Event Horizon (1997)

Starring:

• Laurence Fishburne
• Sam Neill
• Kathleen Quinlan

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Paul W.S. Anderson will never win an Academy Award. Still, he's got a knack for mindless, lightweight horror and action with mainstream blockbuster-y tendancies. Event Horizon is easily his most uncompromising Hollywood film, a dark, unsettling work with some fairly graphic imagery (including a topless Sam Neill). It came out the year before the similarly plotted Sphere, but takes a much more horror-inclined approach (both seemingly influenced by the 1972 sci-fi drama Solaris). The title refers to the name of a space ship that jumps into another dimension and brings back something...evil. No, not Jesse Helms; something worse...barely. While Sam Neill starts out as the central figure in the story, it's Laurence Fishburne who ends up as the main "hero" we're rooting for. He's a typical no-nonsense ship captain, playing it straight and low-key, making his delivery of the best line of the film all the more hilarious: after watching a gore-laden video of what heppened to the ship's previous crew, he mutters, "We're leaving." Richard T. Jones plays crew member Cooper, who despite the racial odds, survives.