As a candidate for scary-movie honors, this one hasn't a ghost of a chance.
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The best thing about the DVD of "Ghost Ship" is the cover art on the packaging. The snapper case features a three-dimensional holographic picture of the ocean liner in the movie heading straight towards us. Not only is it in 3-D, but if you shift your head slightly or move the box, a skull appears on the ship's prow. It's a pretty clever effect, really.
And, then, there's the film.
Following hard on the heels of his previous horror entry, "Thir13en Ghosts," director Steve Beck's 2002 "Ghost Ship" is more of the same, a shopworn haunted house story. True to its predecessor and to Beck's beginnings as a visual effects artist in the film industry, "Ghost Ship" is long on set design, atmosphere, and special effects but short on mystery, suspense, characterization, common sense, logic, or simple frights. In other words, despite a boatload of money that went into its production, "Ghost Ship" ain't scary.
The movie borrows heavily not only from "Thir13en Ghosts" and every other haunted house flick in the history of the world but from Ridley Scott's "Alien" and Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" in particular," following the standard formula for modern horror stories, complete with severed bodies, evil spirits, nasty demons, a touch of nudity, and the obligatory creepy little girl in a white dress (Emily Browning). "The Ring" got away with this latter device pretty well; "Ghost Ship" doesn't.
You know right away with one of these films that when it offers up a whole crew of characters, none of whom appears much more important than the rest, that we are in for a long night of guessing which character is going to die first, in which order the rest are going to give it up, and, of course, who will live the longest to thwart the fiend. If you've seen "Halloween," the granddaddy of these things, you'll know from the outset the answer to all three questions. Kind of kills the suspense, though.
The crew in question is a team of deep-sea salvage experts who are approached by a mysterious stranger to help him bring in a long-lost luxury liner, the Antonia Graza, a grand Italian ship missing since 1962. OK, it's an interesting premise, although we know from the beginning that the ship's going to be haunted. How do we know? Because of the film's introduction, which is elegant enough, a formal dance aboard the deck of the liner. Yet within moments the ridiculous occurs, and a maniac literally slices everyone at the party in half. Don't even ask; it's too silly and too bloody to explain. Indeed, it's so grotesquely ludicrous, it's actually funny. Remember the scene in "Thir13en Ghosts" where a sheet of glass falls and severs a person in half? Well, the same director and special effects department must have thought that was such a great shot, they did it again multiplied by a hundred; only this time the bodies are split horizontally rather than lengthwise. It amounts to the same effect, with gratuitous gore galore as torsos fall slowly off legs and trunks. I'm sorry; I said I wouldn't explain it.
Next, we flash forward to the present and to the salvage crew, headed by a fellow named Murphy, played by Gabriel Byrne, one of my favorite actors and one who's getting pretty handy at these supernatural pictures. But is he ever in a good one? Anyway, the rest of the cast consists of the usual stereotypes in the usual politically correct racial and gender mix: Grier (Isaiah Washington), Epps (Juliana Margulies), Dodge (Ron Eldard), Santos (Alex Dimitriades), Ferriman (Desmond Harrington), and Munder (Karl Urban).
No sooner do Murphy and the gang enter the old derelict than they find it's--you guessed it--haunted. Once aboard, however, nothing much happens you wouldn't expect from a horror movie. Since it's all typical haunted house stuff, the crew follow standard fright-flick procedures by all going their own separate ways. This must be written down in a Hollywood handbook of rules and regulations for haunted places. I mean, how else to better meet the monsters and be killed individually than by going it alone? Complications occur when the crew find the recently dead bodies of strangers in the laundry room and gold bars in the cargo hold, and then we're again shown in flashback the grisly details of the original passengers' deaths, as though once wasn't enough, and so on and so forth, with nothing really helping this waterlogged plot.
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[release]10765[/release]