Every week, Shelf Life sees Tom White select and talk about a movie that lives on his DVD shelf, one he thinks we should all see.
Nowadays, I like to think of director Paul W.S. Anderson as Michael Bay, minus a couple of million dollars. He has a great eye for visuals, and an inexplicably popular franchise, Resident Evil, he falls back on every couple of years, but his movies receive a not undeserved critical drubbing, far beyond anything the Master of Bayhem gets. Now the only enjoyment that I get from him is jokes playing on his name's similarity to the much more favoured Paul Thomas Anderson (you don't know the joy of angering hardcore film nerds by saying, "I can't wait for the next Paul Anderson film"). But there was a time, before the video game adaptions and putting his wife in everything, that I found him endlessly entertaining, and that came to a head in 1997 with horror/sci fi mash-up Event Horizon.
While Alien (which this movie got criticized for being similar to) was conceived as a haunted house movie in space, Event Horizon goes one step further and transplants everything we associate with the genre, putting it all into the giant, derelict space craft from which the movie gets its title. Set in 2047, the story goes that the Event Horizon was an experimental spacecraft, using a black hole as its engine to achieve instantaneous travel to points in space, that went missing on its maiden voyage. Seven years later, it reappears, and a rescue crew is sent to investigate. You can rightly guess that everything doesn't go according to plan. From the opening frame, a genuine sense of foreboding is established, as Michael Kamen and Orbital's soundtrack, complete with thumping bass line, on the opening credits, gets you in the right frame from mind. O.k., so I have to admit the movie's vision of the future owes a lot to Alien, all claustrophobic corridors and darkly lit environments (there is also a hint of H.R. Giger in the ships core), Event Horizon strikes out on its own pretty early on, gleefully going to extreme lengths to creep and gross out the audience as the cast, including Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neil, Joley Richardson, and Jason Issacs, are put through the emotional and mental wringer by the somehow sentient and malevolent ship.
There is wonderfully creepy atmosphere that bleeds from the screen once the action makes its way to the Event Horizon, and Anderson uses everything from body horror, brought to life by some genuinely terrifying practical effects, to surreal hallucinations to great effect. Sam Neil, as the designer of the ship, is probably the high point of the film and really goes all out as the story progresses. Seeing the transformation he goes through as the evil of the ship exerts more and more over him will make your skin crawl, and puts in a great performance as a creepy and menacing villain. He's so good in fact, that he makes you see passed the fact that he is only there so Laurence Fishburne, in full bad ass mode here, has something to fight at the end.
This film never once tries to go beyond being a b-movie, but that makes it even more endearing and entertaining. It is probably one of the best examples of a genre mash-up, taking elements from both sci-fi and horror, which have no right in mixing in the first place, and blends them together perfectly, rightfully attaining cult movie status. Next time you find yourself rolling your eyes at the newest Resident Evil movie, have Event Horizon ready to take of your shelf, and you'll see what Paul W.S. Anderson was once capable of.
