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Event Horizon
A ship with an attitude...
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Event Horizon
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Rated R
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Starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill
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105 minutes
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Review by Tamara I. Hladik
 he research ship Event Horizon has reappeared on the rim of the Solar System, spitting distance from Neptune and seven years after it vanished mysteriously. Immediately Earth sends a search-and-rescue team to check it out, and to reclaim any survivors. Accompanying the team is Dr. Weir (Neill), the man who built the Event Horizon, and the only one who knows that it harbors an artificial black hole in its engine room.
After a seemingly uneventful outbound trek consisting of a few weeks in stasis, the crew arrives and docks at one of the Horizon's
airlocks. Things are spooky and silent. There is no heat, no gravity and no crew. The Horizon's crew's orphaned effects--water bottles, watches, wrenches--float like wraiths above a cold, cold bog. The would-be rescuers feels something is wrong, but they can't put a name to it. Except Weir, who hasn't been altogether forthcoming. During their voyage out, he had disturbingly gruesome visions of his wife and the mission. But he shares nothing.
The rescue team pushes on. They find some tantalizing,
albeit grisly, clues as to the crew's fate, but before they have time to
draw any conclusions, an explosion in the Event Horizon's
engine room fractures their rescue ship. Their vessel now expelling
oxygen into the void, they clamber into the derelict, but it's no stable
refuge. The oxygen is going stale, and the crew is
starting to see frightful things...
A little boring, with some real nasty bits
Event Horizon begins slowly, almost poetically, like a dark
Solaris. Its mystery radiates a sinister, sentient
penumbra, and the psychological tremors thrum low but persistently. However, about
a third of the way into the film, subtlety is jettisoned for unabashed
bogeymen, and Event Horizon begins its painful (and
somewhat boring) transformation into Hellraiser in Space.
Most everything of value in the film is eventually over-magnified,
overexposed or overdone. When the rescue team finally gets a look at a
videolog of the Event Horizon's crew's last hours, it
explains nothing and serves no dramatic purpose. It doesn't take Big
Blue to figure out what happened, and it would have been more disturbing not to see it. And the chaos of the film's denouement is little more than an exercise in special effects. Although there's action aplenty, whenever the drama permutates from psychological to physical combat, it loses kick.
Despite the disappointing handling of the latter portion of the film,
the whole does contain some genuinely scary bits. The scene in which
Weir is crawling in the Event Horizon's back-lit,
circuit-board tunnels is a terrible fright, and the one in which the ship
seems most alive, most sentient, most malevolent. The cast is fine,
too, with special kudos to Fishburne, who gives a superbly
economic, understated performance as captain of the rescue ship. Overall, the writing is merely average and the direction uneven, but Event Horizon does broker some memorable chills.
The sets were marvelous. The Event
Horizon was beautiful, but horrible. Ironically, the marriage of
artistry and technology, although it added mightily to the atmosphere of
the film, seemed implausible.
-- Tamara
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Mimic
Mimic: Is it just another imitation?
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Mimic
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Rated R
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Starring Mira Sorvino, Jeremy Northam
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102 Minutes
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Review by Kathie Huddleston
 mysterious disease is killing the children of New York City. As doctors try in vain to develop a cure, Doctor Peter Mann (Northam) of the Centers for Disease Control convinces insect expert Susan Tyler (Sorvino) to attack the disease at its source by killing the roaches that are spreading
the deadly contagion.
Susan develops a genetically-engineered, part-roach insect called the Judas Breed, which secretes enzymes lethal to regular roaches. The Judas is released, every single cockroach dies, and the children of New York are saved.
Three years later, Susan discovers a bug that may be related to her Judas Breed, even though the Judas was engineered to die out after a generation. As evidence mounts that indeed the Judas has survived and even evolved, Susan and Peter decide they must investigate the place where the bug was discovered--the depths of the subway tunnels.
Joined by a transit policeman and a shoe shiner, they embark on an odyssey into the city's deepest, darkest region. What they find down there has indeed evolved--and grown--and it's not interested in cockroaches anymore. Soon Susan and Peter are in a battle for their lives, isolated from help and weaponless, facing an enemy that is as cunning as it is strong. And not only are their lives in the balance, but so is the fate of all New York and more...
Who cares about logic when you've got humor, chills and thrills?
Mimic, based on the story of the same name by Donald A. Wolheim, is a fairly entertaining horror movie. As directed by Guillermo Del Toro and
written by Matthew Robbins and Del Toro, the film is the sort of humorous, fast-paced thriller that doesn't leave a lot of time to consider logic. That's fortunate, considering the plot doesn't hold up at all.
The standard horror gimmick is used: Some characters go to a place they'd never go and do things they'd never do. Susan is attacked by a baby bug the size of her hand--how big and mean does she think the adult bugs are going to be? Even though Peter is from the CDC and presumably has the power to get a group of people outfitted for the job of looking for the suspicious bugs, he and a couple of others stumble around completely
unprepared. All in all the movie (especially the first half) is arbitrary and
cliched.
And without a doubt, Mimic is not for the squeamish. There's lots of gore and ichor and a questionable scene regarding two boys. However, horror fans will probably enjoy the setting and creature effects. There's more than a little mimicking of Aliens.
What Mimic does well is move the improbable story along, putting the characters through plenty of spills and chills. Overall, the actors do a pretty good job, especially Charles S. Dutton as the highly annoyed cop who uses very colorful language. Sorvino and Mann are fine considering the unconvincing, childless-couple role they're saddled with.
The biggest disappointment about Mimic is that it could have been a great B movie. The idea, the actors and the special effects are all in place. All it needed was a great B movie script. -- Kathie
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