On a rescue mission to recover a spaceship in orbit around Neptune, a crew of astronauts discover the dangers of venturing beyond Uranus.

A box office disaster and subsequent cult classic, this 1997 sci-fi/horror flick shouldn’t work under our physical laws. For starters it’s directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, a black hole for the kind of characterisation, storytelling and visual quality needed to separate sci-fi spectacle from space detritus.

Philip Eisner’s script is also a white-hot mess of horror schlock (“Hell is only a word, the reality is much, much worse!”) and sci-fi technobabble (“It’s possible that a burst of gravity waves escaped from the Core, distorting space-time.”). And the characters appear to have little to no understanding of physics, in efforts to make them Alien-style blue-collar types, but forgetting that they are literally astronauts.

Meanwhile Paramount rushed the film’s release in order to fill the void after Titanic fell behind schedule, meaning Anderson had just four weeks for post-production, making a Laika’s dinner of the CGI sequences. But that doesn’t explain why the inside of the ship is covered in horror movie spikes that serve no obvious function other than to make it easy for people to get horribly impaled on their way to work.

And yet Event Horizon does work, making up for its astronomical shortcomings with boundless enthusiasm and B-movie charm. Inspired by the The Shining and Hellraiser‘s descents into hell, alongside the space madness of Alien and Solaris, the film’s Lovecraftian chaos provides a genuine sense that anything could happen, and the results are deliriously entertaining for 96 minutes of spaced-out warp-gore (fortunately cut down from the original 130 minutes).

Bad ’90s CGI aside, the in-camera effects hold up strongly, with moving sets, zero-gravity sequences and startling make-up immersing you in the environment. And while the performances are about as thoughtful as you might expect from actors who have to keep shouting things like “Scanning for lifeforms!”, Sam Neill is great fun as the designer of the Event Horizon, relishing the role that combines various villainous sci-fi archetypes (corporate manipulator, suspicious science figure, psychotically obsessed ship’s captain) into one mad bastard.

All of this makes Event Horizon a surprisingly enjoyable slice of techno-gothica, providing a wormhole into an alternate reality where Anderson is an effective filmmaker, and Katy Perry is an astronaut.