Event Horizon

All backed up in this biz. Horror movie for yesterday.

10/26: Today's flick was Paul W.S. Anderson's Event Horizon. By and large this is a pretty cool movie, despite it's being a total Alien ripoff, for the most part. Granted, Alien largely laid down the formula for lost-in-space sci-fi horror, but Event Horizon at times almost feels like a shot-for-shot remake of it. Despite that Event Horizon brings an original enough "shell" story so to speak to make the more unoriginal "under the hood" stuff seem ok. Essentially the movie is about a crew that is sent to explore the Event Horizon, a ship that has been missing 7 years when it used it's newly invented technology to create a black hole and travel across space. However, when it returned it was no longer just a ship--it had become something else and the only remains of the Event Horizon crew are bloody smears on the wall. 

What ensues is actually a really cool, different idea, even if it is Alienesque. I don't want to give up the ending, but it's pretty freaky. The movie is largely shot pretty well too, with the Event Horizon feeling very otherworldly. Some of the special effects are outdated, but most surprisingly hold up. The unfortunate thing is that Anderson sort of undercuts these good parts of the movie with a fair amount of 90s-y cheese that keep the movie from being a truly great horror (I especially like mandatory sassy black man). Still, it's an entertaining movie with a cool story and some truly horrifying scenes.

8/10