Ghost
Ship Sets Sail for the Island
of Gore and Cheap Thrills
Ghost
Ship Sets Sail for the Island
Ghost Ship is essentially Alien on a cruise liner. The title ship is the Nostromo. Julianna Margulies is Ellen Ripley. And most of the rest of the cast is fodder for whatever evil entity is hiding onboard. Creatively bankrupt? Perhaps. Good autumn corn? You betcha.
But is it scary? Oh, please. Like I said in my last column, I've felt like I have been walking around the Maryland suburbs for the last three weeks with a sniper's target on my chest. Ain't no flick about ghouls on The Love Boat gonna scare me.
Alright, I can't lie to you. I can still be scared. I'm still a wuss. Anyone who read my review of The Ring knows that that film freaked me out. Abandon was also creepy, but only when Benjamin Bratt and Katie Holmes started Frenching. Oh, and Signs really got to me, too, especially that alien-in-the-pantry sequence. But Ghost Ship? Nope, didn't scare me once. Still, the film has merit. The special effects are good. The cast is game. And, hey, it's still fun to sit down with a bag of popcorn with friends and guess which characters are going to survive and which ones are going to die by the end credits. Nurse Hathaway from ER? Safe. Gabriel Byrne doing his best Robert Shaw impersonation? Hmmm, maybe. The black guy who tells the audience he's getting married in a month? No friggin' way!
Julianna Margulies co-stars with such venerable actors as Gabriel Byrne, Isaiah Washington, and Ron Eldard as the crew of a salvage tugboat hired by a pilot (Desmond Harrington) who has spotted a derelict vessel in the Bering Sea while flying reconnaissance. According to the rules of the open sea, you find such an abandoned ship and its contents are all yours.
What the crew discovers when they venture to the spot is the fabled cruise ship Antonia Graza, thought lost at sea for more than 40 years. Once aboard the creaky, decaying vessel, they find signs of a struggle to the death. They find evidence that others have found the ship in the years since. Then, there are the ghost sightings. A little girl, a beautiful lounge singer, the former captain. What does it all mean? What happened to the ship? Why has it been out on the open sea floating all this time? And why has no one claimed the millions of dollars in gold bars just waiting to be discovered in its storage?
Despite these juicy questions, Ghost Ship is at all times your run-of-the-mill, conventional haunted house/alien onboard rip-off. You know that the salvage crew is going to inexplicably split up at some point and come into contact with the evil within. You know one guy's libido will get the better of him. You know another guy will get drunk or high and think he is hallucinating when he is really not. And you just know Sigourney Margulies is going to be alive a lot longer than she has any right to be.
But yet you watch, hoping for the big moments. And there are some pretty cool big moments. Director Steve Beck and his crew execute the story with a fairly high degree of skill, and the basic concept of what happened to the Antonia Graza is quite clever once you stop to think about it. To paraphrase Billy Idol, though, I just couldn't help wishing for more, more, more. More scares. More humor. More action. More everything really. I could have done without some of the choppy editing, too, especially near the end.
OK, so what's the REAL reason I'm recommending this silly popcorn flick? One word, my friends: GORE! Glorious, beautiful, sick, twisted-minded gore. For fans of on-screen death and dismemberment, Ghost Ship will NOT disappoint. All you really need to see is the first five or 10 minutes of this film to get your money's worth, and I'll leave it at that. The gross-out opening is almost too good actually, because nothing that happens in the rest of the movie (except for one, stunning flashback montage) even comes close to hitting that high-water mark. But it was enough for me. With the snipers caught, I'm an easy man,and this film had me at HELL-o.
Ghost Ship is rated R for gory violence, language, and a really hot topless Italian ghost babe.
[Home]