"F*** this ship!"

Rating: 7/10 (17 October 2015)

A spaceship called Event Horizon returns after disappearing years before. A rescue ship investigates and finds evil. Evil, I tell you! A good sci-fi horror flick that has improved with age. I like it more now than I did when it was first released. It's a movie that borrows so liberally from everything from The Black Hole and Alien to Hellraiser that it leaves itself open to charges of theft. It also uses a formula that has been done to death -- the motley crew of a ship (space or sea -- doesn't matter) encountering some dangerous creature or force. That formula was never better than in Alien, although its roots go at least as far back as the 1950s sci-fi boom. So with the film's creative bankruptcy, why do I still rate it as high as I do? Basically because it does its job very well. It's an entertaining movie with few artistic pretenses. The cast is good for this kind of movie where there's usually at least one person hamming it up so badly they bring the whole movie down with them. Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill are the standouts but the entire cast is solid. The special effects and sets are not too shabby. It's one of director Paul W.S. Anderson's better movies, not that that's saying a lot. I don't really have any superlatives to throw at Event Horizon, as it's not the best of anything really. Just an enjoyable genre movie that has some forgivable flaws.