Everything about it is a metaphor-the vast emptiness that signifies lonely chasms in our consciousness, the jarring discord of the unfamiliar, the endless darkness that makes you wonder if life has any significance or if we're all racing up little Sisyphean hills toward total oblivion (though at least we're not as fucked as Sigourney Weaver trapped in that alien hatching ground). Yup, everything is scary in space-the food, the clothes, the lighting, it's all strange and harsh and threatening and OH SHIT WHAT'S THAT ACID-DROOLING THING THAT WANTS TO EAT ME?? Oh thank God, it's just CGI. But it could happen, right? It's space! Anything goes!

As such, horror and space have made great bedfellows-there's Alien and its sequel (the third and fourth were unadulterated crap, as will be the prequel), plus The Thing (not really IN space so much as FROM it, though Antarctica may as well be another planet), and Event Horizon (that shit was SCARY-watching it turned my college boyfriend's Westchester McMansion into a teeth-grinding insomnia den).

Of course, it's not easy to come up with sci-fi horror that's good, since doing so requires stuff like actual talent and creativity. Which means there's a whole genre of crappy space movies that follow a single system: chop all the good elements out of better films and mush them together, until they form one ultra-derivative feature-length shitfest that sucks away your will to live. It's sort of like the chick lit fantasy where you splice everything you liked about all your past boyfriends into one perfect man-and then he hacks off your limbs and staple-guns your forehead.

So yeah, Pandorum = prime example of this "chop and hack" school of filmmaking. Lessee, we've got shit yanked from Star Trek and Serenity and Alien and Scanners and even some Mad Max thrown in for extra flavor. It's all ripped off-costumes, dialogue, sets-even the bloodthirsty creatures are plucked straight from The Descent's prop desk. Which is a shame, since Ben Foster (the star) is objectively cool-he was cooler than Russell Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma, and he was cooler than Josh Hartnett in 30 Days of Night (not that this is hard-my fridge holds mold spores that are cooler than Josh Hartnett).

But not even the Bodhisattva of cool could withstand the crappiness of a chopjob this derivative, and so Cool Ben Foster is stuck doing a lot of pointless crap for two hours. Like being naked and covered in goo. And running away from things. What things, we're never quite sure-at one point he's apparently fleeing a skinny chick with an accent. (Note to the boardroom full of guys in charge of greenlighting these things-it's almost never believable when a large man runs away from a 120-pound actress. Though granted, my linebacker-sized ex spotted me in the park the other day and took off like a fucking bandit. So it does happen.) Then he has a couple fight scenes taken straight from a Steve Austin/Randy Savage rematch, but by then you've ceased to care, since you're gasping for breath as your will to live is sucked through your nostrils by demon corporate moviemaking.

Finally they hit you with this whole Pandorum thing, which is a retarded word to begin with-it sounds like what happens when you stub your toe so bad the nail falls off, or when your boyfriend texts your best friend at 2 a.m. asking if her boobs are real ("He did WHAT?! Oh I am gonna go Pandorum on his ass"). According to Dennis Quaid (always a reliable arbiter of psychiatric evaluations) it's what happens to your mind when you get stuck in space with no hope of return. Or when you watch too many shitty space-horror movies.

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.

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