In 2047, the salvage ship Lewis and Clark is sent to Neptune to recover the Event Horizon, an experimental ship that disappeared seven years ago and has suddenly reappeared. Where did it go, and what happened to it when it got there? It's not as interesting as it might have been, had the film been in more capable hands. Essentially, the answer is this: The ship went away to another dimension, in order to come back to jump out from behind things and yell, "Boo!"

To humor us, it provides some background. The ship was designed by Dr. Weir (Sam Neill), who is sent along with the salvage crew. Why? To set up later scenes. The ship apparently creates a black hole in space, flies into it, and comes out the other side in a different part of space. As we learn from the film, it's not a good idea. Bad things happen, the kind of things that happen in bad horror movies that attempt to sound smarter than they really are.

My snide comments are getting in the way of this review. That's ok, because the inane script got in the way of the film. Basically, Weir and Miller (Laurence Fishburne), the captain of the salvage ship, try to figure out what happened. Scans indicate that the ship is full of some life form, but not humans. What is it? The film doesn't remember to tell you. The entire crew is gone, but some footage from a security camera, although scrambled, shows a glimpse of the horrible things that happened to them. The ship seems to have the ability to make people have waking nightmares, like the one that haunts Weir. His wife Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) was on the Event Horizon, and he keeps seeing her, although she's all creepy now, with dead eyes and a bad accent. One of the crew approaches the fancy-schmancy drive mechanism that Weir designed, which looks like a huge gyroscope (one of the only frightening things in the film that didn't achieve its fright by jumping out from behind something). It sucks him in, he comes back babbling about seeing horrible things, and lets himself out of the ship through the airlock.

This is an example of great potential spoiled. The director builds genuine suspense and fright at first by portraying the ship as a source of menacing evil that causes hallucinations and insanity for crew members. Especially effective is the psychological torture of Neill's character. Then, the movie turns into another tepid shock-fest, spoiling the building menace of the first half by attempting to show the source of the evil. Horror movies tend to work best when we never see exactly what is stalking the protagonists. Once we see an embodiment of the terror, we focus on that, the physical manifestation, and all of the tension that was building is gone. It's as if we say, "Well, it's just (fill in character/creature)." You get the sense that they didn't really know a good way of showing you the terrible things they had imagined for the film, but they tried anyway.