Horrific Halloween 2019 - Event Horizon

It's October, so Shangrila Towers is serving up All Hallows' Eve-themed posts for the guys and ghouls in your neighborhood. Our subject today is Paul W.S. Anderson's underappreciated box-office bomb, "Event Horizon."

Fresh off the runaway success of the film adaptation of "Mortal Kombat," Paul W.S. Anderson delivered a dark, disturbing sci-fi horror film to theatergoers in the summer of 1997, a literal haunted house in space:



"Event Horizon" had an infamously tortured production. Anderson agreed to a hurried editing process that resulted in a jumbled Act II that feels ten minutes too short, and ultimately the movie lost Paramount a whole lot of money. One can imagine an alternate universe where Anderson got the extra month or so he needed to edit the film, with it becoming a modest late-'90s horror hit, Anderson becoming a genre auteur like Guillermo del Toro, and the public not getting subjected to an unending series of iffy "Resident Evil" and "Death Race" movies.

That said, "Event Horizon" is still pretty good. The titular ship is one of the creepiest vessels this side of "Dead Space" and "System Shock 2," and the cast gamely attack the thin characters they've been saddled with. The standout is Sam Neill, who caps off his trilogy of horror movie performances (he starred in "Omen III" and "In the Mouth of Madness") with a scientist who's one part "Solaris," one part "Shining."

Rating: 7/10