Ghost Ship (2002)
Ghost Ship (2002)
1080 BluRay Rip | MKV | 1920 x 1080 | x264 @ 12,1 Mbps | 01:30:43 | 8,92 Gb
Audio: English DTS 5.1 @ 1536 Kbps | Subs: English SDH, German SDH, Latin Spanish, Br. Portuguese, Dutch, French, Danish
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller | USA, Australia
1080 BluRay Rip | MKV | 1920 x 1080 | x264 @ 12,1 Mbps | 01:30:43 | 8,92 Gb
Audio: English DTS 5.1 @ 1536 Kbps | Subs: English SDH, German SDH, Latin Spanish, Br. Portuguese, Dutch, French, Danish
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller | USA, Australia
A salvage team think they've made the find of a lifetime, until they discover there's more on board than meets the eye in this supernatural thriller. Led by Captain Sean Murphy (Gabriel Byrne), the crew of the tugboat Arctic Warrior have discovered a sideline far more lucrative than hauling ships in and out of the harbor – they locate missing or wrecked ships in international waters, repair them until they can be brought back to port, and then sell off the ship and its contents as salvage. Acting on a tip from Jack Ferriman (Desmond Harrington), a pilot in the Canadian Air Force, Murphy and his crew – salvage expert Maureen Epps (Julianna Margulies), first mate Greer (Isaiah Washington), and crewmen Santos (Alex Dimitriades), Dodge (Ron Eldard), and Munder (Karl Urban) – set out to find a large craft seen adrift off the Alaskan coastline. To their surprise, the crew of the Arctic Warrior discover what appears to be the Antonia Graza, a famous Italian ocean liner, legendary for its luxury, which vanished without a trace in 1962. While they at first anticipate the payday of a lifetime from this find, the crew soon discover a sinister force has taken control of the ship, and before long they're battling not for salvage rights, but for their lives. Ghost Ship was directed by special effects man turned filmmaker Steven Beck, who previously directed the 2001 remake of 13 Ghosts.
IMDB
Dark Castle is the production house set up by Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis, who produced HBO's Tales from the Crypt and obviously enjoy doing their bit to perpetuate the time-honored tradition of the medium-to-low-budget horror film. The movie has few surprises for lifelong horror fans, but it'll keep them (or us – I count myself in their number) happily diverted for just under 90 minutes.
Ghost Ship (2002)
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Things start off promisingly: a mishap aboard the Italian cruise liner Antonia Graza, which went missing in 1962. Proving that Silver or, more likely, Zemeckis has a bit of clout with the MPAA, the opening scene gives us dozens of bloodily dismembered bodies without getting slapped with an NC-17 rebuke. I found the scene as wildly implausible – if you see it, ask yourself if all the bodies would remain standing – as it was fun to watch; horror fans are always on the lookout for new ways to affront the human body, and Ghost Ship introduces the dreaded Runaway Cable. Okay, you've seen that before, but as an instrument of mass murder?
Ghost Ship (2002)
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A weather spotter (Desmond Harrington) has caught sight of Antonia Graza apparently floating out in the nowhere of international waters; he brings this info to a salvage crew, headed by Gabriel Byrne as a tough Irish captain named Murphy. This is excellent news for Byrne, who gets to retain his accent while downing hard liquor and tersely issuing unquestionable commands. Murphy decides to take his crew – including the fearless welder Epps (Julianna Margulies), first mate Greer (Isaiah Washington), engineer Santos (Alex Dimitriades), and scruffy crewmen Dodge (Ron Eldard) and Munder (Karl Urban) – to see if the ship contains anything worth salvaging.
Ghost Ship (2002)
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It contains, of course, much more than the crew bargained for, including a newly minted clichй in recent horror: a ghostly little girl (Emily Browning) who turns up now and then to distribute mystifying warnings. (Someday soon, I expect to see a ghost-movie parody in which the herald of supernatural doom is a portly guy with a bad combover.) For fans of The Shining, there's an enticing chanteuse (Francesca Rettondini) who sings passionately and strips merrily to lead gobsmacked men to their doom – perhaps she thinks she's in a David Lynch movie. Horror fans will also note with bitter amusement that, obeying the rules of the game, the first two victims among the crew are the non-Caucasian ones. My hopes that Ghost Ship would circumvent this rule were dashed when each of the above victims was shown to have a photo of his beloved – one has a wallet photo of his girlfriend, the other a framed picture of his car.
Ghost Ship (2002)
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The movie doesn't know how to use Gabriel Byrne (hint: just point a camera at him and let him be cool), and the big revelation about the bad guy would come as more of a shock if we didn't see it coming about ten minutes into the movie. But the scares arrive on schedule and are crisply mounted, courtesy of director Steve Beck, who manages the unenviable task of making a one-location movie visually interesting without resorting to fancy tactics (having Gale Tattersall as his cinematographer probably helped). And any movie that eventually awards front-and-center status to Julianna Margulies is inherently worthwhile; reading Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter books, I kept picturing Margulies as Anita, but if we don't get an Anita movie series starring Margulies, Ghost Ship is an agreeable alternative.
Ghost Ship (2002)
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Indeed, the movie is generally agreeable; the Dark Castle films come with no pretense, no huge stars to throw off the balance of the script (which means any character can die at any time), and no flab. They're certainly not fit to stand alongside the true classics of the genre – they're somewhere between Roger Corman's run of horror in the '60s and direct-to-video horror of the '90s – but they're fun, handled with a modicum of craft and respect for the horror audience.
Ghost Ship (2002)
No More Mirrors.