Poor man's hybrid of "Solaris" and "Alien" - unpleasant when not being unsatisfying

Rating: 6/10 (25 July 2017)

I strangely failed to catch up with British Director Paul Anderson's sci-fi movie "Event Horizon" until 20 years after it was made. And now I think I understand why, as this piece does not please the viewer as well as it might. This is a more intriguing failing than it might seem, given quite-adequate special effects on the spacecraft in orbit around Neptune (certainly so for 1997), a pretty reasonable cast (Sam Neill, Joely Richardson, Sean Pertwee and Jason Isaacs to name but four) and a creepy-enough core plot idea (with a nicely enigmatic little twist at the end).
Admittedly, quite a bit of the dialogue here is hammy, the theme music is simply a mistake, the plot realisation is at times predictable, and quite often members of the "Lewis & Clark" crew seem to act in slightly unlikely ways (the traditional sin of withholding information from Captain and crew being quite well at work here at regular intervals, for example).
But does even this list of misdemeanours account for what happens with this film?
I'm not quite sure.
What is interesting is that the Neill character Dr William Weir sums up the evil of Hell by reference to eternal chaos and - surprisingly - the film offers up a little slice of that chaos, and it's not pleasant. And, while unpleasantness is not necessarily a crime in a film, or indeed in any other piece of art, the turnoffs here somehow just seem to outweigh any possible rewards of watching, even in a whole that comes in at just 96 minutes.