This futuristic thriller tracks a rescue team's top-secret efforts to recover the crew and logs of a lost ship, the Event Horizon, whose confidential mission included warping space-time to travel to Proxima Centauri. Sam Neill plays the depressed, widowed Dr. Weir, the designer of the ill-fated ship, who tags along with a tightly knit band of interplanetary EMTs who hope to discover why the ship disappeared seven years ago -- and why it's back. Laurence Fishburne gives a respectable performance as their captain, while Kathleen Quinlan and Joely Richardson complement the ensemble.

As one might expect, the mission does not go as planned, people are tense, things explode, techno-gizmos break, the walls start bleeding, a guy gets sucked into a dimensional vortex, the ship is alive -- you know, the usual.

Despite the impressive names in the cast, good acting is not the focus of this film. Event Horizon is a terrifying, bloody, startling, traumatizing, psychological horror movie. The soundtrack alone, a delightfully stereotypical goose-bump-giver by Michael Kamen, has the audience scared before the opening credits finish rolling. Though the film does not supply any innovation -- most of the truly shocking moments are still delivered via jarring loud noise -- the hallucinations of the crew add a sickening intensity to the same old tricks.

The most disturbing quality of this film is its ability to combine cheap, gasp-inducing thrills with truly disturbing, horrific gore. While some movies are scary because they make viewers jump at just the right time without showing anything, and some movies are disgusting and completely unscary because of their unsuspenseful way of showing every Silly Putty scar and fake blood effect, this movie does both. You get the bejeezus scared out of you time and time again, but just when you think they'll cut away to another scene, you'll get to watch a sickening abuse of flesh. The old "tell me when it's over" trick doesn't fly here. You'd miss the last 55 minutes of the movie.