Ishimura and it's mostly reanimated population of necromorphs. Dead Space 2 moved to the colonized moon of Titan, and introduced an Isaac Clark with a voice, which was a much needed addition; the era of the silent protagonist is behind us....even if you don't offer us a voice, at least offer us some dialogue trees...anything to reflect that our cipher in the game is at least as interested or involved in being where he is as we are.

The freshly voice-imbued Isaac is hiding out. He's stuck in a colonial stretch where Earth Government is in direct conflict with a religious cult which grows by leaps and bounds around the Red Marker, a dedication which belies the madness and eventual, horrific changes that come from exposure to the mysterious artifacts. Worse yet, it looks like the cult is in charge, and has been using Isaac to reconstruct the marker, a much larger version in fact. Naturally, Titan is going to hell. Literally.

Although there is perhaps more shooting and maiming, decapitating and murdering of necromorphs in Dead Space 2 than there was in the first game (and there was a lot of that in the first, I can assure you) it still retained the spooky haunted space station feel, coupled with a sort of space-catastrophe on a large scale. It moved beyond being "inspired by Alien" and well into its own territory of space apocalyptica.

If Dead Space 2 has any failings it's that Isaac is unbelievably competent, although that fits the demeanor of a survivalist whose already managed to live through at least one haunted planet cracker and is the source of secret knowledge for a powerful cult desperate to transform humanity according to the will of an artifact that deludes its followers into believing it offers ascendance rather than dead and necrotic rebirth. Isaac can survive so much, from maneuvering with his amazing suit through the depths of space to the collapse and infestation of the colony itself and on to a boss battle at the end that I honestly enjoyed more than the already impressive final conflict from the first game. 

It is true that you might play this game and not find it horrifying, disturbing or otherwise as shocking as the first, but I would suggest that this problem lies with an audience that has grown inured to the media of survival horror. Despite this, I feel Dead Space 2 did an admirable job of carrying the story on past the first title, and into new territory.

A+