A truly scary space horror

Rating: 9/10 (27 October 2015)

Paul W.S. Anderson has been known for maiming some projects, namely Alien Vs. Predator. His Resident Evil films are a rocky road for fans of the game (I think they're fun, don't judge) and he has a few solid genre efforts in the underrated Soldier with Kurt Russell, and Death Race. Any missteps in his lineup can be forgiven, however, on account of Event Horizon, a terrifying journey into outer space, and perhaps further. It plays like Dead Space, Doom and Hellraiser all rolled into one palm sweating nightmare. When a massive, state of the art deep space extraction ship goes missing in the far regions, a rescue vessel called the 'Lewis & Clark' is dispatched investigate and bring the crew home. Captained by Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and presided over by the original ship's designer, Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill). They locate the ship, and board her. From there, they discover that while it has been floating out there, it has visited another dimension, a dimension consisting of the last possible type of energy you want to run into. It preys on them one by one, allowing for some grotesque, shivery death scenes. There's a sequence where they check the ship's video log to find out what happened to the original crew. What they discover there will give you a cold jolt of sickening terror, and is the most well orchestrated scare moment of the film, and possibly the decade. The rest of the crew are played by reliably solid actors, including Joely Richardson, Jack Noseworthy, Richard T. Jones, Sean Pertwee and Jason Isaacs, a standout as J.D., the paranoid Irishman. Sam Neil is eerily calm as Weir, and Fishburne remains stoic as the Captain. Horror movies set in space don't often show, up, and are even less frequently effective, but this one shatters the mould to bring us raw, seething fear in a place where there is no escape, no rescue, and no hiding from the malevolent dark energies working against them.