by Mister Sparta, guest reviewer

Hello folks and welcome back to another edition of Mister Sparta’s Creature Feature.  Tonight, we blast off to outer space as we get a little retro and dig up a gem called Event Horizon.  Fasten your seatbelts, cause this ride gets bumpy.

This film centers around an experimental spacecraft that, after having been missing for seven years, mysteriously resurfaces.  A salvage crew is sent to retrieve the ship and investigate what happened to its crew and, in many ways, all hell breaks loose.  The movie features a stellar cast, including Laurence Fishburn, Sam Neil, and Jason Isaacs.

Now that the details are out if the way, let’s discuss the substance.  The true antagonist in this film is the ship itself, which has gained sentience after its disappearance, so we’re dealing with “The Shining” in space.  Pretty damn good.  I mean this movie takes an otherwise bland haunted house horror genre and puts it in OUTER FUCKING SPACE!  This film is simply brilliant and it knows this, so it gets in your face from the get-go.

The effects are few, but in this movie, less is definitely more.  It doesn’t need to show buckets of blood every scene.  It relies on psychological tension to lay the groundwork so that when the shit really hits the fan, the blood and gore shown hits you hard and makes you squirm.

The only weak link was Kathleen Quinlan.  Her acting wasn’t bad, it was just bland.  Even in the moments if sheer terror, I wasn’t convinced that she could do it.  In short, she served no purpose to the story.  I mean, neither did Richard T. Jones, but Jones’ acting was on par enough to overlook his uselessness.

While we’re on the subject of acting skills, Sam Neil gets the Mister Sparta Batshit Crazy Award for the degree of insanity with which he portrays the ship’s designer.

Final verdict?  Get on Netflix and watch this movie.  It may have flopped in theaters when it came out, but I can’t see how.  This is such a good movie from start to ambiguous finish.

Until next time, this is Mister Sparta and if I learned anything in school, it’s that when some screams in Latin whilst holding their own gouged out eyeballs, just walk away.

Keep those helmets close at hand and head back over to ComicsOnline for everything geek pop culture IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaace.