Genre Index

Home

Synopsis: The crew of the salvage boat, Arctic Warrior, are hired to investigate the appearance of an ocean liner in the Bering Sea. The liner, the Antonia Grazza, vanished into thin air forty years before. The crew of the Arctic Warrior see dollar signs in this floating reliquary, especially after they discover a fortune in gold in the ship's hold. But things are not so simple. Crewman Epps glimpses a little girl wandering the empty corridors of the ship. The girl seems intent on telling her something about the ship. Other members of the crew are beginning to see other apparitions: Captain Murphy finds an open bottle of whiskey in the Captain's cabin and is tempted to drink it; crewman Greer becomes obsessed with a long dead singer who seems to beckon to him, and there are signs all over the ship that a massacre has taken place. Worse still: the Antonia Grazza is sinking. When an accident sinks their own ship, the crew of the Arctic Warrior must find a way to fix the ship and steer it past the rocky islands that are bearing down on it. But the ship has another secret, a secret beyond a mere haunting...

Deja Vu All Over Again: So much of Ghost Ship feels second hand that I had to do a some research to make sure that it wasn't a remake of some sort. I had my suspicions, given that this was produced by Dark Castle Entertainment, heretofore devoted to remaking William Castle movies (director Steve Beck also helmed the remake of Thirteen Ghosts). There are snatches of The Shining, of Alien, of Event Horizon, of The Death Ship, and of both of the previous Castle remakes aplenty here. The film's ghost girl also offers an uncomfortable similarity to The Ring, which, at this writing, is kicking the living crap out of this film at the box office. Now, there has always been a "pattern of influence," for want of a better phrase, in horror movies that are made considerably after a given cycle of films has run its course, but this is ridiculous. And yet, in spite of all of this, there is a certain low cunning in the way this film is put together that sometimes glosses over the echoes from other films, and there are two actual surprises nested inside the wholesale piracy going on in the rest of the film.

Surprise Number One: This comes in the first part of the film: The passengers of the Antonia Grazza meet their fate in a scene of such baroque nastiness that it shatters the rest of the film. Audiences for this movie are likely to forget the rest of the film entirely except for this one scene. In its intent, it echoes the beheading of the photographer in The Omen, but in its execution (if I may use that word), it upstages its role model and upstages virtually every other scene in movies based on that role model. It's been a long time since a scene in a horror movie actually made me wince, but Ghost Ship accomplishes this with surprising ease.

Surprise Number Two: The film uses its ghost story premise as misdirection. The film is actually about something else. Now, whether that something else is worthwhile is open to debate, but I'll give the film credit for deft sleight of hand. I only wish that the film hadn't taken the audience by the hand to reveal that something else through a blatant deus ex machina. The ghost girl LITERALLY takes the Julianna Margullies character by the hand and leads her through a flashback that explaines everything to both her and the audience. The flashback sequence that explains everthing reuses the sequence from surprise number one, and adds a nasty follow-up sequence to it for good measure. Since the director came to the director's chair from the special effects department, one presumes that he is not one to let a good gag sit idle.

Performances: The main downside of the film is the necessity of having characters to inhabit the special effects and art design. This was a flaw in Beck's previous film, Thirteen Ghosts, too. The characters in this film, with one exception, are all cliches and stereotypes. Margullies, with her Pre-Raphaelite hair and enormous eyes seems too fragile to be playing a faux-Ripley character, although she is certainly preferrable to the pin-ups of the month that have occasionally played this role in other films. Gabriel Byrne tries gamely with his alcoholic captain, but his part is too underwritten for him to do anything spectactular. Isaiah Washington gives his role more than it deserves, too. The rest of the crew of the Arctic Warrior is entirely disposable. The only genuinely affecting performance in the film is Emily Browning as the lonely ghost girl. But even this is in the service of a ham-handed plot. Mores the pity.

But even so, I have more affection for this film than I expected going into it. Some of the small touches are more than competent. I LOVED the credit sequence, which is designed like some frothy fifties comedy, complete with tiny bubbles and pink script, and I liked the ending, which doesn't settle for a good conquers evil happy ending. But mostly, I like the idea of the film in the abstract more than I like the execution. There are no teenagers in this movie. Nor, for that matter, is the film played for laughs in any particular scene. It pleases me no end that people are making horror movies again that eschew these two elements entirely. While Ghost Ship may not be particularly good--and it's not--I did leave the theater smiling. You can take that as whatever kind of recommendation you like...