by: Dr. Boogie

Haunted houses are great, aren't they? We're so spoiled now, what with actual haunted houses being all over the places, but in the future, after American exhausts its strategic ghost reserve, all haunted houses will be relegated to spaceships. And that's how Event Horizon happened.

The character of Dr. Weir (Sam Neil) gives the real explanation by folding a piece of paper together and pushing a pen through it: His ship, the Event Horizon (the pen), folds the paper (space) and then passes through it to get from one point in the universe to another. Unfortunately, his scientific expertise fails to account for that area that occurs between the two ends of the folded paper, and wouldn't you know it: it's Hell.

Suffice to say, it catches everyone a little off guard when the ship reappears after a 7-year absence and is evil. Weir decides to roll with it, becoming a full-on crazy person and bringing us this great Horror Moment:

Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) informs Trauma Doctor DJ (Jason Isaacs) that Weir is on the loose and should be taken out with extreme prejudice. DJ decides to put the Hippocratic Oath aside in the name of stopping a murderous hell-loving madman.

Unfortunately, he spends too much time mulling over which surgical instrument would be best for killing someone. Weir is able to get the drop on him.

Though a lack of eyes is a notable handicap, he makes up for it by having super strength and some kind of sonar, or something. He's sort of like Daredevil in that regard. Unlike Daredevil, however, his main move is to grab people with one hand and throw them around a little. And now it's time for Tossfest 2047:

All these curved gothic surfaces are making it frustratingly hard for Weir to kill DJ with mere neck throws. Thank goodness they're in Medical.

We don't actually see the knife going into DJ, but his expression, combined with the sounds of gurgling and someone slicing a cabbage off camera tells you all you need to know.

Miller, meanwhile, is worried about all the screaming and knocking shit over he witnessed after telling DJ to stop Weir. He races down to Medical, but by the time he gets there, he sees that DJ has left everything on the table:

Not a great way to go. Also, why are there so many fishhooks on board this futuristic spaceship? Were they planning to study the effects of faster-than-light travel on trout? Or was there just great fishing to be had on Neptune? Perhaps it was the inevitable result of bringing Pinhead and the rest of his Hellraiser cenobites to space?

As gruesome as that scene is, the entire movie was originally much gorier. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you have a weak stomach), Paul WS Anderson had to tone things down because test audiences were too grossed out. Included in these cuts was a video log showing what happened to the original crew of the Event Horizon. Anderson really amped up the gore there, even going to far as to hire amputees and porn actors to make the "blood orgy" scene as realistic as possible. And it worked: there were reports from early screenings of people fainting when they saw it!

But the footage was lost and now the world may never know what kind of reactions modern audiences would have to a realistic depiction of a 90s era sci fi blood orgy. Que lastima.

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