If Satan was making me speak Latin, I'd rip out my eyes, too.

Rating: 7/10 (21 June 2006)

Event Horizon has the two distinctions of being the only Paul WS Anderson movie that does not feel like it was shat out by a monkey with ADD and smeared onto celluloid, and off being one of the few movies that have genuinely traumatized me. Today, Event Horizon doesn't really freak me out anymore, but it's still an underrated freakout for anyone who hasn't seen it that can accept the weak script and lackluster third act.
So basically it's about this spaceship that gets possessed by evil and terrorizes people by making them go crazy or showing them flashes of their friends screaming and being mutilated in some freaky dimension of chaos or something. The flash parts are really freaky, and along with the scene where the ship's log suddenly starts playing by itself without static over what happened after evil took over--it looks like the kind of porn the dark lord Sauron watches, but with tighter editing. By just flashing crazy gory stuff at you, it makes you think you've seen things that are worse than what you have, since most of it consists of people screaming and bloody or nude corpses impaled through the face hanging around covered in maggots. (on second thought, that is freaky) But it tricks you into thinking you're seeing people being graphically dissected and people eating themselves and gay people getting married.
A lot of people upon release found it to be really derivative of Alien, among other things, but I don't think it's derivative, because it feels like it's taking place somewhere else in the same universe, which is also how it gets away with having everyone smoke 50 years into the future.
The script is lame. "I'm now walking. I'm now entering the medical bay. I'm now picking my nose." a lot of the dialogue can be like that. Or there's the other, non-Morpheus black guy, who seems to be attempting to be the best Funny, But Clumsy Negro stereotype in the history of the cinema, and unfortunately he fails because it takes you out of the movie whenever he appears. They might as well have had Paul WS Anderson play the part in blackface. Also, there's a lot of talk about "hell" and "a dimension of pure chaos", and it all sounds a little silly no matter how freakishly disturbing the visions of it are.
The last half hour houses the biggest shocks, for me, but the movie sort of falls apart into a series of action sequences before the big explosion. You know, the kind that happens in any sci-fi horror movie. It's also unfortunate that they turned the Jurassic Park 1 and 3 guy into the outright villain--it's less scary when you can see the bad guy, particularly if he looks like a more lame, naked version of Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies, but with no pins, so he's really just Head, and that's not a cool name for anybody. The whole last half hour reeks of studio impatience and interference. There was originally another half hour that was cut out, and probably contained a lot of stuff that should have been in the movie, but the studio was a jerk and made them cut a lot of the gore, or the "character" and "story development", you know, things that aren't necessary to Hollywood studios. It's a shame, because with that footage, Event Horizon might have been an actually good movie, and a jewel amidst the chunks of corn in the turd of Paul WS Anderson's filmography.
If Anderson made it today, it would be scored entirely with Marilyn Manson, the action scenes would be hyper-edited and incomprehensible, the characters wouldn't even have personalities, and it would end with Morpheus making friends with the evil force so that together they can battle the alien zombies that Anderson felt were necessary to add to make the movie cooler. And it ends with Morpheus and the Weir-beast walking off into the sunset, holding hands.