Hellraiser meets Solaris in one mess of a film

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2004)

I have only just watched Event Horizon directed by a former Film Studies graduate student of warwick uni, Paul W.S Anderson, and can't help but think I shan't rush to watch it again. Now to be fair this film does fulfill the average sci-fi/horror quota of reasonably tense build up, mildly engaging premise and the almost unavoidable slip into loud, frenetic editing and repetitive casualties (think of all the inferior post-Alien (1979) movies, Sphere, Pitch Black, Supernova, Deep Rising to name but four. However, let's just be honest the film smacks of surface noise and gruesome imagery without ever coming close to Ridley Scott's masterpiece of the genre or even to the bar of the mediocre. Put aside the poor characterization and quite terrible opening narrative (whereby a despairingly unimaginative title credit sequence played out to the least atmospheric score you ever gonna hear is followed by a totally ineffectual series of cues putting us into the present of the film, surely even the most lapse of film students would be familiar with the idea of pure cinema - that the medium is what it is because it is story in images not glip sentences) the fact remains the whole story reads as a ungodly hybrid between Solaris (where the crew were plagued by hallucinations from their psyche due to the proximity of the title planet) and Hellraiser (the horror franchise which pivots upon the concept of a gateway to another dimension, namely the hell of choatic sado-masochistic torture.) If your gonna rip someone of at least have the decency to do it well and even if considerations of script are totally jettisoned from the film's priority list the overriding importance is that the film be directed well. Quite frankly, there isn't a single thing new here and that isn't necessarily saying the film is terrible it just makes you feel the film was put together without much pride in whether the behind it could actually make something decent and to me that always makes me feel dissatisfied with wasting my time watching their lacklustre efforts. Hat's off to Mr Anderson though at least he made the transition from film student to director, although, on the evidence of this i find it hard to see why.