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Before I start watching Event Horizon here, the other day I was cleaning my instant queue of things I either misclicked or wanted Netflix to shut up about, and wow did I ever make an unpleasant discovery. The Haunted World of El Superbeasto presents itself as something about a luchadore monster hunter that's just ill-conceived enough to be good for making fun of, but is secretly someone attempting to make some sort of funny porn using a really poor imitation of John Kricfalusi (the Ren and Stimpy guy)'s art style. So it's a lot like Fritz the Cat, except this has songs in it with lyrics like "It's OK to masturbate to cartoons. People in Japan do it all the time." So... anyone wondering where I draw the line on what's too horrible for me to suffer through and ramble about? There's a data point to go on the other side for you.
Now, what I'm officially watching today is Event Horizon. I'm pretty sure I've seen this before, but it's one of those spaceship horror movies so I can't really say. There's like a dozen of'em and they all have pretty much the exact same plot. I already covered Solaris a while back, which is decidedly on the calmer end of the spectrum, but, expect the same plot here. Event Horizon is, however, the one that really sticks out in people's minds, and I think we can blame that on The Matrix. See, when the first Matrix movie came out, the whole world was unabashedly in love with it and nerded it up. Part of that nerding it up involved looking up what else the guy who played Morpheus did, which is pretty easy since he has the rather awesome name of Lawrence Fishburne. Not very long at all before doing The Matrix, he was in Event Horizon here. So, this is the one on these everyone has seen. It also has the main character from Jurassic Park in it. Another side effect of everyone nerding out like that is that everyone was trying to get Lawrence Fishburne for their movies and voice acting gigs of various sorts. Most couldn't get him though, and had to settle for Keith David instead. Only within the last year or so are people besides me starting to realize that when it comes to having that really awesome Voice of Importance, Keith David should really be your #1 choice. He's on my list of people to cover if I ever launch my little "You know who's awesome? _____!" feature. But anyway, yeah, movie.
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OK, so it's the not too distant future, some ship called the Event Horizon was out doing manned science stuff on the outer reaches of the solar system and disappeared. So... yeah. Title does not refer at all to black holes. Weird huh? Anyway, mysteriousness is afoot. Morpheus is the captain, and Raptor Guy is our main character. He just had some freaky nightmare while in his little cryo pod about... anyone? Anyone? That's right! Seeing his dead wife! With funky little mouth-eyes going on. Raptor Guy is wearing a jumpsuit that says IASA on it. Is that an actual thing, or are you just not allowed to use NASA in fiction? I guess it's also possible that multiple people figure at some point we'll get an International version. Everyone else is the regular crew of this ship, and does regular salvage work evidently. So... OK, they aren't space marines but I guess they're kinda like, the Space National Guard?
Anyway, apparently the deal with the missing ship is that it was supposed to be testing a warp drive Raptor Guy invented but something went wrong. Specifically, rather than teleporting to Alpha Centauri it kinda accidentally teleported to hell. I don't think I'm really spoiling the big reveal of the movie by mentioning this now either, because they were all just listening to the signal they got when it came back and not only does it actually have that "REECH REECH REECH" slasher violin sting in the background, there's a demonic voice shouting "Liberate me!" in Latin. I kinda wish I was doing these as video reviews because now would be an absolutely perfect time to cut in a scene from Disgaea. Because, you know, it takes place in hell, and about halfway through the game a space ship's experimental warp drive causes it to crash there, and then Captain Gordon! DeFENder of Earth along with his sidekick Jennifer and their intrepid robot Thursday more or less completely hijack the plot and take over as the main characters. Then I think the chapter after that is the one where the motive behind all the battles is that Mid-Boss stole Jennifer's picnic basket. Seriously, that game is so darn great.
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Anyway though, yeah, Morpheus and some random Space Guardsmen are now boarding the ship which, hey, doesn't have gravity. Or... OK, it DOES because they're walking around but I mean, there's some random cups and wrenches and such floating around in mid-air. Highlights include a hallway lined with explosives so that they can blow the whole ship in half in emergencies.... which doesn't really strike me as the best way to do that, followed by a little catwalk that goes down a long claustrophobic corridor of whirling blades. They hand-wave both of these preposterous hallways, but nobody mentions how all the doorways have those iris doors and are lined with pointy teeth for some odd reason. There's also a couple cheap jump scares, including a floating corpse whose eyes are missing and his face is all mutilatey. Someone goes "Explosive decompression I guess!" to which Raptor Guy is all "DECOMPRESSION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!" and posits that he just had his eyes torn out by a wild badger or something. OK, he doesn't specify badger, he says "a wild animal" but hey.
So... while they're poking around, random disastery starts to happen. Stuff is exploding pretty much for the heck of it, and one of the guardsmen poked a crazy CGI wobbley water wall and got sucked through it, but he had a life line, so it was possible to haul him back. Of course, he and the guy hauling him lost their footing, so the magnetic boots they are COMPLETELY failing to sell me on lose their grip and they go bouncing around the room, just narrowly missing all the giant spikes lining the walls. You know, this really is a rather terrible movie. I mean, I know the whole poorly lit metal catwalks deal is cliche and it's nice to vary your visuals, but... keeping those same hallways and adding spikes and fangs and whirling blades everywhere... that's just stupid. I mean, you could pull it off if you said it didn't have all these freaky features before going to hell and back, but no, Raptor Guy is explaining how these are all essential features of the ship's design. Captain Morpheus is calling shenanigans on it too.
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Turns out the big round room with spikes all over the walls is surrounding a big whirly ball, enclosing an artificial black hole (OK, I guess that covers the ship's name) which is used to power the warp drive. Also, when the warp drive is powered up, the wobbly water mirror apparently works as an alternate means of going to the destination coordinates set for the drive, if you don't want to bother bringing the whole ship along. And at some point during this. Now here's some girl hearing breathing while checking out the medical bay, grabbing a surgical saw, and moving a little tent aside to reveal her... anyone? Anyone? Dead son! Who disappears when someone pokes her on the shoulder forcing her to turn around what with the cheap jump scare. This movie has a lot of those. So far all have struck me as cheap.
Also... why are you guys still here again? Clearly everyone is dead. I guess you can try and reorient the ship and sent it home, but... yeah putzing around like this makes no sense. Also, guy who accidentally went to hell real quick there is now twitching and foaming at the mouth and saying "He's coming!" Now here's Raptor Guy totally reaking out while poking around in the Jeffreys tubes made of glowing circuit boards because the lights keep flipping on and off and there's dead wifey again... and here's a burning corpse crawling out of the decorative pond under the black hole ball that I guess is there to offset all the spikes. Now everyone is gathering together in a room full of flayed corpses to talk about all the crazy stuff they're seeing. Raptor Guy is all "Oh we're just oxygen starved because this ship's life support isn't working and it's making us hallucinate." Now.... at this point I have to ask, who are we supposed to be sympathizing with again? Raptor Guy is getting the most screen time, so you'd figure it would be him, but he's the A-hole scientist who's being less than forthcoming with important information and trying to dismiss everyone's legitimate points of concern. Plus he's now acting kinda possessed. Morpheus is the only other actor of note here, but he's the level headed authority figure who doesn't do much. Everyone else is cannon fodder. OK, I guess the one blond girl here may qualify as an actual character, but, still.
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So yeah. More jump scares, more hallucinations, hell boy there is spacing himself out of insani-fear. The airlock by the way makes ear-splitting siren sounds for some reason. This actually snaps him out of his crazy state and suddenly he grows some self-preservation, but naturally, there's no undo feature for the open outer door button. Now, you'd figure he's just dead at this point, but we've established that we're handling decompression realistically, and Morpheus was already working outside in one of the pressure suits they should really all be wearing, so after advising him to "huff and puff and blow all the air out" he manages to tackle him back inside at the last minute with only a lot of barfed up blood and presumable lung damage. OK, so I guess Morpheus is our designated protagonist after all. Can we get him some more screen time and lines to make that clearer?
The exterior view of the ship by the way is pretty Grimdark too. I get the impression that Raptor Guy has some serious psychological issues that were weighing on him while he designed this thing. I'm just waiting for them to show the bathrooms and have everything all covered in screaming skulls and have him be "well yeah, the eye sockets are good for handholds! You need those when the gravity kicks out!" Anyway, the cannon fodder examining the original message realizes that it's actually saying "Save yourselves from hell!" more than "Save me!" Meanwhile the girls have decrypted the video logs. Oh hey, here's the whole crew going totally insane, ripping their clothes off tearing each other's eyes out and just generally mutilating each other. NOW Captain Morpheus is finally going "OK, yeah, @#$% this. Everyone back to our ship, we're going to fire missiles at this thing until there's nothing big enough to target, and heading home as fast as we can. Raptor Guy is all, we can't leave! I'm already home! Because again, he's a cartoonish parody of a character. Also? He is REALLY phoning in his performance this whole movie. Especially his scream at the first jump scare. It was pathetic.
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So... now it's time to kill the cannon fodder. Here's the girl who saw her ghost kid seeing him again. She smiles and walks over towards him, not noticing the giant hole right in the middle of the floor. Because, again, this ship is designed to work as a horror movie set, not a spaceship. So yeah, she's dead. Now here's Raptor Guy hallucinating about his wife some more. Specifically, here's him watching her slit her wrists in a flashback. Oh and here's half a second of full frontal nudity. Now she's put her underwear on but still has her boobs out and the weird mouth eyes thing going on. She pokes his eyes out and we move on. Here's our token Brit freaking out about how Raptor Guy is going all crazy and wandering around sabotaging things. He tells Morpheus, he works things out, oh, he took one of the bombs off the bomb hallway and decided to use it to blow up the salvage ship... which, of course, British Guy is on. He finds it just too late to disarm it or flee. ÊThe resulting exploson also kills Generic Black guy. I think they had a grant total of like, 5 lines each. Oh, here's more for Black Guy. He gets to swear and go why does this always happen to me. On the up side, he also gets to attempt to make a jump from a hunk of wreckage to get back to the ship, but seems to have missed and is headed for Neptune.
Meanwhile, here's Crazy Raptor Guy getting the jump on Other British Guy in the medical bay. Despite having no eyes (which I guess is what the mouth eyes thing is supposed to be, but it really looks kinda weird and I don't think there's really that much of an open shaft behind the eyeball). Anyway, he vivisects him and suspends him from the ceiling with meat hooks. It's actually a very ho-hum non-freaky looking flayed corpse though. This movie has a really hard time selling its visuals in general. So... now we're down to blond girl and Morpheus. And of course Crazy Raptor Guy, who's all strapped into his special chair with his eyes sewn shut. "Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see." Well, OK? Maybe that's true, but, it doesn't hurt to have'em? Cutting them out is kinda drastic. Anyway, he goes on to give the whole "It's BEAUTIFUL!" crazy speech. So... he sets the ship to go back to hell and...
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Oh hey! Other Black Guy made it. He lands on the front window. Crazy shoots him though with a uh... harpoon gun? Which he had because... yeah. So, this is enough to pierce the big cross shaped front window... and uh... space? Debris? Also, the resulting decompression is enough to unbolt Crazy's chair from the floor and pull him out, but Morpheus is fine just holding onto a floor grate and then crawling to the door via a loose cable, and blond girl, right after being knocked nigh unconscious by Crazy manages to also crawl to freedom. OK, that whole scene? Totally illogical. Also, Black Guy, somehow, manages to get back to the ship again and gets to the airlock while they're doing this. Lucky guy him.
Of course, the ship is still set to to to hell in 5 minutes. So, Morpheus is taking Chekov's Bomb Hallway down off the mantle and getting ready to Êblow everything but the escape pod section. Oh and the while ship is flooding with blood, and Morpheus is getting chased down the blade hallway by that flaming corpse from earlier who's shouting "You let me burn!" and attacking with flame thrower breath. Apparently that's his big past sin because everyone has to have one of those in a movie like this. He points out that hey, he's a good captain and did everything he could. Corpse grows skin and it turns out to actually be Crazy Raptor Guy, reconstituted by the ship as a reward for embracing evil or whatever. So... they have a fistfight. Um. Yeah. This might work with a better actor. Also, him going on to play Morpheus makes it really weird for him to be not holding his own in a fight. ÊEventually though, he finds the detonator so he can properly go all heroic sacrifice. So... everyone dies except for Blond Girl and Black Guy, both of them decided non-characters, who get to live only because she's the Designated Chick Who Survives and he's the Generic Black Guy who is supposed to die first and isn't that funny? Oh and apparently the kid who spaced himself was packed away Êby some considerate person. Anyway, they hop into cryo pods, and are eventually rescued by a SECOND rescue team of... space firemen... who actually totally look like Quarians from Mass Effect (AKA Space Gypsies). One removes his mask to reveal... Crazy Raptor Guy! Ohnoes! But that's just a hallucination. They're really fine. Just Blond Girl is traumatized forever. And... you know, the kid who was sucked into hell and later spaced himself is probably going to have issues too. Then it actually goes and says "The End" before the credits.
Seriously though, it's really messed up that the guy who gets sucked to hell isn't the guy who ends up going crazy and killing everyone. It's like they started off just doing a straight-up Solaris knockoff, and then halfway through they changed their mind and decided to rip off Alien instead (or one of the other many things that have the scientist who built the whatever secretly planning all along to sacrifice everyone so he can study whatever kills everyone). Sure, it means turning the main character into the main villain, and having to panic and promote a random secondary character to main character status, but hey. They went with it. Again, this movie is terrible enough its popularity has to be from that Matrix connection I mentioned. And Raptor Guy SO phoned it in.
