The Blood Ferry: Ghost Ship (2002)

Ghost Ship (2002)
Rating: ***
Starring: Julianna Margulies, Gabriel Byrne, Ron Eldard

It's better than you expect but not as good as you hope. This is how film critic Roger Ebert described this film and, yeah. He's right. It's an early-2000s horror movie about a haunted ship with murderous apparitions killing off anybody who steps into it and if you're not expecting anything more than that, then the movie is serviceable despite the clichés.

Starting the scene with, honestly, one of the best opening sequences in a horror flick, it's 1962 and about dozens of wealthy passengers aboard the Italian ocean liner, Antonia Graza, are having a great time dancing in the ballroom and at the decks. A young girl named Katie, however, isn't finding any of this dazzling so when the Ship’s captain notices her boredom, he kindly offers his hand to dance with her. All the while, another pair of hands pulls a lever to unravel a thin line of steel cable from a spool. A snap is then heard and almost everyone on the dance floor looks out in shock as a projected cable slices across, dissecting them in a mere flash. Only Katie is spared due to her height, as the Captain didn't fare any better than the rest, with his head decapitated by the mouth as Katie screams in horror.

Flashforward forty years later, we now follow the self-proclaimed best damn salvage team in the business, made up of team leader Epps (Julianna Margulies), first mate Greer (Isaiah Washington), engineer Santos (Alex Dimitriades), tugboat captain Murphy (Gabriel Byrne) and a pair of best buds Dodge and Munder. (Ron Eldard and Karl Urban) The gang was celebrating a successful haul when weather service pilot Jack Ferriman (Desmond Harrington) approaches them at a bar for an opportunity to salvage a spotted vessel adrift in the Bering Sea. Being in international waters meant that the ship can be claimed by whoever is able to bring it to port and, by luck, said ship happens to be the Antonia Graza, which mysteriously disappeared in 1962 and was believed to be lost at sea, crew and the passengers never heard from again.

By the time they make it to the rotting ocean liner, the crew ponders the possibilities of salvaging such a rare find for cold hard cash, as well as discover that the ship has hidden stashes of gold and various valuables cargo. They will, unfortunately, discover that within the abandoned rooms and hallways hide haunting memories and deadly secrets which would soon start preying on the salvage team one by one.

From what I read, screenwriter Mark Hanlon's original draft of Ghost Ship (2002) was more like Stephen King's The Shining set on a boat rather than a straight-up supernatural horror film, centering itself on the uneasy dynamics between four members of a salvage crew after they get stranded in the titular ghost ship. Much like Jack Torrance in the Overlook Hotel, one of the crew mates goes cuckoo for murder after spending one night of spooks, paranoia and panic, though changes were made through rewrites and the final product ultimately ended up resembling a slasher with gnarly kills and a paranormal villain, much to the disappointment of the casts who favored the dropped psychological aspect. 

As a supernatural bodycounter, Ghost Ship (2002) is favorably entertaining so long as you don't demand a lot from it; the casts plays the average B-grade slasher fodders and the pacing does take a while before getting to the body pickings, spending a fair bulk of the early act looking into the characters' encounters with various oddities and scares as they try to make do with their current situation. The further the film goes, the more the salvage mission goes from bad to worse by the minute, thus leading way to more haunting imageries, a couple of fun scares and the ghoulish forces becoming more bloodthirsty as not only do we get a climactic reveal as to what happened to the passengers and crew of the Antonia Graza, but the ship practically becomes alive and starts snuffing out the crew with whatever moving parts it has. A cheeky bad guy motive then gets added into the bloody affair, and too a hammy finale involving heavenly lights and a last might surprise that I'm sure no one was, um, surprised to see, just little slices of outrageousness that keep the generic plotting of Ghost Ship (2002) an amusing watch. 

The premise of a boat-set horror flick will always be a refreshingly intriguing set-piece as the idea of surviving whatever horrors lingering within a vessel afloat a vast body of water often invokes a sense of isolation and helplessness, factors that would greatly benefit any scares and thrills to come. Ghost Ship (2002) projects the same sentiments here, albeit on a tone and direction communicating a more fun angle with the conventional thrills of bloody killings and hokey supernatural action. It isn't offering anything new to the table, but for what it is worth, the film definitely works as a popcorn B-flick and I can respect that! 

Bodycount:
80 victims cut in half by a projected steel cable

1 male decapitated by the mouth by a projected steel cable

7 males found dead inside a submerged room

1 male immolated in an explosion

1 male falls down an elevator shaft, impaled on steel rods

1 girl killed offscreen, body seen hanged (flashback)

1 female impaled in the jaw with a crane hook (flashback)

1017 crew and passengers massacred via poisoning, stabbing and gunfire (flashback)

1 male found drowned inside an aquarium

1 male gets caught on gears, crushed into pieces

1 male killed offscreen
Total: 1112