261 Days of Horror, Day 30: Ghost Ship
Feb. 9th, 2007 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiGhost Ship. Directed by Steve Beck. Written by John Pogue and Marc Hanlon. Produced by Dark Castle, Distributed by Warner Brothers.
No, I'm not covering another Val Lewton movie today (although I'll certainly revisit some of his works later this year). This is the Dark Castle "remake." Unlike the first two DC remakes (Thir13en Ghosts and The House on Haunted Hill), Ghost Ship doesn't attempt to adhere to even an outline of the plot of the original film. The result isn't necessarily a good movie, but it's a nice and gory guilty pleasure with some superb moments.
We start with what may be the most memorable opening scene since the original Halloween. Sometime in the '60s, on board a cruise ship, everyone is having a wonderful time in the ballroom. People are dancing, a chanteuse is crooning, and the captain, seeing a lonely little girl named Katie by herself, dances with her*. As everyone is having a good time, we see a mysterious hand winding up a tightly-coiled wire. With a loud snap, the wire is released, and it snaps through the entire ballroom. Everything goes quiet for a second, and we see the taut wire, now on the other side of the room, covered in blood. The assorted dancers slowly slip apart, separated (depending on their height) at the head or torso, with assorted severed arms flying to the floor as well. The poor girl, still with her arms around the captain, is unable to react until the captain's upper face slowly slides off his head. She screams as the scene fades out.
Okay, so that scene is ludicrous. No way could the wire actually do that, of course, and there are all sorts off issues with the height of the wire, which seems to have varied just to allow it to cut off a nice assortment of body parts (and inanimate objects like flowers) without killing the girl. But dammit, it's fun, graphic, and stylish.
WIth an opening scene like that, there's no direction for this movie to go but downhill. And it does, with the shift to the modern day and the introduction to the cast of mostly-generic salvagers. We see them bring in a ship, and then chat with each other at a remote salvage bar. The crew consists of a captain whose interesting traits are that he drinks a lot and looks like Gabriel Byrne (possibly because he's played by Gabriel Byrne), a woman named Epps (played by Juliana Margulies), whose interesting trait is that she's a woman, and a group of otherwise-interchangable crew members. Of the latter, one of them misses his wife (and is played by prominent homophobe Isaiah Washington, so you can watch this film and feel some schadenfreude), two of them (Dodge and Munder) are played by Ron Eldard and Karl Urban, and one is going to be the first to die.
As they sit around drinking, they're approached by a Canadian Air Force pilot named Ferriman, whose defining trait is that he looks vaguely like Matt Damon (although he's played by Desmond Harrington). He explains that he saw an abandoned ship drifting in international waters, and needs a salvage crew to claim it. After some fierce negotiating, we have ourselves a partnership, and our team goes out to find the ship. Said ship, of course, is the one we saw in the opening scene, the Antonia Graza. It was an Italian ship that vanished over thirty years ago, and is likely to bring them all fame and fortune. Or maybe death and misery. It's hard to tell.
Eventually the tugboat makes it to the ship (but not before some bonding moments between Ferriman and Epps), and some attempted character development moments for everyone, none of which actually stick.
On board the ship, strange things start happening. A swimming pool fills with blood. Smoke appears in random places. Epps catches glimpses of a little girl. Folks hear music. And two of the generic crewmen start eating cans of old food, only to find that they're eating maggots (an ok, if predictable, inversion of the classic scene from Lost Boys). Eventually, they discover a cache of gold! Never having seen any of the Leprechaun movies (or even Miner's Massacre) it doesn't occur to anyone that finding gold in a spooky old place could actually be a Bad Omen**.
Sure enough, after a few more scenes, the tugboat explodes, taking the guy who was due to die first with it. The rest of the crew are trapped on the ship, and are faced with the choice of either trying to get it in working order (which Eldard and Urban do), or going slowly mad as they see ghosts, hear sounds, and discover the dark secret of the ship.
The guy who misses his wife goes first. In spite of how much he misses her***, he falls in love with a photograph of the singer first witnessed in the opening scene. Eventually, he wanders into the ballroom, and finds himself back in the '60s, with the band performing and everything looking shiny and new. He and the singer flirt and court over the course of a few scenes, and she eventually leads him away from the ballroom. He follows, but she stays one step ahead, until finally, he catches her, only to find himself falling through her now-ghostly body and into the open elevator shaft behind her.
If Arnold Schwarzenegger were in this movie, this is the part where he'd look down and say, "He got shafted."
Alas, our ghost girl merely turns skeletal and fades away, pun left unuttered.
Meanwhile, the tugboat captain has been chatting with his ghostly counterpart from the old cruise liner, finding out that they took the gold aboard from another ship, and that the troubles began soon after. However, our present-day captain, even as he learns the dreadful truth about what happened, gets drunk and (worse) haunted by his dead crew member. As he starts railing about how much danger they're in and seems ready to destroy the work his crew have put in to fix up the boat, Ferriman knocks him out, and they lock the captain up until he wakes up.
Now it's Epps's turn to hear the truth, as Katie reveals to her the true story of what happened on the ship that fateful night. In an extended flashback, we see the opening scene replayed, this time with additional views of the chaos both before the wire came down (the kitchen staff were massacred, and rat poison was put into the soup), and after (passengers and crew are killed left and right by the greedy folks after the gold, and poor Katie dies of hanging). Eventually, most of the killers open the gold, only to be shot down by one of their own with a machine gun. He, in turn, turns around to take a bullet in the head from the singer. She, in turn, is about to engage in a tender embrace with the ringleader (and now the only other survivor on the ship), when he throws her onto a convenient passing hook. It's like the circle of life, only with psycho killers!
Now, we pan to the face of the ringleader, and ZoMyGods! It's Ferriman! This was all a trap!
Epps runs to find her captain, only to discover that he's been drowned. One of her other crew members, swimming under the ship to fix a propeller, gets sucked in between underwater gears. Now it's just Epps and Dodge, in an ER cast reunion special! Ferriman still feigns innocence, so she has Dodge cover him with a gun while she runs off to do nothing at all justifiable plot-wise, but the director wanted her out of the scene. Ferriman threatens Dodge, and the latter shoots him. Next we see, Dodge meets up Epps, but Epps is too smart, and knows that this is really Ferriman in disguise, and the he's killed the last of her crew!
Ferriman, being a good movie villain, explains that he's really, well, a ferryman. For the devil. And see, he's got a quota to meet, and he has to bring souls to the dark side. But the ship doesn't have enough, so he needs more folks to come on board. If there are logic holes here (like why does Ferriman have to lure a small group of salvage folks, when he could probably get an entire navy vessel involved), Epps is too polite to point this out. Instead, she rigs the boat so it'll explode, and then, with the help of the ghostly Katie, makes it off the ship, where she's eventually rescued. But, as she's being brought ashore and loaded into an ambulance, she sees a crew of folks who look just like her old crew loading a chest of gold onto a ship, led by Ferriman! Oh no!
Okay, I admit it. Ghost Ship is a terrible movie. But it's a terrible movie that I've seen five times. That opening scene and the expanded flashback later in the movie are graphically brilliant moments. This is not a movie for those with weak stomachs, but if you can take it, those scenes are worth watching the movie for. Director Steve Beck is as hamfisted here as he is in Thir13en Ghosts (his only other feature), but is saddled with a weaker cast. Co-screenwriter John Pogue is responsible for the Rollerball remake and all three Skulls movies, and only his stint on U.S. Marshalls shows that he can rise above this sort of material (and his co-writer, Marc Hanlon, has only directed one other minor film).
The cast here is weaker than it sounds, with only Margulies really putting any effort into her role amongst the heroes (although Emily Browning does a nice job as Katie). To be fair, the dialogue is too weak to make any actor enthusiastic about these lines. Fortunately, the special effects are top-notch, and they're really the star here.
The Dark Castle films have steadily dropped in quality, with each successive film featuring weaker actors and less sensible plots. Ghost Ship is essentially the hump film, with the two that followed (Gothika and House of Wax) being nigh-unwatchable messes. There's much that's unwatchable here, but there's also plenty to make Ghost Ship a guilty pleasure.
*This sounds creepy, but isn't.
**Another Bad Omen is last year's remake starring Liev Schreiber, who should have known better.
***And really, if you're the type who can't stand being away from your wife for months at a time, why the fuck would salvage be your line of work? It doesn't pay enough to justify it. Don't take a travelling job and then whine about the travel unless you're Steve Perry singing "Faithfully****."
****Come to think of it, don't even do it then.
No, I'm not covering another Val Lewton movie today (although I'll certainly revisit some of his works later this year). This is the Dark Castle "remake." Unlike the first two DC remakes (Thir13en Ghosts and The House on Haunted Hill), Ghost Ship doesn't attempt to adhere to even an outline of the plot of the original film. The result isn't necessarily a good movie, but it's a nice and gory guilty pleasure with some superb moments.
We start with what may be the most memorable opening scene since the original Halloween. Sometime in the '60s, on board a cruise ship, everyone is having a wonderful time in the ballroom. People are dancing, a chanteuse is crooning, and the captain, seeing a lonely little girl named Katie by herself, dances with her*. As everyone is having a good time, we see a mysterious hand winding up a tightly-coiled wire. With a loud snap, the wire is released, and it snaps through the entire ballroom. Everything goes quiet for a second, and we see the taut wire, now on the other side of the room, covered in blood. The assorted dancers slowly slip apart, separated (depending on their height) at the head or torso, with assorted severed arms flying to the floor as well. The poor girl, still with her arms around the captain, is unable to react until the captain's upper face slowly slides off his head. She screams as the scene fades out.
Okay, so that scene is ludicrous. No way could the wire actually do that, of course, and there are all sorts off issues with the height of the wire, which seems to have varied just to allow it to cut off a nice assortment of body parts (and inanimate objects like flowers) without killing the girl. But dammit, it's fun, graphic, and stylish.
WIth an opening scene like that, there's no direction for this movie to go but downhill. And it does, with the shift to the modern day and the introduction to the cast of mostly-generic salvagers. We see them bring in a ship, and then chat with each other at a remote salvage bar. The crew consists of a captain whose interesting traits are that he drinks a lot and looks like Gabriel Byrne (possibly because he's played by Gabriel Byrne), a woman named Epps (played by Juliana Margulies), whose interesting trait is that she's a woman, and a group of otherwise-interchangable crew members. Of the latter, one of them misses his wife (and is played by prominent homophobe Isaiah Washington, so you can watch this film and feel some schadenfreude), two of them (Dodge and Munder) are played by Ron Eldard and Karl Urban, and one is going to be the first to die.
As they sit around drinking, they're approached by a Canadian Air Force pilot named Ferriman, whose defining trait is that he looks vaguely like Matt Damon (although he's played by Desmond Harrington). He explains that he saw an abandoned ship drifting in international waters, and needs a salvage crew to claim it. After some fierce negotiating, we have ourselves a partnership, and our team goes out to find the ship. Said ship, of course, is the one we saw in the opening scene, the Antonia Graza. It was an Italian ship that vanished over thirty years ago, and is likely to bring them all fame and fortune. Or maybe death and misery. It's hard to tell.
Eventually the tugboat makes it to the ship (but not before some bonding moments between Ferriman and Epps), and some attempted character development moments for everyone, none of which actually stick.
On board the ship, strange things start happening. A swimming pool fills with blood. Smoke appears in random places. Epps catches glimpses of a little girl. Folks hear music. And two of the generic crewmen start eating cans of old food, only to find that they're eating maggots (an ok, if predictable, inversion of the classic scene from Lost Boys). Eventually, they discover a cache of gold! Never having seen any of the Leprechaun movies (or even Miner's Massacre) it doesn't occur to anyone that finding gold in a spooky old place could actually be a Bad Omen**.
Sure enough, after a few more scenes, the tugboat explodes, taking the guy who was due to die first with it. The rest of the crew are trapped on the ship, and are faced with the choice of either trying to get it in working order (which Eldard and Urban do), or going slowly mad as they see ghosts, hear sounds, and discover the dark secret of the ship.
The guy who misses his wife goes first. In spite of how much he misses her***, he falls in love with a photograph of the singer first witnessed in the opening scene. Eventually, he wanders into the ballroom, and finds himself back in the '60s, with the band performing and everything looking shiny and new. He and the singer flirt and court over the course of a few scenes, and she eventually leads him away from the ballroom. He follows, but she stays one step ahead, until finally, he catches her, only to find himself falling through her now-ghostly body and into the open elevator shaft behind her.
If Arnold Schwarzenegger were in this movie, this is the part where he'd look down and say, "He got shafted."
Alas, our ghost girl merely turns skeletal and fades away, pun left unuttered.
Meanwhile, the tugboat captain has been chatting with his ghostly counterpart from the old cruise liner, finding out that they took the gold aboard from another ship, and that the troubles began soon after. However, our present-day captain, even as he learns the dreadful truth about what happened, gets drunk and (worse) haunted by his dead crew member. As he starts railing about how much danger they're in and seems ready to destroy the work his crew have put in to fix up the boat, Ferriman knocks him out, and they lock the captain up until he wakes up.
Now it's Epps's turn to hear the truth, as Katie reveals to her the true story of what happened on the ship that fateful night. In an extended flashback, we see the opening scene replayed, this time with additional views of the chaos both before the wire came down (the kitchen staff were massacred, and rat poison was put into the soup), and after (passengers and crew are killed left and right by the greedy folks after the gold, and poor Katie dies of hanging). Eventually, most of the killers open the gold, only to be shot down by one of their own with a machine gun. He, in turn, turns around to take a bullet in the head from the singer. She, in turn, is about to engage in a tender embrace with the ringleader (and now the only other survivor on the ship), when he throws her onto a convenient passing hook. It's like the circle of life, only with psycho killers!
Now, we pan to the face of the ringleader, and ZoMyGods! It's Ferriman! This was all a trap!
Epps runs to find her captain, only to discover that he's been drowned. One of her other crew members, swimming under the ship to fix a propeller, gets sucked in between underwater gears. Now it's just Epps and Dodge, in an ER cast reunion special! Ferriman still feigns innocence, so she has Dodge cover him with a gun while she runs off to do nothing at all justifiable plot-wise, but the director wanted her out of the scene. Ferriman threatens Dodge, and the latter shoots him. Next we see, Dodge meets up Epps, but Epps is too smart, and knows that this is really Ferriman in disguise, and the he's killed the last of her crew!
Ferriman, being a good movie villain, explains that he's really, well, a ferryman. For the devil. And see, he's got a quota to meet, and he has to bring souls to the dark side. But the ship doesn't have enough, so he needs more folks to come on board. If there are logic holes here (like why does Ferriman have to lure a small group of salvage folks, when he could probably get an entire navy vessel involved), Epps is too polite to point this out. Instead, she rigs the boat so it'll explode, and then, with the help of the ghostly Katie, makes it off the ship, where she's eventually rescued. But, as she's being brought ashore and loaded into an ambulance, she sees a crew of folks who look just like her old crew loading a chest of gold onto a ship, led by Ferriman! Oh no!
Okay, I admit it. Ghost Ship is a terrible movie. But it's a terrible movie that I've seen five times. That opening scene and the expanded flashback later in the movie are graphically brilliant moments. This is not a movie for those with weak stomachs, but if you can take it, those scenes are worth watching the movie for. Director Steve Beck is as hamfisted here as he is in Thir13en Ghosts (his only other feature), but is saddled with a weaker cast. Co-screenwriter John Pogue is responsible for the Rollerball remake and all three Skulls movies, and only his stint on U.S. Marshalls shows that he can rise above this sort of material (and his co-writer, Marc Hanlon, has only directed one other minor film).
The cast here is weaker than it sounds, with only Margulies really putting any effort into her role amongst the heroes (although Emily Browning does a nice job as Katie). To be fair, the dialogue is too weak to make any actor enthusiastic about these lines. Fortunately, the special effects are top-notch, and they're really the star here.
The Dark Castle films have steadily dropped in quality, with each successive film featuring weaker actors and less sensible plots. Ghost Ship is essentially the hump film, with the two that followed (Gothika and House of Wax) being nigh-unwatchable messes. There's much that's unwatchable here, but there's also plenty to make Ghost Ship a guilty pleasure.
*This sounds creepy, but isn't.
**Another Bad Omen is last year's remake starring Liev Schreiber, who should have known better.
***And really, if you're the type who can't stand being away from your wife for months at a time, why the fuck would salvage be your line of work? It doesn't pay enough to justify it. Don't take a travelling job and then whine about the travel unless you're Steve Perry singing "Faithfully****."
****Come to think of it, don't even do it then.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-10 01:02 am (UTC)Julianna Margulies is wet in this movie.
Therefore this movie wins.
Also? February 20 brings The Dark Castle Horror Collection (http://www.dvdpricesearch.com/cgi-bin/dvdcalc2?cmd=calc&tmpCart=63867).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-10 02:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-10 02:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-10 02:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-10 11:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-11 06:34 am (UTC)It also makes a good "Don't go on the boat!" film festival with Deep Rising and Virus. A case could also be made for including Event Horizon, but really, you're better off not.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-13 04:32 pm (UTC)I did enjoy Mia Farrow though. I just wish she had chosen to stick with, “Have no fear, little one. I am here to protect Thee” when she first meets Damien.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-13 04:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-13 05:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-14 05:52 pm (UTC)My personal favourite best horror movie opening may just be from The Abominable Dr Phibes (which I discovered much too late in life, dammit)!
Absolutely Off Topic:
Is it just a Hammer Horror gimmick that, when the alpha vampire dies and becomes ash, he always leaves a ring behind?
It is such a strong image in my head....I know it happens in at least a few of the Cushing/Lee movies, but does it happen elsewhere?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-16 01:57 am (UTC)Okay, it's a guilty pleasure for me.