Review of Ghost Ship (2002) by Adam F — 21 Jul 2013

"Ghost Ship" has all the ingredients to make a great haunted house film except for the most important one: the scares. The premise is pretty ingenious and gets you excited to see the rest of the film. The story begins in 1962 on a fancy ocean liner called the Antonia Graza, where an unseen character triggers a deadly chain of events and murders a significant portion of the passengers. Only a small girl, Katie is spared. 40 years later, we see our main characters, a boat salvage crew that just finished a big, difficult job and are headed home. They are approached by a stranger named Jack Ferriman who tells them that he's found the Antonia Graza and wants their help bringing it in to port. Because the ship is out drifting in international waters, it means a significant amount of money for all involved. When they arrive on the ship, they discover a huge deposit of gold bars but no sign of the crew or passengers. Strange events begin plaguing the crew, including terrifying visions of the surviving little girl, hallucinations and deadly encounters. Stranded in the middle of the ocean, the crew will have to figure out what happened on the cruise ship those 40 years ago if they hope to make it back to with the treasure but they should really care about making it back home at all.

The setup is actually pretty clever. The cast of the horror movie is limited to 6 people plus Jack so you have time to get to know the characters and care if they bumped off or not. With the flashback sequences there are plenty of gory moments when we find out what happened to the original passengers of the Antonia, which balances out the limited amount of bodies so you get the best of both worlds. You also get not one but two realistic reasons why the people involved don't just leave the haunted location (a problem that plagues nearly every single ghost story): not only are these people stranded in the middle of the ocean so there's no opportunity to call for help or just leave the place but they also have this enormous treasure up for grabs on the ship. You can actually believe that these people would ignore some of the lesser bizarre occurrences just to get their share of the money. To go along with the premise, the film uses excellent special effects, sticking mostly to practical and only using CGI when necessary. There's a lot of makeup, prosthetics and fake body parts used throughout and those all look good.

There are two crippling problems with the film. The first and most serious is the lack of scares. The setup with the gold leads you to believe that the crew is going to start backstabbing each other and plotting to keep the entire treasure for themselves but that really isn't the case. There's no suspense regarding who you can trust, just ghosts vs. crew and the ghost don't really do much at all. There's a couple of scenes with creepy imagery but none of them match the ones at the very beginning of the film when there's a spectacular event that wipes out a significant amount of people. Some of the creepy hallucinations that you do see end up adding nothing to the movie either. A scene where the ghost of the beautiful Francesca appears has her turning into what looks like a rotting corpse at one point but not only does her makeup and design not match her death (Which we see later in the film through flashback) but when you see this shapeshift it's too late to creep out the audience. She's already done something way more disturbing than change her looks by sending a crewmember off to their death so this last won't really affect you at all. The "detective" aspect of the film is also pretty poorly handled. We simply get a scene where everything is shown at once instead of getting a buildup through clues and deductions.

The second element that really doesn't work is the explanation for why the boat is haunted. I don't mean the fact that there are ghosts on the vessel or how the people on the ship died; I mean the reasons why they are lingering on Earth (well, at sea). The revelation we're given at the end is completely unnecessary and isn't the least bit credible, disturbing or frightening. People died on a ship, the ship was lost at sea. That's all you need to tell us. I won't say what the reason is exactly but it has to do with characters from the past and a ridiculous sort-of demonic pact that has to do with souls. It robs the movie of any potential scares because it just turns the whole thing into an action picture at the end.

I have to mention how great the movie looks once again. Seeing the dilapidated ship, it's really creepy and totally convincing. Seeing the gore, it's satisfying and disturbing. There's even some nice obligatory horror film nudity thrown in to please the male teens or anyone else that will enjoy seeing the beautiful actress take off her clothes. Thanks to the lame script however, the whole movie will just leave you indifferent and in the end you're just looking at a wasted opportunity and talented people coming together under a doomed project. The people I saw it with were easily able to predict what was going to happen and even though the revelations about the past were intriguing, they don't make up enough of the film to raise the material high enough to warrant a recommendation. Despite the good elements present "Ghost Ship" is a huge disappointment. (Dvd, July 12, 2013).