Sometimes all you need is just that one moment to guarantee that your horror film lives forever in various Instagram posts and online musings. In fact, your movie doesn’t even have to be that good – if that one, ace scene manages to click with audiences, you’ll be rendered immortal in endless online rankings usually entitled “Great Scenes In Forgettable Movies” or something similar.
Usually appearing around the top of said lists is the thoroughly forgettable third entry from Dark Castle Entertainment (who at this early juncture had already ceased remaking movies made by William Castle) Ghost Ship. While essentially just The House On Haunted Hill set on a cruise liner (The House On Haunted Hull?), the film nevertheless opened with such an attention grabbing first scene, it’s virtually impossible to completely write the film off despite the remaining 90 minutes being derivative, if glossy, ghost shenanigans set on the high seas. But has time cause Ghost Ship to ride the crest of a nostalgic wave, or is this soggy shocker still taking on water?
Back in 1962, the passengers of the Italian luxury ocean liner MS Antonia Graza enjoy a night on the dance floor just off the Labrador Coast, but after a freak occurrence involving a mystery set of hands fiddling with a tightening metal wire, everyone suddenly decides to split – permanently. However, mass bisection aside, the legend goes that the Antonia Graza was never seen again after further atrocities occured within its hull.
A quick jump ahead to the present day introduces us to the scrappy salvage crew of the Arctic Warrior whose family like dynamic is overseen by ex-alcoholic captain, Sean Murphy. The plucky group are doing enough to scrape by, but after he and Epps, Greer, Dodge, Munder and Santos are approached by noticably awkward weather service pilot Jack Ferriman, he gives them an offer they simply can’t turn down. It seems that on a flight over the Bering Strait, he spotted the legendary Antonia Graza adrift and jotted down the coordinates in order to locate it with a salvage crew to make a substantial amount of money.
Once the Artic Warror makes it to the ship that’s been rusting in the middle of the ocean for 40 years, the crew start to explore and soon discover a classic good news/bad news situation. While Epps discovers an actual shit ton of gold in the lower decks, she also finds a pile of dead bodies who look a hell of a lot fresher that 40 years old and it turns out that the liner has actually been discover numerous times – its just that no one’s ever seemed to get off the boat alive.
Pretty soon, the salvage crew start seeing and hearing weird things. Epps spots a pale little girl eyeballing her at inopportune moments, Greer hears a strange singing voice echoing through the halls and Murphy looks to be going a little bit Jack Torrance-y after he’s lured back to the booze – but is the ship alive; is it haunted; or is something else planning to use the salvage crew as salvage themselves?
If you havent already guessed, Ghost Ship is simply a Haunted house movie on the ocean much in the same way that Event Horizon is sort of The Shining in space, however, other than that barn storming opener, the film somehow doesn’t actually offer up a single original idea during the entirety of its runtime. This would be bad enough, but when you realise that this was the third Dark Castle production in a row that literally had people wandering around aimlessly in ghost infested locations, you can’t help but realise that maybe the well of ideas had already run dry. While William Malone’s House On Haunted Hill and Thirteen Ghosts (also directed by Steve Beck) saw a surprisingly starry cast wander around endless corridors as supernatural entities stalked their every move, at least the first movie was novel and the second involved a visually striking abode made of glass. Here, such actors as Julianna Margulies, Gabriel Byrne, Isaiah Washington and Karl Urban literally just wander around a rusted ship while typically 2000s era camera tricks and editing try to convince us that something scary is going on – but you’re hardly going to crap yourself on the poop deck, if you know what I mean.
If you’ve seen other such maritime horror’s such as Deep Rising and Virus, it’s unavoidable to feel that Ghost Ship is going through the standard motions – the crew bicker, their escape boat gets fucked up and they’re forced to remain on a craft with a malevolent force that blatently wants to kill them – but while the first half is pretty derivative, the second soon starts to fall apart under the weight of sloppy plotting and some rather outlandish twists that makes things the wrong kind of silly.
Still, there’s still some good stuff here to be salvaged, tmeith the chief of those unsurprisingly being that magnificent opener that somehow manages to out-Final Destination Final Destination.
It’s almost like Beck set himself the challenge to top his other striking Dark Castle death from Thirteen Ghosts that saw a guy get split in half by a glass door and spectacularly over compensated. A nod also has to go to the set design which manages to keep something as potentially dull as a rusted hulk actually look quite epic and there’s the occasion striking visual effect in there too, like a ruined room putting itself back together in order to set the scene for an amorous ghost to seduce a strangely horny victim.
Sadly, it doesn’t last and with a “shock” reveal that seems utterly stolen from Event Horizon, Ghost Ship promptly runs aground, tips on its side and lays belly up until the end credits roll. In the years following, the production house continued to spit out a few more glossy horrors such as Gothika and the remake of House Of Wax before diversing out of the genre. But of all the Dark Castle entries from 1999 to 2005, Ghost Ship remains the most forgettable by far thanks to lacking a showy hook such as featuring a glass house, casting Halle Berry, or “killing” Paris Hilton to disguise it’s weak spots and it shows.
Rumour has it that the movie was originally supposed to be a dark thriller that saw the ship slowly drive members of the crew mad not unlike The Shining, but the events of 9/11 made the filmmakers change to a more simplistic “boo” movie to avoid being such a downer. Whether this decision cost us a film with way more bite will be forever unknown, but anything has to be better than shot that sees all the spirits emerging from a sinking ship at the end that looks more at home at the end of a live action Disney movie than the end of a sea faring scaring machine.
Arguably the worst of Dark Castle’s 2000s horror output (unless you count the direct to DVD Return To House On Haunted Hill), Ghost Ship fills the brief on the studio’s wish list. But an impressive cast and a banger of an opening scene simply can’t help if the rest of your movie refuses to make waves.
“Sea Evil” as the rather awkward tagine for this movie – “Dead Wet” would have been more apt.
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