Coroner’s Corner
Flayed in Space
by John Bikowski
Illustration by Eric Johnson
I had mixed feelings about the latest sci-fi/horror romp called Event Horizon. Overall, I would say the film is OK but very difficult to become embroiled in and ultimately tough to care about. It seems that each “death in space” film that comes out is trying to top Aliens while ripping off some of its ideas. Well, they should give up because it doesn’t get any better than Aliens. However, Event has a few scenes and ideas that were pretty damn cool and well worth the price of a cheapie-theater/video-rental perusal.
The premise is that seven years earlier Sam Neill’s character had engineered a ship that could essentially span the distance of a galaxy by entering a sort of hyperspace warp. The initial testing was a failure because the craft disappeared along with its entire crew. (Whoops, sorry dudes, I coulda sworn it would work!) Seven years after the monumental blunder, a distress signal is received from the missing ship. In a military investigation, Sam joins Captain Larry Fishburne to check out what the hell (pun intended) happened in those seven lost years. The suspense is generated through questions like “Where physically was the ship for seven years?” and “Why are life forms registering but no one will answer?” If you want the answers, check it out yourself. What follows is a melding of several films’ ideas and styles: The Amityville Horror, The Exorcist, Hellraiser, Dreamscape, Leviathan, and… well, you get the idea. Event Horizon is ultimately unsure of what it wants to be so it winds up being a little bit of everything.
Many of the special effects are swell, gory, and crisply executed. An example would be the scene where everything is floating around because the gravity field was turned off. Large water globules lazily hang in mid-air as does the ravaged corpse of a butchered crew member. Once the gravity field is reinstated, all types of crap just slam to the floor including the rotting human carcass which splatters like a giant runny tomato. Another horrific sequence is when the investigating squad discovers the video-disc log left by the former (now eviscerated) crew. What they see is quick bursts of extreme violence and sex(!?) in a nasty rasty up-close extravaganza. Yikes, I had the chills for a moment.
While we are on the space theme I thought I would alert you to an underrated alien fest from 1982 that you can catch on video. The film is called XTRO and it stars absolutely no one. Well, unless you count Maryam D’Abo (she sure does like to get naked and she looks good doing it). The plot centers around a father’s return home after your basic alien abduction. Questions arise as to how messed up this guy really is. You get the answers when people start to die gruesome deaths and he uses the baby-sitter as a fetus breeder (See Sickest Scene). Apparently, Dad wants his young son to hang out with his new monstrous self and he is willing to kill everybody else in his way. The Official Movie Guide gave this film the lowest possible rating and said it was “sick, sick, sick.” Well, that more than recommended it to me. You could do much worse with two bucks and an hour and a half of your life. Use a condom if you decide otherwise.
Sickest Scene O’ the Month: This month’s honorable award easily goes to the alien birth scene in XTRO. Any woman contemplating labor should see this film immediately and feel enlightened knowing that she won’t go through what this unwilling mother does. In the film the baby-sitter begins to writhe all over and her stomach bloats out in all directions. Buckets of slop start pouring from between her thighs as we begin to see what she is pushing from her uterus. What painfully slides out, killing her in the process, is a full-grown human man. That had to hurt.
