Event Horizon (1997)
Starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Joely Richardson, Kathleen Quinlan.
Review by Laurence Mixson (jarls@datasync.com)
***1/2 out of ****
Event Horizon really fools you for a while. For about the first third of the movie, I thought it was going to be your average, run-of-the-mill late-summer release, basically a straight-to-video release put into the theaters. I was wrong. The movie sets up the plot rather quickly: seven years ago(it takes place in the year 2040-something)a spaceship named the Event Horizon, designed to explore the vast caverns of space, dissapeared. Now, in the present(although, technically, it's the future, but let's not get into that), the ship suddenly reappers with no apparent crew on board. A rescue ship crew, headed up by Captain Miller(Fishburne)to explore the event horizon. Accompanying he and his several man crew is Dr. Weir(Neill), who designed the Event Horizon. He lets them in on a secret rather early into the picture: the Event Horizon was not actually a space exploration ship, but a top-secret time-travel ship, designed to create a black hole and use it to travel from one end of the universe to the other. Miller's crew boards the Event Horizon and discovers that none of the Event's crew is present, all though lots of neat gore and blood splatter is everywhere. Eventually, they begin having hallucinations, and things start to get more violent, and Weir is cracking up... Event Horizon owes more than a little to both The Shining and Hellraiser which it gracefully rips off; and even ups them, in some cases. The special effects, while not cutting edge, are very good; they're the best when showing off graphic displays of gore. Like a man being cut open, having his insides dumped out, and hung from hooks on the ceiling. Did I mention this is a well-rounded, family movie as well? All though it's probably too late now to see it at the theaters, Event Horizon is a definite must-see video. Which, I suppose, makes it a good direct-to-video picture. Except it's better than that. Except that's not the point. Or is it? Aww, forget it...
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