It seems like I got into Warhammer 40,000 just in time last year since it seems it is making a large splash and coming to the fore of the zeitgeist as it were recently. Amazon has announced a project to make a TV series with Henry Cavill, and the video game Helldivers II that has been making waves has clear inspirations from it and Starship Troopers (the film), though Starship Troppers (the novel) itself had strong influence on 40k.
I recently saw two videos on the topic of films that influenced 40k, one by Rogue Hobbies and one by Adeptus Ridiculous, and thought that I should watch some of the movies in there that I hadnāt seen yet.
Hellraiser is a long-running horror franchise that I am unfamiliar with beyond the visual aesthetic of pinhead and the fact that it is about torture.
The story is that a man and his second wife move into an old house the he had inehrited. The house was last occupied by his brother as a squat. At the start of the film the brother bought a weird puzzlebox and then is seen activating it which summons a group of horrifying people that apparently torture him before eviscerating him in hedonistic excess. These monsters are called Cenobites and āresetā the room in the attic that this happened in.
Through an accident blood is spilled in the attic, which somehow allows the brother to reassemble himself into a monstrous form. He manages to rope the wife to lure men into the attic so he can suck out their life force and reassmeble himself. The daughter of the husband finds out about this and manages to steal the puzzlebox. She accidentally summons the Cenobites again but manages to convince them to let her go in exchange of bringing them to the brother who escaped them.
Overall, the film had excellent practical effects, but unfortunately in general it was kind of boring. Much of the plot hinges on the scheme of the wife luring people to the house in promise of sex, but as bad as it probably sounds I must say that I found here absolutely and entirely unattractive. The acting in general is not that great. But I guess as pulpy schlock it works for what it is.
Event Horizon is a better film overall, even with its trouble production and release from what I hear. It is a āhaunted house in spaceā film in a very similar vein to Alien, though it falls short of the mark which is to be expected since Alien is one of the best films ever made.
The titular space ship was constructed with an experimental drive to enable faster than light travel, but went missing in its initial voyage. Seven years later it is found again and a secret military mission is dispatched to find out what happened. They find the Event Horizon deserted but with odd sensory readings, and through an accident they are forced onto the Event Horizon as their own ship is damaged, with the crew suffering halluciantions and other strange occurrences.
The movie is directly inspired by 40k, as one of the core conceits in that setting is that FTL travel is possible by taking a shortcut through The Warp, a hellish dimension infested by daemons that can possess people and even machines. In particular the game Space Hulk about exploring derelict space ships is to be noted here.
The movie is pretty decent, largely carried by good performances by its cast. In particular Lawrence Fishburne as a no-bs military captain did really well. It also provides some good effects and frights. Unfortunately it has some rather big holes in it structure that make it a bit nonsense. The Event Horizon as a ship is really oddly constructed with stuff like spikes on hatch doors, basically an exposed reactor room, and features a spinning tunnel taken directly from a fun house at a carnival. But the thing that annoyed me the most was that a lot of the plot hinges on people holding the idiot ball. Most notably the first thing they do when entering a space ship that even ostensibly traveled to another solar system and back is that they split up and every person is entirely by themself, which just makes absolutely no sense.
Overall still a decent film overall, but nothing must-see.
Probably the best film among those Iāve watched recently is Deathwatch, a horror war film.
In this one the main cast consists of a group of british soldiers on the western front in World War I. They accidentally cross no-manās land and capture a german trench, only to find weird stuff such as a lot of corpses and with weird injuries or wrapped in barbed wire and bayonettes littering the ground. The one guy they captured alive seems deeply afraid. Then night falls and strange things begin to happen, paranoia starts to set in and the group begins to turn on each other.
While of course this is a different period. you could also interpret this as what could occurr with a squad of imperial guardsmen being haunted by daemons in 40k. But outside that context you can also just interpret of the strange occurrences of the horrors of war made manifest in a different manner.
Regardless of the perspective, this was a really good movie and I definitely recommend seeing it. It has a slightly weak ending for my taste, but it doesnāt sink the film.
