Event Horizon (1997)

I saw “Event Horizon” back in 1997 and thought it an ugly, silly mess with good actors – Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne star – mucking about in a spaceship so familiar one keeps waiting for John Hurt to lose his lunch. (Hurt does not appear.) The plot: Neill is a scientist leading the salvage of the spacecraft Event Horizon that went missing seven years prior with no clear explanation. The ship appears as if every ’80s slasher villain has run through it: Blood smears and grisly bodies abound, floating in micro-gravity. Why? How? I won’t spoil it. Naturally, though, the crew ditch the buddy system and split up because in 2047 no one has seen “Alien.” Made by Paul Anderson (not Thomas, but W.S.), “Event” smacks of a film that’s dead certain that pouring on guts, gore, eyeballs, and blood all means horror and scares, not aware that the opposite is true. The paces Neill is put through makeup-wise brings my truest pity. The scenes with men holding on by fingers to bending, twisting iron brought my continuous, unpitying laughter. Time has not been kind at all. D

The Gate (1987)

“The Gate” is one of those late-1980s hell-is-rising horror flicks that, if I saw at age13, I can’t recall. With a then-new diet of HBO’s “Tales from the Crypt,” “The Shining,” “Alien,” and much other horror, I may have laughed myself silly. I did this viewing, age 38. This story is all pre-CGI smoke and rubber-suited demons and zombies chasing after a middle schooler (Stephen Dorff) and his sister and best pal, after a portal to hell is uncovered in their back yard. Naturally. Silly, harmless, with big hair, and big phones that melt to the wall, the real fear here isn’t hell or ghouls, but the reaction Mom n’ Dad will have when they come home and see a smoldering mess of a house. How do you explain that? “The devil made me do it!” Forget the plot, it’s not worth the hassle. Dorff, sweet and innocent, has since carried a career playing vampires and guys who go thump in the night. Love the stop-motion effects. B