Event Horizon
In space, no one can hear you mix body horror with a lot of other cinematic references in a fast paced action film. A great film all around.
In a future where permanent bases in the moon were already a reality by 2015, the titular ship built for FTL travel fails on its maiden voyage and disappears. Seven years later, it reappears at the edge of the solar system, and a rescue mission in put together.
The crew are Space Marines, plus the scientist that built said ship. The captain is Morpheus, Trinity is Joely Richardson, then there’s Lucius Malfoy and other dudes. The guy that built the ship tags along; good thing his palaeontology days are over. They wanted to get their asses to Mars, but Neptune it is. The trip there goes without a hitch, but what they find there is unfathomable. Crew Expendable.
The ship itself seems intact, but with it’s life support systems disabled. They turn them on, but it was better if they didn’t: foul smells, weird blood-spattered walls, an horrifying video log. The gravity drive looks like something out of Hellraiser, with spikes and rotating blades all around. Fucking magnets, how do they work?
They start getting picked up, one by one, by the darkness within the singularity. The ship’s core came back with some hellish entity, and it feeds on people. A being of pure chaos, it can project hallucinations mining the deepest recesses of human fragility, it knows their secrets. Liberate te tutemet.
Most of the crew is lost, either to outright hallucinatory accidents, murdered by “possessed” crewmates, or outright blown to smithereens. The only survivors are the lieutenant and the flirtatious handyman, and he had to get back from space. The first guy that went catatonic when exposed to the darkness miraculously survives too, or so it seems. The final scene is ambiguous.
The director didn’t just saw Alien and Aliens. He also watched The Shining, Solaris, and even Apollo 13. That is mixed with gruesome body horror, a winning combination.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.