Three SF Horror Movies

Here are three science fiction/horror movies that I happen to like. Not the only three, by any means, but just three, picked more or less at random.

Pandorum

I've seen this movie a few times, and I'm still not entirely sure I know what it's about. The short version is that a bunch of humans are dispatched to a habitable planet in hibernation aboard a starship that looks like a bunch of Hula-Hoops. Things proceed downhill from there. There's racial degeneration, paranoia, blatant insanity, cannibalism, amnesia and no end of technical difficulties. It's dark. It's grim. It's frankly kinda confusing. It's gory. But it's atmospheric as the dickens, has more plot twists than a whole year of X-Man comics, and Antje Traue is no hardship to look at either (see above).

John Carpenter's The Thing

Scientists and various hangers-on at an Antarctic base sally forth to explore something they found buried under several thousand years of ice, and things go very badly indeed. It's a pretty good adaptation of Campbell's famous story Who Goes There? Better than the movie with James Arness was, anyway. It's way graphic and way gory, and the startling thing is that the effects were achieved practically, for the most part; there's no CG in the movie at all (other than a by today's standards laughable animation of alien cells taking over human cells) and I don't recall seeing any stop-motion work. I like the writing and acting (Kurt Russell - see above, regarding a frozen Norwegian - and Keith David in particular), and the spider-head alone is worth the price of a rental. But it's nihilistic in the end (if none of your actions matter, why bother to do anything at all?) and even I, a fairly seasoned horror movie watcher, am occasionally undone by the sheer grossness of it all.

Event Horizon

The spacecraft Event Horizon goes out to test a new kind of gravity propulsion system. It's supposed to open gateways to various other locales in our universe, but it opens what amounts to a portal to Hell. When it returns, it comes back with more aboard it than when it left, if you get my drift. It's easy to dismiss as a cross between Alien and Hellraiser, and the last third of the movie suffers; it stops being weird and turns into just another hero-versus-monster movie, and not a particularly good one at that. But when it's being weird and atmospheric, it's tastily weird and atmospheric. Event Horizon is like a bag of Cheetos - it isn't very good for me, and it leaves a residue that can only be removed with athletic hand-scrubbing, but I still indulge from time to time.