After building enough haunted houses to establish a community, sailing a fleet of haunted ships, and even revving up a few haunted automobiles, the horror film, probably beginning with "Alien," boldly went where no one had gone before, proceeding to populate spaceships with ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night. The combination of two contemporary popular genres, science fiction and horror, no doubt proves irresistible to Hollywood, like fresh flesh to a zombie or a jug of Type-O Positive to a vampire.

The latest example of that peculiar blend of high tech and low fright, "Pandorum," employs an introduction outlining a future in which overpopulation has drained Earth's resources, forcing an exploration of space for another planet that can sustain life. The discovery of the distant Earth-like planet Tanis inspires the mission, in 2174, of the space ship Elysium, carrying a cargo of 16,000 people to Tanis with the means to save the human race and create a new world. That dream of salvation, alas, conflicts with some mysterious events and horrible creatures aboard the craft.

The picture proper opens with a crewman, Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) awakening from an extended hypersleep, the suspended animation that enables a journey of decades traversing the spaces between the stars. After some disorientation, he manages to rouse another crewman, Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid), and the two of them determine that the sleep period lasted far longer than it should and that nobody else seems to have survived. They discover that the ship's systems seem paralyzed by an apparent failure of the nuclear reactor, which Bowers, an engineer, sets out to repair.

Most of the rest of the movie consists of Bower's perilous journey through the maze of tunnels, catwalks, and corridors of the enormous ship, intercut with shots of Payton, who undergoes his own drama, communicating with him from a control room. In a bizarre odyssey, as he travels through the vessel's passageways toward his distant goal, Bower encounters a series of obstacles - locked doors, open manholes, dead ends - and the horrors of some dead bodies, but much worse, catches flashes of movement just out of sight, and hears a cacophony of disquieting sounds. Finally, out of the darkness, an attacker appears, the first of many he must confront throughout the rest of the movie.

After linking up with a couple of other survivors, Bowers finds the source of the horror, a horde of hideous creatures, apparently mutations from the initial human cargo, who attack him and his companions. Humanoid, agile as monkeys, with bald, seamed heads, slimy bodies studded with spikes, ravenously cannibalistic, the creatures seem invulnerable; it requires both heroism and sacrifice on the part of all the survivors to defeat them.

The movie's title refers to a disease that strikes some space travelers on long voyages, a madness that drives them to megalomania and murder; oddly, that condition only tangentially affects Bower's dangerous mission. He and his companions, in fact, display a superhuman capacity for suffering, as they endure a score of extremely brutal and bloody beatings inflicted by several different foes, who bite and claw them, strike them with a variety of crude weapons, bounce them repeatedly off metal walls and grates, drop them through open holes, and mistreat them so often and so viciously that the whole affair degenerates into an awful sort of comedy.

In the tradition of contemporary science fiction, the movie's sets dominate almost all of the action, so that the consistently dark lighting, the many mechanisms, the relentlessly featureless metallic devices and props overwhelm the characters and much of the action. The actors, including a quite hysterical Dennis Quaid, carry out their tasks in a decreasingly convincing manner, reduced to a kind of mechanical repetition of a single emotion - fear - -and a single act - violent, bloody combat - without a glimmer of variety or subtlety. The ending of "Pandorum," though certainly intended as an expression of hope in a future for mankind, actually comes as a kind of relief for the audience, who must rejoice that the long, painful journey through the labyrinth of the ship and of their own sensations reaches its appropriate conclusion.