Review of Ghost Ship (2002) by Luke S — 03 Nov 2011

This tale centers around a boat captain named Sean Murphy, he runs a crew of marine salvagers and they get along like family. When celebrating in their local pub after their latest haul, a guy named Jack approaches them with a proposition.

He's a pilot and a number of times while flying over the Bearing Strait he saw what appeared to be an abandoned ship just drifting aimlessly in the middle of the ocean, and a big one at that. After some finagling Captain Murphy and his crew work out a deal with this Jack character and hit the waves immediately.

It doesn't take them long to find the ship they're looking for, but when they do Captain Murphy is perplexed, for the ship is the fabled Antonia Graza, an Italian luxury liner that disappeared mysteriously way back in 1962 with no survivors to tell any tales.

As exploration of the ship begins strange things start to happen, most notably the fact that Epps, the lone female on the salvage crew, keeps seeing a little girl aboard the ship, which couldn't possibly be.

The strangeness gets put on the back burner though when the crew hits paydirt, finding hundreds of millions worth of gold bars in the ship's hold! The rejoicing is short lived though as soon after their discovery the crew members start dying suspicious deaths.

Eventually Epps tracks down the little girl and finds out she's a ghost, that the souls of all the passengers that originally sailed on the Antonia Graza are being held on the ship by some evil force.

Well, it turns out that Jack is that evil force! For sins in his previous life Jack is being punished, he now works for the ultimate bad guy . . . and is a harvester of souls. With all the salvage crew dead except for Epps though, will the souls on board the Antonia Graza be saved, or will they continue to be stranded and seeking release? Man I love this movie, I could watch it every week.

It's such a cool story and to tell it amidst the setting of an abandoned cruise liner just makes it even spookier! This move is pretty suspenseful and also a little funny at times, plus you get to see a few boobies to boot! The cast was really cool too, not really big names at all, just actors that fit their roles perfectly.

They left it open for a sequel at the end, but to my disappointment I haven't seen anything yet. Booooooo.