Ghost Ship (2002) Review

Ghost Ship (2002) Review

When I was in grade three, the new horror movie everyone was talking about at school was Ghost Ship. “Oh man, this movie looks scary!” Everyone was raving about it, but it would be a couple more years before I was allowed to rent it from the video store. Even though I never found it scary, something about it stuck with me. The premise is simple: instead of a haunted house, it’s a haunted cruise ship. A team of salvagers are tipped off about the ship by a sketchy pilot who joins them on their mission to find it. Once they get aboard and start piecing together why the ship went missing forty years earlier, things get strange, and when they discover crates full of unmarked gold bars, it gets even stranger. 

Ghost Ship was trashed by critics when it came out, but I say screw the critics, Ghost Ship is great. The opening scene grabs you immediately, with the guests aboard the Antonio Graza enjoying a nice evening of dancing on the upper deck, when out of nowhere, a length of wire cord snaps across the deck, cutting everyone in half, except for a little girl, who is short enough that the wire goes over her head (but as we find out later, she still meets a horrific fate), and it’s in this first scene that Ghost Ship earns its R-rating. The gore effects are all mostly practical, and while they never go too extreme with the violence beyond this scene, there’s no holding back in showing them.  

The characters are mostly all one-dimensional, but still likable. The cast did a good job working with what they had. Gabriel Byrne plays the team leader, Murphy, and he’s great, as is the underrated Julianna Margulies playing Epps, his right-hand woman and one of the last survivors. For all the clichés used in this movie, at least they didn’t make the one female main character a damsel in distress. Epps is badass. When she sees the ghost of the girl from the opening scene and tells someone about it later, she matter-of-factly states “I must be losing my goddamn mind.” It’s such a straight delivery I chuckle every time. And that’s another great thing about Ghost Ship: it has a sense of humour, without becoming completely laughable.  

While I find it entertaining, Ghost Ship is not a movie to be taken too seriously. The characters make some dumb decisions typical of a movie like this (splitting up Scooby Doo-style, for instance) and the rules surrounding the supernatural are fly-by-night. It’s also not really scary at all. There are some cheap jump scares, and it becomes fairly predictable toward the end, but the build-up is effective, and some of the scenes are both horrific and funny, like when Karl Urban is eating a can of beans and it turns into maggots in his mouth. If you’re looking for seriously scary content, you won’t find it here, but it’s still exciting and thrilling from beginning to end. 

Ghost Ship is not high-class horror entertainment, but entertainment nonetheless. I’d recommend it most strongly for viewers who haven’t seen that many horror films. This is perfect for someone just breaking into the genre. It was one of the first R-rated horror flicks I ever watched, and I find it minorly nostalgic to revisit from time to time.