October Spook-tacular Playoffs: Event Horizon

The List:

The Conjuring (2013)

The Mist (2007)

Event Horizon (1997)

Parents (1989)

Halloween (1978)

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

The Quartermass Xperiment (1955)

Cat People (1942)

The Mummy (1932)

The  Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

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Infinite criticism.

Title: Event Horizon

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Writer: Philip Eisner
Actors I recognize: Sam Neill, Laurence Fishbarn

What I know going in: One mans goes to space, but what happens when he can't come back... from space? Actually I know that Sam Neill is going to turn evil and that an event horizon is the point of no return from a black hole. Little science bomb to drop on your head there.

I had a morbid curiosity about this one, as it has a positive reputation among bad scifi apologists the net over. Moreover, I'll watch Sam Neill in anything because I have yet to see him star in a bad picture. Until today. Let me drop a metaphor bomb on your head here: Event Horizon is on the wrong side of the event horizon of movie awfulness. Nothing good escapes from this black hole of creativity and entertainment, not even the great Sam Neill. It's not often I find a movie beyond forgiveness, but for me the fatal flaw is something to do with a lack of concept. Not since Jacob's Ladder have I seen a movie so confused and confusing about what it is or is trying to say. Event Horizon isn't so much a wild flurry of ideas; like a bad X-Files episode, it's a viewing experience where nothing happens and a wide array of flat, uninteresting, and far too specific self-commentary is strewn on the floor like as many dead bodies.

The basic idea is that a ship is lost in space and comes back seven years later, whereupon a bunch of Aliens-wannabes go check it out and find it had been in another dimension and came back as an apparently living haunted house? but people there can never die? and it still has a portal to the other dimension? Which it turns out is either basically or literally Hell; the movie is never particularly honest on whether people are capitalizing that word. So we have dimension-shifting, religious suggestions, inanimate things coming to life, possibly demonic possession, isolation, and a whole. lot. of. hallucinations. About half the movie is unrelated hallucinations.

The plot is so weirdly strung together that it feels like the filmmakers had a series of images in mind but no clue how to rope them into the same story. It reminds me of the music-video-esque Hellraiser 2, but at least Hellraiser 2 was relatively focused and genuinely out there. Really there isn't much story; what we get is mostly back-story - in the words of the illumined Ebert, "the screenplay creates a sense of foreboding and afterboding, but no actual boding". The gang gets stranded on the evil Event Horizon, we hear a lot of Sam Neill explaining/worshiping the ship, some side characters try to repair their escape shuttle entirely off-screen, and everyone else wanders about, either experiencing hallucinations or whining. No one does anything. Nothing about their scenario changes from beginning to end, and once we reach the end we actually learn they couldn't have done anything even if they wanted (they were past the event horizon! except two people still escape...).

The pacing here is a puked-in dumpster. The intro is dramatic nonsense, act 1 is pure exposition until someone finally finds a corpse, act 2 is people having inconsequential hallucinations and a bunch of undeveloped hanging threads (like fixing the ship and finding the Event Horizon's crew logs), and in act 3 finally someone fucking dies. The action becomes relentless but so scattered that everything remains an unsatisfying headache.

The handling of the burdensome hallucinations is utterly piss-poor. Dream sequences are a very difficult beast to slay, requiring a careful balance of deceit, implication, and consequence. Once I know events aren't for keeps, I tend to disengage. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons Twin Peaks is so good - it betrays that expectation and makes dreams/visions matter more than waking reality. But Event Horizon does not understand this balancing act. Hallucinations take form as things whose if-this-is-real implications are just really stupid. A crew member sees her son with wounds on his legs. Oh my god, what if he's really on the ship? Not only do I not see how that could be true, I don't care. So what if her son is on the ship? Or in hell? Is there anything she can or might have done about it? No. Does it tell us something about her character? She doesn't want bad things to happen to her son. Delightful. What a visionary trait. Is it an incarnation of a past sin? If it is, I certainly can't figure it out, nor does this character get enough screen-time for me to know what that means to her. I hate this part of the movie so much. 

The function of the dream sequences in the overall plot is perplexingly nonsensical. The crew is eventually clued in to the root of the terror: the ship is alive! Wait, the ship is alive? What does that have to do with people going insane? Ohhhhh, the hallucinations are a "defense mechanism", like "some kind of immune system" (hi terrible screenwriting cliche!). Those are two completely different ideas. Crew members tripping balls. Ship is alive. Since when do we automatically assume hallucinations have an external origin? This is like when Mulder throws off a perfectly reasonable hypothesis about hypnotic suggestion by declaring "it's a form of psychokinesis!" The fact that we're given a single setup line about the scanners detecting life signs from all over the ship is essentially an insult, like one of the characters picking up a page from the script and reading "holy cow, the ship is alive?!".

And, unsurprisingly, the ship being alive creates exactly zero original conflict. The crew is fighting to escape the Event Horizon because they're running out of oxygen. That is the main boss of this movie. Was that supposed to create a sense of realism or something? With all the other shit going on, you'd think they'd want to leave anyway, but the fact that it's a failing oxygen supply that kicks them into gear makes it seem like it doesn't matter at all what happens, because they're going to be dead in four hours anyway. This redundant timer saps all the tension out of the would-be conflict with the ship or Evil Sam Neill.

The tone is also bad. Mostly I would call this dumpy perfunctory self-seriousness; the kind of scifi that acts realistic (people feel contemporary) but never earns it (they are still extremely movie-like). Yet occasionally we get an insane jolt of yakety-saxical comedy thanks to Eddie Murphy stand-in Cooper. Coop isn't in most of the movie, but when he shows up occasionally it's with whoopy-cushion one-liners and huge exaggerated expressions. Whoever wrote that character is an idiot. Whoever directed those scenes is an idiot. Whoever chose not to leave them on the cutting room floor is an idiot. Better yet, in the middle of a couple dramatic scenes with Mr. Justin (such as when he tries to commit suicide by explosive decompression) characters refer to him as "Baby Bear". This is never explained and extremely (unintentionally) hilarious. [watching guy bleeding out of his eyes] "Hang in there Baby Bear!"

Here is another scene that has a very very dumb tone

At the heart of all the movie's problems is the noncommittal approach to characters - I can't tell who the hell (Hell) this movie is about. It seems like maybe originally it was supposed to be the tale of Sam Neill's battles with guilt over his dead wife, but then it was decided that they wanted a third act where he's evil and that another character would need to take over. So Laurence Fishburne gets some haphazard exposition and, yay, a hallucination, revealing that he once let a man die because it was necessary in order to save others, and he never wants to do that again. Again, this is the yawniest of motivations ever conceived. Oh my god, the captain doesn't want anyone to die! It's not even like it's his fault that they're in this deadly situation; the whole crew was basically tricked into the mission and he didn't know their destination, let alone what had happened to it. There are enough periphery characters that get expository but not active development that I'm sure someone considers the novelization an ensemble tale. It doesn't work that way in movies. Remember how everyone has really strong personalities at the beginning of Aliens, and then they all immediately die anyway? Man I wish that had happened in Event Horizon.

Though it never makes a philosophical statement on any coherent level, Event Horizon has a bit of a Jurassic Park problem. See, Jurassic Park is a movie about the power of nature and mankind's attempts to control it. Giant dinosaurs are brought back to life and it is amazing and the scientific discovery of a lifetime, but terrible coincidences and one self-serving asshole cause a handful of deaths at their hands. But still, man has brought life to extinct species! Think of what we can learn! Except the moral of the story, as our Jeff Goldbums so clearly elucidate, is that that was a fucking mistake and should never have been done and it was playing god which is evil. That's a science-phobic crock of shit and a pretty damn ironic conclusion for a movie that revitalized pop-interest in paleontology and evolutionary biology. Come on, dinosaurs were not going to get out and destroy civilization. Event Horizon gets caught up in the same stew of equating technology to hubris; here it's theoretical physics. There's an attempt, presumably to make the movie seem like "real" science fiction, to explain some astronomical phenomena at a third-grade level. Why a trained space crew needs wormholes explained to them is a pretty reasonable question, but whatever. It's setup so that when shit hits the fan, the angry dumb guy can say, "you can't break the laws of physics without paying the consequences!". Hacky dialogue or not, the idea that experimentation is a gateway to hell is pure sourness. Should we shut down the space program every time a shuttle crashes? (perhaps appropriately, a NASA Antares rocket just exploded this week)

But maybe Event Horizon is just reaching for our instinctual fear of the unknown, forget about science. A tale Lovecraftian in purpose. But the essence of Lovecraft is that mankind is irrelevant - we aren't the ones ignoring the rest of the universe, the rest of the universe is ignoring us. A happy ending and a sense of containment undercuts any such thematics. The universe of Event Horizon is still anthropocentric. I mean, apparently the ship cares enough to give people personalized visions of their loved ones and past mistakes. There is no awe here, no cosmic loneliness. This is the kind of story that makes the invocation of Lovecraft a punchline rather than an honor.

It feels almost disingenuous to show you cool pictures as if they are in any way representative of the movie's quality

In other poorly executed concepts, I hate movies that conflate insanity with evil. This is not a legitimate criticism so much as an example of the the movie setting its sights really low, but it is boring when someone going "insane" just means they become a jerk like Sam Neill does here. Watch Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness or the fantastic French art-horror Possession if you want Sam Neill to show you how to lose a mind. God I wish I had just re-watched Possession instead of this.

I have a single compliment for Event Horizon. Some of the sets, with their intricate techno-gothic architecture, are very cool-looking. If you are the set designer for Event Horizon, congratulations for providing quality work amidst what I'm sure was a waterfall of shitheaded retardation. Though I do have to say your output feels a bit derivative of Warhammer 40K. Since that's not a movie, that's cool though.

Actually, hang on a second. Future humans create a warp portal that accidentally encroaches upon a chaos dimension from which spout possessing spirits and torture demons? And techno-gothic whatever? That's the plot of Warhammer 40K. This movie is WH40K: The Prequel. It's also a really huge ripoff of Hellraiser, but I gotta bring this bitchfest to an end sometime.

What I know going out: This movie is an insult to my intelligence.

Oh man, I forgot to mention Space Latin. Well, maybe next time.

October Spook-tacular Playoffs sudden death update! Styles of the century!

Well the Orioles got swept so that sucks. I was so haunted by their defeat I couldn't even make room for a scary movie last weekend. The only way the Orioles and I can make up our terrible failings to you, the home viewer, is to extend the Scare-tacular Playoffs for another five five five! weeks!!!!!

When I looked at my queue and realized I had horror movies from all but one of the last ten decades, I thought to myself: why not continue for a full century, back to the 1920s? You know, it's pretty crazy that we're a few years away from a new '20s, since that's the first decade people talk about. No, it's not crazy. It's downright insane. Anyway, I didn't have anything from the '40s because what the hell was going on in horror movies in the '40s? Google tells me the war was scary enough that people didn't need horror so I guess that's that. I did manage to find a couple known films that aren't just Universal monster sequels, and thus was the list complete.

It then also occurred to me that I had quite the variety of styles on display, most fairly representative of their decade, so why not try to "catch 'em all"? So for the '10s we've got The Conjuring (2013) to represent the paranormal ghost adventures that have been highly popular lately; in the '00s we have a creature feature, The Mist (2007), even if the I-don't-care-for-it "torture porn" style was the decade's forte; in the '90s there's Event Horizon (1997), a scifi John Carpenter-wannabe like everything else at the time; Parents (1989) should bring some of the dark comedic joy of the '80s; the '70s wouldn't be the same without slashers, so we've got Halloween (1978); heading up the wave of '60s/'70s Satanic obsession is Rosemary's Baby (1968); in hopes to double-cover '50s B-movie scifi and Lovecraft I've got The Quartermass Xperiment (1955); whatever was going on in the '40s, The Cat People (1942) is meant to be a psycho-sexual delight; the '30s brought us the mothers of all franchise monsters, so we'll watch Karloff in The Mummy (1932); and bringing it all back home to surrealist German experssionism we have The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

From here I'll be watching in reverse chronological order - just pretend 2013 accidentally got lost somewhere in the 90s. God knows I did. But THAT is a story for another day.

October Spook-tacular Playoffs: The Mist

October is always a treat, being that the weather is nice and the theme colors are the Baltimore Orioles colors. This is especially important this year because the Orioles are in the playoffs, which also happens in October! The team will gain a significant advantage by seeing their colors all around the country and on the TV for the Halloween season. This is a big factor in baseball and explains how the Orioles colors were originally chosen.

The only way to celebrate this certain-to-be historical playoff run is... horror movies! I'm going to knock five movies off my queue, one each weekend and one each from the last five decades. Then at the end of October we'll have a little "playoffs" where I choose which was best. I think that's how the World Series works? All of the teams play each other in the same game? Those 8-team innings sure can drag on. Here are the movies.

Halloween (1978)

Parents (1989)

Event Horizon (1997)

The Mist (2007)

The Conjuring (2013)

Title: The Mist

Director: Frank Darabont

Writer: Frank Darabont, based on a novella by Stevie King
Actors I know by name: Thomas "I'm Tom Jane" Jane

While my OCD tells me I should have gone in chronological order, I had already watched The Mist by the time I came up with this idea so it was too late. Plus hey this way I can save Halloween for Halloween.

What I know going in: A mist traps a town indoors and there are monsters out there and didn't I see this movie back in the '80s (before I was born)?

From the moment The Mist cuts in on posters for The Thing, The Dark Tower, and Pan's Labyrinth, I knew we were in for some apocalyptic dimension-hopping shenanigans. That's a good omen for me; weird trans-dimensional shenaniganry is my jam, be it Silent Hill, From Beyond, or H.P. Lovecraft. Simultaneously it was an omen of the on-the-nose cheesiness that permeates the entire movie - the classic King explicit reference. That's this movie - solid premises taken in extremely loud directions. Sometimes the arresting volume is satisfying - a stormy opening punctuated by a tree bursting into our protagonist's home, angrily foreshadowing monsters that pierce the dimensional window into our world. Other times it's pandering, like the repetition of the line "something's in the mist!". It also ranges into frustrating, as my reaction to faux-Biblical rant #847 can testify. However stylized it may be, the material sticks to core themes of faith and despair in the face of the unknown - my only real objection is how those questions are resolved.

I probably should expect obnoxiousness from Darabont and King, the creative team behind the most painfully cloying and obvious "classic" of our time, The Shawshank Redemption. The Mist has a lot of wowing "what is a man?" moments, from the illogically blustering lawyer neighbor to the burn victim begging for death to a crowd silently staring down a mother begging for help finding her children. There's this general suggestion that people are acting extra psycho (i.e. hammy) because that's what fear does; the dialogue is extremely on the nose in pointing out "they're scared", "it's okay to be scared", etc. While this gels with the movie's theme of fear as the root of faith, dialogically it has the awkward repercussion of feeling like an excuse for exaggerated characterization. While my brain tells me The Mist is going for bombast, the movie itself tells me it's supposed to be realistic. I prefer to ignore that claim.

A horror/disaster movie posits what happens when ordinary people are confronted with extraordinary circumstances. The Mist shows us fear driving the existing social order to extremes. In the case of resident church-lady antagonist Miss Carmody, it draws forth ultimate faith in despair. She heralds the mist as judgment day: in the giant locusts she sees a Biblical plague, in the military man she sees a sacrificial lamb, in herself she sees a prophet. There's no other side to this character, no humanization whatsoever - when Amanda calmly and kindly suggests she might be projecting her fear, Miss Carmody responds by calling her a sinful whore or something. Likewise, Mr. Law and Order sits staunchly on the claim that there aren't monsters unless he can see proof, even as he sounds growingly hysterical in his attack. This works on the allegorical level where characters are simply incarnations of their metaphorical function, and in terms of story, that's the film's strongest suit. The Mist doesn't falter until it gets to the sympathetic players.

Sorry, no monsters. You can watch the movie or do a Bing (unpopular search engine) if you really want to see them.

Believability is an issue here. Believability is not a question of whether we're dealing with tentacle monsters and that I think the physics of tentacle monsters are sufficiently explained. It's a matter of whether a microcosm rings true. While the aforementioned societal stand-ins work as the pillars of this world, the behavior of normal people is really what's being analyzed. That's where The Mist loses me a bit. That the supermarket crowd is won over so quickly to religious fundamentalism is a strong damnation of human nature and needs sufficient support for me to buy into. What the movie is lacking is any actual character to illustrate that transformation. Miss Carmody was preaching the downfall of man in the supermarket aisles before the mist descended. Everyone else shuffles over in the background as things get worse, the only conversion we see being the dumb guy who gets super-traumatized. I just didn't find a convincing argument that this is what people do - it was all kinda quickly slotted to status quo so our hero would have cultish opposition. I like that as a plot point - the blathering doomsayer is usually the first to go, so having people rally around her is a nice inversion. It's just that the philosophical backbone is more idea than argument.

[major spoilers in the next paragraph]
The hero, David Drayton, works well enough. He's a bit on the uninteresting side, but oh well. He's the everyman in a sea of caricatures. His arc takes him from hope to despair, though its conclusion is a bit too dark to resonate with me. David is a man of action willing to do anything except sit and wait for death, whether it's investigating the generator, going to the pharmacy, or eventually making a run for it. Yet every action he takes makes the situation worse and gets people killed. In the end he chooses to kill his companions and his son rather than wait for the monsters to find him, acting on despair rather than hope. Unsurprisingly, he's a minute too soon - the mist rolls back and reveals that salvation was moments away. So complacent faith in despair was the way to survive? Action leads only to self-destruction? Even if methodically developed, our protagonist's lack of self-awareness strikes me as a bit bitter on the part of Darabont.

[end spoilers]

For all the heightened dialogue and characterization, when the horror gets going, the movie gets damn good. The pacing is spot on, starting with the normalcy of a grocery shopping trip silenced by air raid sirens. We slowly increment from there, taking plenty of time away from the monsters to focus on human turmoil and build the mystique of what's out there. The mid-movie foray into the pharmacy is so Aliens it hurts, but jesus if my skin wasn't crawling at every spidery image, most of all the fate of the still-living MP. And the appearance of the locusts nails everything that I like about this movie's atmosphere - the sense of awe and proportion, the patience of the monstrosities, and the genuinely hellish and end-of-times sensibility. The Mist is a story of anti-survivors, a group of people who could easily stay alive if they weren't so determined to die. That shot from outside the store as the locusts flit and prance carries an ominous natural beauty juxtaposed against humanity tearing itself apart inside a glass cage.

Fine, here are some monsters.

The creature design and effects are largely fantastic as well. Those tentacles get us off to a great disconcerting start - "what are those things attached to?" is a great question left unanswered. We get the predator/prey relationship between the vulture-things and the bug-things and the various size/ages of spiders, hearkening back to what makes the Alien xenomorph such a memorable creation - the naturalistic approach. There's the sense that these are real beings with their own life-cycles, rendering humanity all the less significant. In keeping with the Alien-inspired design, these things are deadly in all kinds of ways, be it acid-webbing, venomous stings, or shredding talons. The spiders are definitely the best-realized of the fiends and are absolutely the high point of the movie, even in spite of the overabundance of giant spiders in fantasy. At the other end of the spectrum, the lurkers in the mist felt kinda lame and almost comical, and I'd have preferred further development of another monster over their perfunctory appearances. Overall, this is a top tier creature feature and worth seeing on those grounds alone. I'm of the opinion that monster movies have largely suffered at the hands of CGI, but The Mist proves that CGI is ready to please (now if we could just get the mainstream off the current ghost movie fetish...).

What I know going out: It's hard to call The Mist a great movie when it has such ugly things to say, but the fact it can even be approached at that level is a testament to its quality. While I'm still left searching for a modern creature-feature adventure, I suspect The Mist will have legs and hope that someday I find a more resonant message at its core.