Terrifying

Rating: 7/10 (21 April 2003)

I've been upset lately and this is what I've been telling my friends when they asked me if I had seen any good horror movies: "No way...they kind of stopped doing those". It's an affirmation filled with both irony and a small amount of despair. Today, though, is a day which should be marked in a calendar, for I have seen it! I have seen a movie that actually scared me big time...a film that did all that I had hoped Thirteen Ghosts would have done.
SPOILERS
No need to go in on the story...there's not really much of a story. I, myself, prefer to think of it as of a "pretext" for horror. A bunch of people are sent to Neptune to "investigate" a strange event which occurred, the reappearance of a space ship which had vanished seven years before. The strange reappearance of the ship isn't the only strange thing around. The crew receive a message which I initially thought to contain only the most terrible and to the bone shaking shouts I have ever heard. There was a short text there, among that shouting, which is quite stupidly still undeciphered at those moments(though they had received that message some time before)...oh well, that's not the only stupid thing, but they can most certainly be ignored. These few words get more on the way(hmmm) and from their initial meaning "Save me" they transform to "Save yourself from hell"(that's what Latin can do to you)...but everybody goes on the ship which is the only one capable of traveling at speeds higher than the speed of light("going around the theory of relativity") Once on the ship one of the crew members will suffer an accident and the crew's ship will be damaged, these being elements which will prolong the stay on "Event Horizon"...where our "friends" will start hearing strange things, will start seeing strange things and ,worse of all, will start living through them.
Some have said that the characters are practically inexistent...I can not agree. They are very shallow, some of them are "inexistent", but the main focus point is on the ship and the "horror" not on the characters. Still we learn some things about them...the ones least described are exactly the two survivors...strangely enough.
As I said, this film scared me...it shows disturbing images, of which some are really gruesome and which could have been omitted, but which make "a hell" out of "Event Horizon". Anderson actually achieved to scare you through more than just the ferocious images, but he also did it with the sound...a hard thing to achieve, which I haven't seen accomplished recently.
There's not much else to say. For me, in general, horror movies do not have to present any deep message(though, if there's a smart "head" behind them, he can get more horror out of such things than out of images) but it has to scare. I am not pleased if I see a movie which tries to "use" the "deep-message tactic" and then presents a boring and rarely entertaining flick. When I want horror, I just want horror...most certainly, too much of "image" horror would make me feel fed up at one point, but considering that this is the first horror movie I've seen this decade(the first REAL one) I can't be unhappy. If you want to get scared...take this piece: 8/10