The Horrible Horror Vault Revisited: The one with an evil boat

 

 

Title: Ghost Ship

What Year?: 2002

Classification: Mashup/ Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

As I write this, I’m at the tail end of a phase of retiring some of my longest-running features, usually with some measure of relief. That has brought me back around to considering whether I should dust off any of them. It happened that the one that finally forced my decision was a horror movie from within the “modern” era, which I have usually specifically avoided outside of zombie films like Splinter.  I quickly realized that the one place it really fit was my one dedicated horror feature, the Horrible Horror Vault, and what made things interesting was that this one went in a quite different direction. I present Ghost Ship, a movie about a literal boat from Hell, and boy do I know there’s more than one.

Our story begins in the 1960s, with a captain and a little girl dancing on a cruise ship deck until a preposterously gruesome mass casualty event strikes. Skip forward, and we meet an evidently competent salvage crew with a butch lady boss who is technically second in command. A nondescript guy comes to them with a lead: After 40-some years, a missing cruise ship has been rediscovered, still drifting around what would in regular reality be the maritime border between two superpowers. This apparently seems neither improbable nor utterly terrifying to the crew, who sign on for a job. They discover a standard spooky ship where rats still scurry about and mysterious figures appear and disappear, particularly the captain and the girl. Just when the audience is thinking get the Hell off this thing, the crew discover a fortune in the hold, only to lose their own ship. The lady and her dwindling crew must survive the perils of the ship and the sea. But they are already part of a trap that claimed the lives of the original complement, and the stakes are their lives and their souls!

Ghost Ship was a 2002 supernatural horror film directed by Steve Beck and produced by Joel Silver (see Lethal Weapon, Predator 2) and Robert Zemeckis. The production was developed from a script that reportedly emphasized psychological horror over gore and supernatural elements. Similarities were noted to the 1980 film Death Ship (oh dear Logos, that should have been on my list of films too bad to review), ultimately including a very similar movie poster. The film starred Julianna Margulies as the lady boss Epps, with Gabriel Byrne as Captain Murphy and Emily Browning as the girl. Plans to film on an actual ship were rejected in favor of CGI effects and extensive miniatures, provided by the crew Photon VFX from Australia. The movie was released in October 2002 and on home video in March 2003. It received mixed to negative reviews but was a commercial success, earning $68 million against a $20M budget. It is currently available on digital platforms including HBO Max.

For my experiences, this is one I remember seeing around the time it came out without knowing it was “supposed” to have a bad reputation; I liked it, I hear nothing bad about it, and I distinctly remember at least one reasonably positive contemporary review. But what has really stood out is the whole “evil boat” concept. It’s a counterpart to the more niche “underwater sci fi” (see Leviathan, The Abyss) which I have covered with the likes of Deep Rising and The Ghost Galleon. (Wait, doesn’t Event Horizon kind of count???) In that context, what I have found most interesting is the degree to which it rides the line between horror and science fiction. The notes are Gothic, but the visual vocabulary is industrial, with shot after shot emphasizing the very solid if rusted and creaky walls, rooms and fittings of the ship. It’s a fascinating blend of genres, and that’s the other reason I remain very conflicted coming back to this film.

Moving forward, the word that applies here is indeed “solid”. Everything here is genre formula done quite well, with good acting and dialogue, excellent effects, and a story that at a minimum gets a real payoff out of a “twist” villain. It all serves to illustrate that cliches become cliches because they can and do in fact work. What is most impressive is that there is still complex conceptualization and  genuine ambiguity. Several incidents could be actual hallucinations. Others appear to be a combination of illusions by the spirits and hazards already present on the boat. Then there are certain points where the ship seems to show a malign will of its own, to a degree that I considered including this along with The Lift and Willy’s Wonderland under the “possessed machine” category of my robots feature. It all builds to an unexpected touch of beauty in the finale when (fine, spoiler) the sinking ship releases the souls of the dead. The only points where this becomes a problem are where the film goes with shocks over substance. It shows most around the middle act, which sees multiple redundant jump scares and one obvious gross-out. But we already see it in the ludicrous opening, which just feels like an unconvincing ripoff of the laser cheese grater in Resident Evil, even though a little chronological review would indicate that this was mostly in the can by the time that movie came out.

With these issues already on the table, where my nitpicking instincts kick in is the reveal of the original atrocity that killed everyone in the first place. This is the point where the story becomes a straight-up Medieval morality play, and for the most part, it’s another twist that really works, especially once the characters start to question each other’s identities and motivations. The problem is that the chain of events follows neither logic nor proportion. By my further penchant for rewriting, what would have worked is a potentially non-lethal scheme that actually went wrong, like a staged “accident” gone out of control (essentially the set-up of Deep Rising and for that matter an intelligible solution to the actual Mary Celeste). Instead, almost everyone jumps straight to mass murder on a literal war-crime scale, which goes as far beyond the standards of “rational evil” as killing a bank president, vice president and the entire board of directors to rob the bank. Even if this went according to plan, it’s obvious that it would almost certainly end badly. The real “problem” here is that the movie specifically fails to sell this as a slippery slope that might tempt the ordinary viewer, and that specific weakness is in contrast to the unsettlingly believable conflicts that arise among the present-day protagonists.

Now for the “one scene”, the one that really lingered in writing this review is a scene that makes absolutely no sense in cold blood. In the midst of the middle-act slow-down, Byrne/ Murphy has wandered into the captain’s cabin, where he discovers the ghost of the original liner’s captain. What is surreal off the bat is, first, that there is neither fear nor surprise, and second, that this non-reaction actually follows from previously established characterization. The captain simply accepts what he sees, and gives careful attention as the ghost presents a file on the discovery of another ill-fated and infamous ship. Murphy says simply, “I know the story,” without telling the yarn anyway. He adds, “There were no survivors,” at which point the ghost holds out a photo we don’t see. Of course, it’s always possible that this whole interaction is simply how a character we know to be imaginative visualizes a discovery he made rummaging through a desk. For the film’s purposes, it doesn’t really matter, and the story is already moving on accordingly.

In closing, I come to the rating, and this is a fairly rare case where I have been going back and forth the whole time. By my own admission, the main thing this film has had going for it is that I can remember a time when I viewed it quite favorably. Channeling early 2000’s me, I would probably have given it the same rating then that I do now. In other ways, however, time and more experience with the genre(s) have been unkind enough that I came close to knocking the rating down to 2 out of sheer disappointment. What settled things in my mind was simple perspective. This may never have been a great movie, but it still stands as one that did far better than might be expected and in some lights better than it really deserved to. (With Death Ship anywhere in the frame of reference, Sleepaway Camp would get the benefit of a doubt.) That’s enough to hold its own in my book, and that makes one more film I’ve made my peace with. Bon voyage!