Event Horizon (1997)

If Alien was famously pitched as “Jaws in space,” than Event Horizon could be accurately described as a big, dumb Hellraiser in space. Director Paul W.S. Anderson (infamous helmer of big, dumb movies) and writer Philip Eisner’s film borrows heavily (steals, you might say) from many other sources, but the most clear influences are the aforementioned Alien and Hellraiser. From the former, Event Horizon takes its steampunk spaceship aesthetic and a crew of blue collar space workers. From the latter, it duplicates the grisly Hieronymus-Bosch-at-an-S&M-club imagery and demonic mythology. Unfortunately, while Event Horizon certainly conjures some genuine scares, it doesn’t inherit the intelligence or style of its forebears.

The talent in front of the camera, including Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne, leads you to think Event Horizon might aim for a sort of commercial version of Solaris with this tale of a rescue team investigating a spaceship which has mysteriously returned from a journey through a black hole. Instead, the filmmakers take a much more blunt approach: What if a spaceship went to hell? It’s a comically goofy premise, but also an undeniably appealing one, and the best scenes in Event Horizon mine that absurdity for all its worth (characters giving ominous warnings in Latin, unsettling hallucinations, and, in one example that is both a blatant rip-off of The Shining and admirably ridiculous, torrents of blood inexplicably surging through the ship like a tidal wave).

I can’t help making all these references to other films, as Event Horizon is just so utterly blatant in its mimicry. Of course, such shameless imitation is pretty common amongst low budget fare (think of all the Jaws rip-offs, like Piranha or Orca) and, essentially, Anderson has made a B-movie with an A-list cast, budget, and production values. There’s some fun to be had there, despite the occasionally distracting nascent CGI. And I have to give some sort of perverse credit to Anderson for managing to make a big budget film so unrepentantly violent and graphic (apparently his original cut earned the dreaded NC-17 rating). Event Horizon is certainly not good, but it’s unabashedly bad in a way you can almost applaud.