Event Horizon ★★★
BELOVED Kiwi actor Sam Neill is not a name synonymous with the horror genre.
Throughout his career he has played every type of character imaginable and been equally at home in drama, adventure, comedy and romance.
Setting aside the thriller Dead Calm, he has also appeared in three particularly notable horror films – Andrei Zulawski’s bizarre Possession from 1981, John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994) and 1997’s Event Horizon.
Even though it’s a guilty pleasure for some, including myself, let’s not include his turn as Satan in 1981’s Final Conflict, which still has several problems.
Neill plays has the ability to transform at the flick of a camera switch from an everyday, stoic, potential hero into your worst living nightmare, something not every good actor can do.
The sci-fi horror Event Horizon was directed by journeyman Paul W. S. Anderson whose main claim to fame is still four of the Resident Evil films. Writer Philip Eisner’s screenplay is quite simply a haunted house story set in space.
It’s set in 2047 on board a spaceship heading towards Neptune. The Event Horizon is a research vessel that has been missing, presumed destroyed, for several years but a distress signal is suddenly received and a potential rescue mission is launched.
Laurence Fishburne plays the head of the rescue vessel while Neill is Dr William G. Weir who is not part of the usual crew but along for the ride in his capacity as the original designer of the missing ship.
In fact it turns out Neill’s missing ship was involved in an experiment designed to enable immediate travel through some form of bending of the space-time continuum.
Unfortunately for everyone concerned, in this case the Event Horizon’s efforts caused a rift in the continuum that enabled some kind of evil force to possess the ship with resulting impacts on its human crew.
It’s best you don’t bother to think whether this makes any sense at all in the real world of astrophysics and instead just sit back and enjoy the thrill ride which varies between some ice-cold suspense and a few laugh-out-loud moments.
The strong cast also includes Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Sean Pertwee and Jason Isaacs who all ensure they maintain as serious a tone as possible under the circumstances.
But the stand-out performance is definitely Neill for reasons that become more apparent as the story progresses to an exciting final act.
The film is quite gory in places and this originally resulted in the studio apparently insisting that Anderson make a range of cuts. Unfortunately the removed footage, which amounts to about 20 minutes, is yet to be restored for a director’s cut which would likely improve the film further.
The short sequence that shows some of the mayhem from the Event Horizon on a video screen is a terrific teaser for what could have been a very intense experience.