Ghost Ship
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, R, 91 m, 2002
Directed by Steve Beck. Stars Julianna Marguilies, Gabriel Byrne, Ron Eldard, et al.

Steve Beck’s Ghost Ship hits the high seas with what may be the most disquieting sequence I’ve encountered in a film since Dr. Lecter served an unwitting dinner guest bits of his own gray matter in Hannibal. Don’t ask me why, but the movies these days seem more adept at nauseating audiences than they do at inspiring them. Whether it’s a demon-possessed schoolgirl mutilating her genitalia with a crucifix in The Exorcist or an acid-blooded extraterrestrial ripping through a space explorer’s bosom in Alien, it’s a prerequisite in modern fright flicks to offer up at least one vomit-inducing scene. Ghost Ship carries the unseemly distinction of being the first entry in this genre to depict a mass evisceration by a runaway cable. It's a brazenly twisted set piece that tops the, er, sidesplitting death of the grasping lawyer in Beck’s Thir13en Ghosts. Of course Tinsel Town loves this type of show-stopping carnage because inducing moviegoers into disgorging their Milk Duds somehow translates into untold millions at the box-office. Indeed, contemporary moviegoers have come to demand a copious measure of blood and guts from the horror genre, but I must be of a softer constitution because I can’t seem to shake off such gruesome imagery as easily as they can. The first round of butchery in Ghost Ship has a surreal impact because the preceding titles are designed like the overture to a frothy ‘50s musical, complete with rosy, curlicue text. The Antonia Graza, an Italian luxury liner full of aristocratic merrymakers, is sweeping through the moonlit waves of the Atlantic Ocean circa 1962. Many of the guests sip champagne on the boat’s upper deck, while others waltz to the strains of a sultry diva in the adjacent ballroom. But the highfalutin doings is brutally upended when the ship’s anchor is somehow released below, its rigging line franticly spooling in until it swings across the dance floor and then clangs to a halt, sodden with gore. An eerie silence follows as the crowd stands motionless trying to figure out what the hell just happened. Then they notice vital fluid blooming from the midsection of their formal wear, but just as the reality of their imminent Waterloo sinks in, they literally fall to pieces. Soon, the whole gathering is lying in a tarn of blood, twitching and moaning, reaching for their severed limbs. Because of her wee stature, Katie (Emily Browning), a pony-tailed lass who was shuffling with the kindly Chief Steward (Boris Brkic) only seconds before, has fortuitously eluded the garroting. But her dance partner, who was hunching over to protect her, has seen the wire slash through both corners of his mouth, and the upper part of his head languidly falls off like a grapefruit half slipping from a plate. The abundance of spurting entrails in this unholy display makes for the blackest of gags, but I find the notion of viewers responding with laughter a bit unsettling. 

As Ghost Ship navigates into the present day, our expectations are high as to what Beck will conjure up in the way of an encore to the film’s ghastly opener. And though he may fall short, the action that follows certainly keeps us engrossed. We meet Jack Ferriman (Desmond Harrington), a weather spotter for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Looking to claim a handsome finder’s fee, Jack clues the crew of the Arctic Warrior in on the whereabouts of the Graza, which we learn went missing without even transmitting a distress signal the night of the aforementioned catastrophe. The salvage tug’s skipper, Murphy (Gabriel Byrne), has heard all the legends of the doomed vessel over the years, and since it’s now adrift in international waters, the law reads that he’s free to haul it back to shore and sell it for millions of dollars. The exterior of the lost ship is realized digitally, and you know the effect is lacking when Murphy has to remind us no less than three times what a “beauty” she is. No matter, the Graza’s decaying interior is ingeniously conceived, its once sumptuous decor now withering from the brackish fog that perpetually lingers around it. Whispers of a bygone shindig that ended abruptly and without reason still reverberate throughout the boat’s rotting facilities, and curiosities such as bullet holes in the perimeter of an emptied swimming pool suggest that something truly sinister went down here years before. We know what fate befell the poor souls on the dance floor, but what became of the ship’s other passengers—including the little girl—is a puzzle that we dread learning the resolution to. 

Murphy’s wacky, ethnically diverse band of floating grave robbers consists of the beautiful co-owner Epps (Julianna Margulies), the mechanic Santos (Alex Dimitriades) and assorted hands Munder (Karl Urban), Dodge (Ron Eldard) and Greer (Isaiah Washington). They all come to experience one paranormal happening or another as they creep about the ship’s decrepit corridors, such as Epps repeatedly making contact with Katie’s spirit, Greer being seduced by the dead diva, etc. Even more disconcerting is when Epps and a shipmate discover some freshly rotting corpses in the bowels of the Graza, suggesting that another salvage crew may have already visited the ship. But Murphy and company’s disquietude quickly subsides when Ferriman discovers an enormous cache of gold bars, its value estimated in the billions. Naturally, the crew decides to forgo the recovery of the Graza and just take off with the precious metal. But things go terribly awry when everyone but Epps starts getting picked off by the boat’s disagreeable spooks. The assorted liquidations aren’t cleverly worked out; I think that a few rewrites might have elevated Ghost Ship into the canon of supernatural classics. Things get pretty hair-raising, though, when the specter of Katie takes Epps on a tour through the past, showing her what happened to the rest of the boat’s inhabitants on that ruinous evening in ‘62. The horrifying montage plays out like a demented variation on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; the bloody double-crossings pile up as an endless roster of shady characters make a play for the gold—all to the techno beat of Edwin and the Pressure’s “Superhoney.” How Katie can maneuver through time (with a mortal, no less) is unclear, but Epps gets to witness the Graza’s moneyed guest-list being murdered in an endless variety of harrowing fashions. It turns out that the Graza did have one survivor: a key character that figures prominently in the latter day proceedings, but, of course, will remain unidentified in this critique. (Alas, the revelation doesn’t pack much of a jolt.) 

If you want for a splatter pic with some measure of thematic support, then I guess you could pretend that Ghost Ship is a meditation on the evil of avarice. Be forewarned, though, that the movie’s flippant coda trivializes this message. Mind, it’s not an entirely limp gag, but permitting the film’s metaphysical miscreant to push forward in the name of claiming more souls makes the precursory bloodshed appear in bad taste. More explicit carnage isn’t the only thing that separates modern horror pictures from their Hays-inspected precursors—the movies’ killers are now free to slice and dice even more folks in countless sequels. (Think Freddy, Jason, et al.) Though the very title of Ghost Ship denotes an antiquated B-grade spook show, it isn’t retro in the sense that it copies the A-to-Z plotting of those insipid ‘50s matinees. No, this floating haunted house borrows shamelessly from more current sources, i.e. Alien, The Shining, Deep Rising, Event Horizon—you name it. But Beck’s penchant for riotously off-center gore keeps undermining our tepid expectations. The film isn’t half as visionary as Thir13en Ghosts, but it manages to be a boatload more disturbing.   

March 28, 2003

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. Al rights reserved.