In The Mouth Of Event Horizon

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.

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.