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    Ghost Ship

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

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    Ghost Ship has all the ingredients to make a great haunted house film except for the most important one: the scares. The premise is ingenious and it gets you excited right away. The story begins in 1962 on a fancy ocean liner called the Antonia Graza, where an unseen character triggers a deadly chain of events and slaughters nearly everyone on board. 40 years later, Jack Ferriman (Desmond Harrington) approaches a boat salvage crew and informs them that he's found the Antonia Graza. Bringing the ship back to port means big bucks. The high-paying job becomes a little bit too good to be true when strange events begin plaguing the crew, including terrifying visions and deadly encounters with the long-dead passengers.

    I like the setup. The cast of the horror movie is limited to 6 people plus Jack so you have time to get to know the characters and care if they bumped off or not. With the flashback sequences, there are plenty of gory moments when we find out what happened to the original passengers of the Antonia, which balances out the overall low body count. You get the best of both worlds. You also get not one but two realistic reasons why the people involved don't just leave the haunted location (a problem that plagues nearly every single ghost story): not only are these people stranded in the middle of the ocean (so there's no opportunity to call for help or just leave the place) but once on the ship, they find a treasure worth so much money that no one in their right mind would want to leave. You can actually believe that these people would ignore some of the minor paranormal occurrences just to get their share of the money. To go along with the premise, the film uses excellent special effects, sticking mostly to practical and only using CGI when necessary. There's a lot of makeup, prosthetics and fake body parts used throughout and those all look good.

    There are two crippling problems with the film. The first and most serious is the lack of scares. The setup with the gold leads you to believe that the crew is going to start backstabbing each other and plotting to hoard the treasure, but that isn't the case. There's no suspense regarding who you can trust, just ghosts vs. Crew and the apparitions don't really do much at all. There're a couple of scenes with creepy imagery but none of them match the ones at the very beginning of the film when there's a spectacular event that wipes out a significant amount of people. Some of the creepy hallucinations that you do see end up adding nothing to the movie either. A scene where the ghost of a beautiful femme fatale appears has her turning into what looks like a rotting corpse, prompting one crewmember to soil his pants in terror… but not only does her makeup and design not match her death (Which we see later in the film through flashback) but when you see this shapeshift it's too late to creep out the audience. She's already done something way more disturbing than change her looks by sending a crewmember off to their death. The "detective" aspect of the film is also pretty poorly handled. We simply get a scene where everything is shown at once instead of getting a build-up through clues and deductions.

    The second element that sinks Ghost Ship is the explanation for why the boat is haunted. I don't mean the fact that there are ghosts on the vessel or how the people on the ship died; I mean the reasons why they are lingering on Earth (well, at sea) The revelation we're given at the end is completely unnecessary and isn't the least bit credible, disturbing or frightening. People died on a ship, the ship was lost at sea. That's all you need to tell us. I won't say what the reason is but it feels like something ripped out of a weak creepy pasta.

    I have to mention how great the movie looks once again. Seeing the dilapidated ship, it's really creepy and totally convincing. The gore on display is satisfying and disturbing. There’s even some nice obligatory horror film nudity thrown in to please the male teens or anyone else that will enjoy seeing a beautiful actress take off her clothes. Unfortunately, the lame script will leave you indifferent and in the end you're just looking at a wasted opportunity and talented people coming together to work on a doomed project. The people I saw it with were easily able to predict what was going to happen and even though the revelations about the past were intriguing, they don't raise the material high enough to warrant a recommendation. Despite the good elements present, Ghost Ship is a huge disappointment. (On DVD, July 12, 2013)

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    adamwatchesmovies@  20.8.2016 age: 26-35 2,867 reviews

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