Event Horizon, Suitable Flesh, The Flight of Dragons, The Secret of NIHM, The Fall of the House of Usher, Dragonslayer

- Event Horizon [1997] - 68

“Infinite space, Infinite terror” reads the poster for 1997’s cosmic horror Event Horizon… and it’s mostly right. This is a movie that gets super panned critically and, though I have my issues with it, I don’t totally understand why. It’s no sillier than Cube, no weirder than Twelve Monkeys, and no gorier than Seven. The film falls apart some near the end, as it feels a sudden need to inject an entirely meaningless bit of comedy into the narrative, but it recovers well enough to leave a lasting impression. This is very much a Lovecraft meets Warhammer 40k story and I love it for those elements. That said… 2007’s Sunshine is effectively the same movie but improved in nearly every way. As a more niche recommendation, I’ll also turn you to The Way Out: an audio drama set in the 40k universe.

- Suitable Flesh [2023] - 27

It’s difficult for me to even justify this film’s existence. It’s too long, it’s extremely boring, it’s very cheap looking, its story makes very little sense, and it abuses the “based on” tagline to draw in fans of Lovecraftian horror. Suitable Flesh is a nightmare amalgam of gratuitous sex, half-hearted violence, bad continuity, and meaningless plot points. It’s a movie that was clearly based around one scene very near the end which then needed something to justify its existence.

This movie sucks. Absolutely skip it.

- The Flight of Dragons [1982] - 89

Anyway, back to good movies. The Flight of Dragons is a 1982 animated film with almost all of its ducks perfectly in a row. Featuring the great animation of the time, a surprisingly involved plot for a “children’s” movie, and one of [if not the] most insane climaxes I’ve ever seen in film… I really loved this one. The only thing that keeps it from being a mid 9 is that a couple of plot points are pretty… problematic. They’re brief and easy enough to wave away given the context of when this was made, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Regardless, The Flight of Dragons is just delightful and impressively smart. Who doesn’t want to learn that dragons keep hoards of gold because they tend to burn conventional bedding and so use a soft metal instead?

What good buds.

- The Secret of NIHM [1982] - 62

Speaking of animated 80’s films with problematic plots/ characters: I also watched The Secret of NIHM this week. It’s uh… it’s not very good. It has a lot of really cool ideas and an excellent opening sequence, but it’s one of those films that starts to move in one direction, realizes that direction is a little obtuse, and then pivots back into something more conventional. Meaning, NIHM has some neat stuff going on, but it never develops any of that stuff to make it truly matter. Talking rats that live extra long lives because of some science experiment at the hands of the NIHM lab? That’s pretty cool… doesn’t really matter though. The main character’s husband is something of a legend among this colony of said rats and we don’t know why? Also cool, but only vaguely important. "Courage of the heart is very rare, the Stone has a power when it's there." That sounds neat, too bad we learn next to nothing about this object and it features only in a single scene afterwards.

The Secret of NIHM could have been really great if it was longer, more focused… and didn’t feature an extremely creepy and… let’s say “forward” bird character who has way too much screen time.

- The Fall of the House of Usher [2023] - 55

Time for my most unpopular opinion that will probably surprise no one. This show was stupid. The Fall of the House of Usher is just a slasher-anthology series disguised behind the beautiful directing, high production value, and excellent performances that Mike Flanagan always brings to his stories. This series takes 8+ hours to tell a story that could have been condensed into 2 at most. It’s a show best served in the background of an event or project that you pause and rewind whenever you hear a loud noise because… nothing ever happens. Every episode is just an hour of waiting for a character to be semi-brutally killed with little-to-no actual or interesting plot development in between. While these nothing moments are largely very well produced [just ignore all the hideous visual FX] and extremely well acted, there’s simply no substance to them; the show demands absolutely nothing of the viewer, and you walk away without anything to show for it. The plot is so basic and meaningless that there’s simply no reason to pay any actual amount of attention, making it very boring to experience unless you like slasher violence and want little else. Easily the weakest [or at least the most padded] of Flanagan’s work that I’ve seen, The Fall of the House of Usher has officially put the final nail in the artist’s coffin for me. Good riddance.

- Dragonslayer [1981] - 65

1981’s Dragonslayer is a film that feels like it was developed by Japanese game studio FromSoftware: The story is obtuse and told through tiny bits of lore in weird orders, most of it only vaguely makes sense or matters, and the whole thing is excellent to behold from a visual standpoint with a strong sense of the fantasy setting it creates. This is a movie that I’m glad I watched because it was fun [and unintentionally funny], but not one I’d necessarily recommend to people or will be watching again. It feels a little like Willow without the whimsy and a little like Dragonheart without the Sean Connery. I certainly wouldn’t turn anyone away from it, it’s just a movie that exists and is interesting as a time capsule. It’s also a PG-rated, Disney produced film with some brief nudity in it… so that’s kind of a funny trivia point.