In The Mouth Of Event Horizon

This edit is an absolute blast! This is best seen without spoilers so I'll keep this review brief...

The blend of the two horror-movies is freaky as hell but never feels illogical. The FX shots are astounding, you would never know anything had been changed.

The altered painting and the intercutting of the corridor are jaw dropping. Plus it's always a total fanediting thrill to make a character from one movie, look at something from another movie... and this has that in spades!

One small negative would be the narrative, which is sometimes a bit hard to follow but I'm sure this is mostly down to the source movie (And probably deliberate, given the subject of insanity). Lastly, the editing of the visuals and the audio is both technically and creatively perfect.

I'm not the biggest horror buff around, but I do really like In the Mouth of Madness and Event Horizon, so this edit got my interest. I absolutely loved it. The visual editing is just incredible and worth watching for that alone. The audio editing is great, no issues. Picture is perfect. The story works amazingly well. The only issues I had were the inclusion of the In the Mouth of Madness opening credits along with the custom credits. It looks a little odd to have "Directed by John Carpenter and Paul Anderson" followed by "Directed by John Carpenter". And there is a strange edit around 15:45. I know it was a necessary cut, but could have been smoothed out a bit more.

But those are very minor quibbles and this is a great edit. I love seeing this kind of creativity by someone who really has some amazing technical skill. Can't wait to see what RollWave does next.

Besides one particular case of noticeable rotoscoping, this edit is very well made from a visual and audio perspective. I really have no complaints there. However, I was disappointed by this edit. It was partly my own fault for forgetting how its IFDB page describes it since I just put it on my watchlist a while ago, so I was surprised how much this was just "In the Mouth of Madness" with scattered shots and scenes from "Event Horizon." While these additions are not jarring and actually feel mostly in place in the movie, they don't add much if anything at all. Add that to the fact that "In the Mouth of Madness" was not a movie I loved in the first place, and we have an unfortunate combination. All that said, I applaud the editor for the effort they put in to this!

The idea of In the Mouth of Event Horizon, I think, sounds good on paper but in practice didn't work as well as I'd hoped. Both films star Sam Neill, and both movies focus on his characters descent into madness, but that's where the similarities end.

It was basically watching In the Mouth of Madness with bits of Event Horizon sprinkled in. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it begs the question as to why? If it doesn't improve and/or change the narrative I'm not sure what the point was, and this edit accomplishes neither. The shots from Event Horizon don't add anything to Carpenter's film.

That's not to say this is a bad edit. The video and audio quality are fine and I didn't notice any cuts. The special effect changes were really well done and to be honest I was quite impressed by them. That said, I didn't feel like I was watching anything different than "In the Mouth of Madness".

I'm happy I watched this fanedit, I enjoyed it, though I feel the narrative suffered from the inclusion of "Event Horizon" since it didn't really add anything.

Do I recommend the edit? Sure. Why not? But I don't think it's one I need to see again.

Combining two different films to make a new viewing experience is nothing new in the fanediting world. We’re not talking using different entries of the same franchise here (ala Jaws 1 and Jaws 2 for example), but actually two entirely different movies. It’s no easy task as more often than not, whilst the final product can be fun and engaging it can suffer from a lack of narrative structure which ultimately makes the experiment an unsuccessful one.

As I approached Rollwave’s intriguing pairing of Paul Anderson’s Event Horizon with John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, I was therefore hoping this would be one of the few exceptions. I’d already been impressed by the trailer, which showed off some nifty after effects work to replace paintings and posters to help tie the films closer together, so I was pretty excited when I settled down to watch this with the missus.

Firstly, the quality of the picture on show here (I watched the DVD version) is top notch. The film stock used for both films seems similar enough that nothing stands out as odd or ill-fitting, and the audio levels between the footage used is nicely balanced and never draws attention to itself. I did notice a very slight glitch in the picture during the scene where one of Sutter Cane’s disciples (his agent I believe) breaks through the window, but I can’t be sure if this was due to a disc error of some kind, rather than the rendered video file itself. Otherwise, on the technical front this is a great looking and sounding edit.

On the narrative front, I was really impressed with how rollwave combined elements from Event Horizon into the visions which Trent sees during In the Mouth of Madness. Remarkably, by the time the film reaches its conclusion, I was suitably convinced that what I had witnessed was some weird director’s cut of the movie and you can’t really ask for more praise than that. Quite simply, it works.

If there is a slight criticism, I would say it’s the way the edit is presented in its DVD form. No menu of any kind, something which I do feel is important if you’re going to present a DVD version, and secondly having the fanedit credit “directed by John Carpenter and Paul Anderson”, and then leaving the actual film credit of “directed by John Carpenter” is just a little lazy in my opinion. Also, I would have liked some fan-made end credits for a project such as this.

That said, this is still a top notch fanedit and comes highly recommended. I look forward to see
what Rollwave hits us with next.