Title: Event Horizon
Studio: Paramount
Rating: R
SRP: $29.99 (Blu-ray)

FEATURE: C+
I’ve liked Event Horizon for years, ever since I was a kid, and have never been exactly sure why. It isn’t exactly the best sci-fi or horror picture around. In fact, it’s kind of decidedly middle of the road. The plot is interesting, if unoriginal, the special effects passable, and the ending something that you’ve seen over and over in horror movies.

Despite that, Event Horizon is amazingly charming. The cast is made up of your typical action/horror movie stereotypes. You have the stern commander with a secret in his past, stuffy scientist-type, goofy black dude, vaguely cranky engineer, and on, and on, and on. I think that the stereotypes work to the movie’s advantage. You don’t really have to know anything about them, because we’ve seen them before in every movie ever. You have an instant connection with them. It may not be as deep as what you’d see in a deeper film, but this is a movie about an evil spaceship. You kind of have to take what you can get where you can get it.

There are two “big” names in Event Horizon. Sam Neill plays Dr. Weir, architect of the Event Horizon and science consultant to the crew of the Lewis and Clark. Laurence Fishburne is Captain Miller. The rest of the cast is not necessarily as popular, but are all on about the same level of acting as the rest of the team. The only real stand-out actor is Jack Noseworthy, who has a wonderfully creepy scene mid-way through the movie. He sells his role very well,

Event Horizon’s plot can be summed up as “haunted space ship.” The Event Horizon disappeared seven years ago after it opened a gateway in space-time. It’s space-folding process took it out of the universe and into either hell or a dimension very much like it. The crew was murdered, defiled, driven insane, or all of the above, leaving no survivors. In 2047, the present day, the ship reappears and the crew of the Lewis and Clark are assigned to investigate.

Obviously, disaster strikes almost immediately. Hallucinations, sightings of pure evil, and attempted suicides are experienced by the crew, while Dr. Weir slowly tips over to the dark side. It gets gruesome quick, fast, and in a hurry, with buckets (or giant tanks) of blood spilling all over the screen and onto the characters.

Event Horizon isn’t a great movie for the exact same reason that it’s just a decent-ish movie at best. The stereotypes that make it into a kind of horror movie comfort food–where it isn’t exactly good, but it’s familiar, so that’s good–make it tough to care about the characters. There’s no real growth in any of the characters by the end of the movie, other than terrible psychological scarring. Cooper the Goofy Black Guy stays the Goofy Black Guy throughout the movie, with a spectacularly ill-timed “I’m back!” scene to boot. Dr. Weir stays aloof and standoffish, so you’re not particularly surprised when he flips to the dark side of things. Captain Miller is stern and steely-eyed with everyone from his second in command to a skinless burning monster.

What you’re left with is a pure popcorn movie. You put it on to laugh at the absurdity (Yes, lady, that is your son on this spaceship millions of miles from home) and to check out the somewhat dated effects. The set design is pretty amazing, however, and the almost constantly off-kilter camera adds quite a bit to the mood of the film. The eye-shaped doorways are creepy, and the various transformations you see throughout the movie are a genuine thrill. It’s just that the stuff surrounding this kernel of cool doesn’t stack up to its potential, preventing Event Horizon from being the horror movie it should have been.

PRESENTATION: C-
The menus were fairly barebones. A static picture, embossed buttons, and that’s about it. It feels like a retrograde DVD menu that was just slapped together. It’s disappointing, because if the menus had followed the aesthetic of the movie, there could have been some great effects that add to the movie, rather than just being a chore to slog through.

The DVD case is pretty simple, too. There’s not really any flash or interesting bits to look at. It’s a logo, a picture, and some marketing copy. Even the tagline, “Infinite Space, Infinite Terror,” feels old.

The film is high definition, but it lacks the clarity that modern movies have. It’s over ten years old at this point, so maybe we’re at the edge of what Blu-ray is capable of enhancing. It isn’t that it looks bad, per se, but it doesn’t exactly set the screen on fire with bleeding edge visuals. Whenever a computer screen comes up, it is enjoyably detailed and sharp, but the normal visuals don’t quite stack up.

EXTRAS: C+
The extras are pretty light. We have a commentary with Director Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt, a producer on the film. There are also a few short documentaries on the making of Event Horizon, some behind the scenes features, and a few deleted scenes. A couple of trailers round out the extras.

The documentary stuff is pretty interesting, but not quite enough to be remarkable. The deleted scenes are from a sub-VHS-quality transfer and don’t add anything to the movie other than a few extra minutes with the cast.

It seems like a waste of the Blu-ray format to not load up on the extras. An extra commentary with the cast or really anything extra would’ve helped beef up this lean disc.

OVERALL: C
Event Horizon is a shaky movie, and it’s disappointing that it ended up with a similarly shaky Blu-ray release. While the movie itself has its charm that makes it worth a watch, I can’t really say the same for the Blu-ray.