IHR induction #22: "Event Horizon" (1997, Paul W.S. Anderson)

Here's an interesting one for many reasons, including but not limited to:

(1) It's a HORROR FILM IN SPACE, practically a genre unto itself.

(2) It's got a fantastic score by Michael Kamen, and is one of the few horror movie soundtracks that I can replay in my head without the aid of the DVD.

(3) Captain Awesome himself Sam Neill is your starring actor. Even better, he's the villain. People remember Neill for a lot of different things - okay, that's a complete lie. Most people ONLY know him as the dude from "Jurassic Park," but in my warped world he's a horror movie deity akin to Jehovah and Ghandi combined. Or something. Long story short, if Sam "Best Thespian Ever" Neill is in a movie, I'm interested.

(4) Paul W.S. Anderson, one of the internet movie community's punching bags, is your director...and this movie doesn't suck.

That should about do it for an introduction.

*takes breath*

So despite this being a horror movie in space directed by Paul "I'm the most shameless wife pimper since Tim Burton" Anderson, it's damn near flawless, and ranks as one of my favorite scary flicks of the '90s. The acting is outstanding, the look of the film is memorable, the story is the kind of "keep it simple stupid" epic that I've grown especially fond of in this era of unnecessarily complicated action pics...and it's got Sam Neill.

What more introduction do you need? Let's go right into THE MOVIE!!

The year is 2047. A distress signal from the vessel Event Horizon has just been received, and a rescue ship - named the Lewis and Clark - is dispatched to salvage the ship and any remaining crew. One of the very cool things about this movie is that I can remember all of the characters by name - there's Miller (Laurence Fishburne), the kind-hearted leader of the team with a tragic past; there's Peters (Kathleen Quinlan), the med tech who has one of the most heartbreaking death scenes I've seen in any movie; there's Starck (Joely Richardson), the requisite blonde hottie, and, amazingly enough, several more. "Event Horizon," for a horror film (IN SPACE!), has a terrific cast as noted by those names above. Incredibly, it also has a script that does a good job endearing the characters those actors play to the audience - they're given nuances, scenes of dialogue in between the scenes of tension-building that really give us reason to care when we see these genuinely good-hearted people getting offed.

Soon enough, we're able to distinguish what exactly our antagonist in this film is supposed to be. Some people have described "Event Horizon" as a kind of strange hybrid between "Hellraiser" and "Alien," and while that's a fairly accurate statement, the thing that makes "Event Horizon" a good movie is that it takes the best parts of both of those movies and - while it doesn't quite have the glorious highs of those two universal classics - manages to to carve out its own identity. Rather than demons from hell or an external force, the villain in "Event Horizon" is never really spelled out for us. Dr. Weir (that's Sam the Man Neill for those keeping score), who has tagged along on the rescue mission, was the designer of the ship which seemed to disappear seven years before the movie's events begin. It was a major breakthrough in space travel, giving travelers the ability to go from point A to point B by traveling through a kind of alternate dimension, hence the name of the ship. There's only one thing that Weir failed to consider - what exactly is in said alternate dimension?

The middle sections of "Event Horizon," where its true greatness lies, are made up of several fascinating sections. Almost every character is given back story and a few scenes of alone time. It's here where we learn that Quinlan's med tech had a child who died, where we learn about Sam Neill's wife committing suicide, where we get what's actually one of screendom's better soliloquys from Fishburne about the ill-fated rescue mission he took part in years prior to the events depicted in "Event Horizon." Its notable that all of the characters in this horror film are adults, and that many of them are older than 40. While the Horror Nerd loves him some slasher films, it's quite refreshing seeing this tactic played out in films of this nature from time to time. More specifically, in a day and age where almost all horror films employ the tactic of "every character is a gigantic douchebag with the exception of one" to nonperfection, this movie makes the step of making EVERY character likable, even the one who will turn into its eventual villain.

This is also quite the scary film. In returning from the alternate reality, the ship has brought back a presence - demons, ghosts, even the nature of evil itself seems to be contained on the ship. Like some sort of space-age Freddy Krueger, this presence also recognizes each victim's personal worst fears, and uses this strategy to (1) psyche out the characters, and (2) murder them at their peak of vulnerability. The ship's energy seems to overtake Weir, the most shattered and vulnerable of the characters. This decision isn't an accident, as it affords Neill to give us one of his trademark crazy characters, and in the movie's gore-laden finale Weir is one bad S.O.B.

In short, this is a pretty damn good movie. Without exaggeration, I've seen at least a dozen "rescue crew in space meets deadly entity" movies, and with the exception of the first two "Alien" films, this is the best, mainly due to the treatment that it gives its characters and the script (which reportedly received a re-punch from Andrew Kevin Walker, the scribe behind the 1995 classic "Se7en"). When I first saw this movie in 1997 (at the age of 14, at the first party I ever attended where actual, live human females my own age were also present) it really stuck out in my mind as something special, and as a teen first starting to get into this horror thing pretty hardcore, I took note of the director's name. I would go see his next movie, "Soldier" with Kurt Russell, and consider it a temporary setback. Then I saw "Resident Evil," the movie that took the most terrifying video game of all time - immersive, eerie and claustrophibic just like all the "Night of the Living Dead" clones badly wished they could be - and turned it into just another asskicking chick vehicle. And then came "AvP," which took the Alien and Predator film franchises and effectively ruined the mythologies of both. Paul, once upon a time you were a kickass horror guy who picked a good script and shot it damn well. Ever thought about going back to your roots?