• Tweet
• 

• Tweet
• 

Over the weekend, a friend of mine loaned me his copy of Dead Space 2, a much-ballyhooed recent release that, like most much-ballyhooed recent releases, has you playing the role of Space Person vs. Invasion of Evil Space Monsters. In it, you are suffering post-traumatic shock from the events of the first game, and resisting the manipulations of an evil, Scientology-esque cult, all while trying to escape your space station and not be eaten. Or something like that. To be honest, I’m only about halfway through, and so far the story seems to just be justification for sticking enemies to walls with a rail gun – which, shhhhh, Dead Space 2, you never need to explain yourself when it comes to that. You had me at ka-thunk.

Still, it’s impossible for me to play the game without thinking of one of its inspirations – Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon. I watched this movie when I was a kid and it scared the bejesus out of me, and so, in a fit of nostalgia, I decided it was time to watch it over again and see if it held up at all.

Event Horizon was made during the early days of Paul W.S. Anderson cinema, back before his middle initials found their way into the credits – allegedly because he was tired of being asked to explain the frogs in Magnolia (not a joke!) – and before he was reviled for his treatment of franchises such as Aliens vs. Predator and Resident Evil. The movie tells the story of Dr. William Weir (Sam Neil), a scientist who helped design a ship that can fold space and allow instantaneous travel anywhere within the universe. After the ship mysteriously disappeared during it’s first test, it just-as-mysteriously reappears near Neptune. Weir and a rescue team (led by Laurence Fishburne, auditioning for the role of Morpheus) are sent to search the ship for an explanation and for survivors. What they find is a massacred crew and a ship that has been to Hell… and brought enough back for everyone. (DUMDUMDUM).

According to IMDB, the screenwriter pitched the idea of this movie as “The Shining in Space,” which, while catchy, doesn’t really explain why this movie holds up as guilty pleasure for me. Oh, sure, Sam Neil’s character does go crazy throughout the course of the film – with Sam Neil doing a riff on his performance in 1994′s In the Mouth of Madness – but the movie doesn’t really revolve around him. If I were to pitch this film to a room full of executives, I would probably tell them to think of this movie as “those soldiers from Aliens get trapped in a haunted house,” then pause for dramatic effect and finish with, “… in space!” Think about it. You’ve got a veteran deep space rescue team who crack jokes about the civilian in their midst and strip down to their underwear to be put into stasis. You’ve got the one guy who is trying a little to hard to be the Bill Paxton character – his whole purpose in the movie seems to be to say things like, “Oh, fuck!” and “What the fuck?” – and the capable-but-compassionate leader in Laurence Fishburne who is quick to realize that the best way to deal with the threat is just to blow everything up and call it a day. Not to mention Jason Isaacs and Sean Pertwee, who stand in the background of scenes, smoke cigarettes – is that a good idea on a spaceship? – and look like they’ve seen it all. I must admit, my respect for Paul W.S. Anderson went up a notch when I realized that he cast both Pertwee and Isaacs in three of his first four movies.

As for the ship itself, the Event Horizon? Total haunted house. I was watching the DVD and taking some notes – taking notes is how I pretend that I am a super-serious film-type guy – and my friend made a crack about how it was just a haunted house in space. And he’s totally right. You’ve got your blood coming out of the walls, doors randomly opening and closing, people seeing things that aren’t there – classic haunted house. You even have a thunder and lightning storm going on outside, which, I mean, I’m not really sure how you can have a lightning storm that high up in a planet’s atmosphere, but whatever. There are only two real differences between the Event Horizon and a haunted house. One, you can’t go outside without dying. This actually leads to a pretty gut-wrenching little scene where a character is sucked out an airlock with no suit and is rescued by a well-timed jump – a legitimately cool sequence that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid.

The other difference? While most houses – and, for that matter, spaceships – are designed by engineers and architects, the Event Horizon was apparently designed by Clive Barker on a bad day. The engine room contains three spinning rings and walls of spikes – according to the movie, this was to create a gravity field that would help contain the black hole contained within the blah, blah, blah, it’s just CREEPY, man. Not to mention the fact that to even GET to the spinning-spike-black-hole room, you have to walk through a corridor that looks like it has shards of glass stuck the walls. The only thing the ship is missing is an old painting whose eyes follow you wherever you go, but that probably would have been a pretty hard sell to the set designer.

Nobody, least of all me, is going to sit here and pretend that Event Horizon isn’t just a typical B-horror movie with a sci-fi twist, but how much I enjoy the film is a testament to what you can do with the right cast and some pretty sleek production design. Maybe I don’t know anything about the character that Jason Isaacs plays – the neck-to-navel surgery scar he shows appears to be a bit of character development that is lost to the ages – but I care about Jason Isaacs, damnit! The same goes for Sam Neil – when I’m screaming, “HE WOULD HAVE LIKED TO HAVE SEEN MONTANA” when he tears out his eyes, I think it’s ok to acknowledge that you’re banking on your actors’ appeal more than your script. Event Horizon has a better cast than you remember, a ton of gore, and a couple of nifty little scares. Maybe it isn’t the smartest science fiction movie around, and maybe a couple of the characters are kind of annoying, but the movie gets enough right that I don’t begrudge my younger self his appreciation for it, and that’s kind of a rare thing these days.

(I swear to God, childhood me, if you bring up Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves one more time….)