Ghost Ship (2002)

               I’m starting to form some definite opinions on Dark Castle Entertainment, the production company behind three of the recent movies I’ve watched. So far none of them have been any good, so fingers crossed for the upcoming ‘Gothika,’ I guess. The three-headed beast that rules over the still-operating company is comprised of Gilbert Adler, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis. I think because I first learned of its existence right after watching ‘What Lies Beneath,’ which Zemeckis directed, I focused a lot of my attention towards his influence on their output when the person I really should have been zeroing in on was Joel Silver.

This ... this isn't "The Love Boat," titles.

              I keep forgetting Silver’s been around since the early 80’s. His name is slapped on a ton of classic films, such as ’48 Hrs.,’ ‘Lethal Weapon,’ and ‘The Matrix.’ Let’s refer to those movies as the ones made by the “good” Joel Silver. There’s the “bad” Joel Silver as well, however, and he’s the guy who helped bring ‘Brewster’s Millions,’ ‘Richie Rich,’ and ‘Fred Claus’ into this world. I’d say the last actually good film he was involved with was 2016’s ‘The Nice Guys,’ because other than that the last decade and a half has not been kind to him. Pretty sure that Dark Castle brought out the worst in his absolutely not cocaine-tinged instincts because everything I’ve watched from this production company has been shit.

              It doesn’t take much digging to turn up some fairly shameful shenanigans going on behind the scenes for this movie. Let’s get the numbers out of the way first: this was a pretty sizeable step down budget-wise from the last movie the company had done: $20 million for ‘Ghost Ship,’ on par with the ‘House on Haunted Hill’ remake, but quite a bit less than the $42 million for ‘Thir13en Ghosts.’ It somehow earned back $68 million worldwide, allowing the schlock factory to churn on. The movie started as a spec-script by a first-time screenwriter named Mark Hanlon, who hasn’t had anything produced since. It was entitled ‘Chimera’ and while it featured ghosts and an abandoned boat it was intended to be more of a psychological horror with very little gore or violence. Here’s a link to the original draft: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/ghost_ship.html. According to Hanlon this was the version that the actors signed on for, and when they arrived for the shoot and realized how much it had been changed into a sloppy gorefest they were none too happy. I don’t often feel much sympathy for movie actors unless some truly heinous stuff went on during production, and while nobody is alleging any illegality or abuse I bet most of these actors were very angry with Mr. Silver for some time.

              The director is someone I’ve already met. This is his second and last feature film after his previous effort ‘Thir13en Ghosts.’ Which frankly surprises me, I would have completely understood if he’d been blackballed after that first one. Of course it was terrible, but more importantly it didn’t make that much money. In Hollywood terms it basically broke even. Yet for some reason Dark Castle entrusted another of its properties to a demonstrably bad director, and he doesn’t get any more work after the one that does make money? Perhaps he realized after making this movie that directing features just wasn’t for him. From what I understand there’s a lot more money in directing commercials anyways.

              Hanlon’s script was handed off to John Pogue for extensive rewrites, adding more blood and nudity and grody kills with each draft until it turned into the thing I just watched. Pogue isn’t a nobody, by the time he was handed this assignment he’d already written ‘U.S. Marshalls’ (the quasi-sequel to ‘The Fugitive’), ‘The Skulls,’ and the 2002 ‘Rollerball’ remake. Speaking of sequels he’s since moved on to directing, helming such prestigious fare as ‘Deep Blue Sea 3’ and ‘Eraser: Reboot,’ a legacy sequel to the 1996 Schwarzenegger film. These are not artistic titans, I guess is my point.

              The disappointed cast is once again made up of some prominent actors. Silver’s name still held a lot of sway in the industry at the time. Julianna Margulies stars as Maureen Epps, part of a salvage crew captained by Sean Murphy, played by Gabriel Byrne. Margulies had risen to fame as a cast member in “E.R.” but left at the end of season six in early 2000. She’d kicked around a little bit doing tv movies and guest spots. She’d had sizeable roles in movies before, but this was the highest-profile film she’d done so far. Byrne is given top billing, but his role seems to have been cut down over the course of the rewrites because he doesn’t have a lot to do here. He’d already led a ton of movies by this point, including ‘Miller’s Crossing’ and ‘The Usual Suspects.’ Isaiah Washington plays another crewmember, Greer. He was still a few years away from “Grey’s Anatomy” but was already a well-established character actor. Greasy, long-haired Munder is played by a baby Karl Urban, fresh from his recurring role as Julius Caesar on “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Alex Dimitriades and Ron Eldard round out the crew as Santos and Dodge, respectively.

              The non-crew characters of note are a mix of ghosts and antagonists. Emily Browning, probably best known for her role as Babydoll in ‘Suckerpunch,’ plays a nice ghost girl named Katie. Italian actor Francesca Rettondini really stretches her acting wings by playing an Italian character named Francsca. And the secret bad guy in the movie, named Jack Ferriman for pun reasons that will become clear later, is played by Desmond Harrington, who was in 72 episodes of “Dexter” even though I can’t remember him at all. None of the acting in this movie is particularly good, but considering that the characters range from bland to actively annoying and everyone’s decisions becoming compoundingly stupid over the course of the film, I’m going to blame the same director that made Tony Shalhoub suck on screen.

              Of course I’m going to compare this movie to 1980’s ‘Death Ship.’ Aside from the advances in special effects and editing it’s actually a very fair comparison. Instead of being stuck aboard a derelict prison ship they’re stuck aboard a derelict cruise ship, but it still features people trying to fix a boat and survive supernatural forces picking them off one by one. I also think they’re equally bad, just in different ways. The relative budget of ‘Ghost Ship’ is obviously higher, but ‘Death Ship’ had access to an actual derelict boat. The editing is terrible in both and everyone’s actions equally nonsensical. I might give the edge to ‘Death Ship’ only because the evil plan in that one is a lot more streamlined. “Ship possessed by dead Nazis out for blood” has a lot fewer moving parts than what Jack’s plan ends up being.

And they all invested well and retired.

              To briefly sum up the premise: we’re introduced to a rag-tag group of marine salvagers as they’re finishing up a long three months of hauling a sunken ship off of the ocean floor and are now hauling it to land. There’s some kind of crisis that allows the movie to establish everyone’s specials skills and the relationships between the crew members. This is all fine. They celebrate back on land just long enough to set up that Greer has a fiancé and the wedding is in about a month, putting a big ol’ death flag on his head. Everyone except Margulies’ Epps dies by the end of the movie, don’t give it another thought. As they’re toasting their own success Jack Ferriman introduces himself as a weather service pilot who thinks he spotted a large, abandoned ship in the Bering Strait. That’s the gap between Alaska and Russia, but don’t worry about anyone freezing to death, the subject literally never comes up again and people survive long periods in the ocean just fine. He offers to give them specific details to find the boat for a finder’s fee and insists on coming along. Before I twigged that he was the bad guy I had this whole screed written about how this didn’t make any sense, so I guess a small point to the movie. Everyone decides this could be a big score and away we go.

              Anyone who’s watched the movie is crying foul at this point, because the movie does not start with any of the above scenes. It starts in 1962 aboard a cruise ship we eventually learn is called the Antonia Graza. There’s a nifty little party going on up on deck with Francesca singing a number to the dancing guests. There’s a bored girl named Katie who gets persuaded to cut a modest rug with the captain. While they’re dancing a mysterious figure throws a single lever which manages to swipe a metal wire right across the deck at just above Katie’s head, cutting everyone in half. This is the only scene most people have ever seen from this movie, and the shock helps hide how badly it’s done. I don’t mean the CGI, though to modern eyes it does look a bit ropey, I mean how the wire manages to cut some people in half at the waist while people a few feet away get the wire through their mouths. Since Francesca is eventually revealed to be in on the mass murder, I went back to see what happened with her and the band after the wire deaths and the camera just doesn’t happen to look in that direction. Sloppy stuff.

              The movie is very bad at establishing and conveying information, and I don’t know if that’s the fault of the screenplay or the direction. I want to say it’s a wonderful mix of both. From reading plot synopses and checking a fan wiki I’m pretty sure the story goes something like this: Jack Ferriman was a sinner who died and went to hell. He was then picked by some evil force to return to the land of the living in order to collect souls and deliver them unto his master Satan. His method of doing so was to use a bunch of gold bars to tempt people into committing horrible sins to try to get their hands on it. For some reason he decides the best way to do this is by jumping from ship to ship, tempting people along the way. Back in 1962 he’d been on another ship called the Lorelei and managed to kill everyone there before being rescued, along with the gold, by the Antonia Graza. He then persuaded some of the crew and Francesca to murder about a thousand people between the rest of the crew and the guests. Then they all turned on each other leaving Francesca the sole survivor. Jack then kills her with a random hook that’s hanging around and marks her palm with a burn in the shape of a hook. There is exactly one other instance where someone sees a supposed ghost with that hook mark on his hand, but that ends up being an illusion so who knows what the rules are. Everyone on the ship except Katie was a sinner of some kind which gives Jack power over them, but apparently he hasn’t met his quota yet because he keeps luring people onto the boat using the gold. When they get there they always end up killing each other, adding more souls to his total. Sometime before the movie the boat got caught in a current that kept swinging it by some rocky islands, damaging the hull. He therefore specifically sought out a salvage crew that would be able to repair the ship, allowing it to continue on its soul collecting way. None of this is communicated properly to the audience. I had to do a decent amount of research and I’m still guessing at some of the connective tissue here. Like I said, Nazi ghosts possessing a ship hungry for blood is a much simpler idea.

I think I have this Cocteau Twins album on vinyl.

              The deaths are also almost all lame. The first guy gets blown up in an explosion, which is yawn. The next guy, Greer, also has a dumb death but at least there’s a decent moment leading up to it. After getting drunk on ancient champagne, he wanders into the ballroom where time rewinds around him while the camera spins in a circle. It’s not a bad effect. He’s confronted by a room of smiling and clapping guests while Francesca sultrily approaches. He announces that he knows it’s not real so he’s just going to go with it, then smooches the ghost. I’d like to think this line is a primal scream of frustration from John Pogue as he tries to finish rewrite fourteen. After spectral makeouts Francesca just strips off her clothes and leads him to an empty elevator shaft and he falls down to his offscreen death. At one point Gabriel Byrne talks to the dead captain who reveals Jack is an ageless killer but never mind because the rest of the crew bonk him over the head and toss him in a tank. A few scenes later he drowns offscreen, never mind. Dodge also dies offscreen to set up a stupid fakeout. Munder has a pretty good death conceptually, getting eaten by a massive set of gears like George Kennedy in ‘Death Ship,’ but again we don’t see any actual gore.

              The only other thing that even approaches being interesting is the pronounced and seemingly deliberate thread of misogyny and homophobia that runs through the movie. I know that it was the early 2000’s and obnoxious bro culture ruled the land, but most of the male characters constantly accuse each other of either being girls or of being gay, in very directly insulting language. It certainly struck me as rising above the normal background homophobic radiation of the time period. It starts to play with an idea when Jack taunts Dodge about how much of a chicken he is to never try for something with Epps, but then the character dies offscreen and the movie has to wrap things up in about seven minutes.

              This is an actively bad film. As in it’s not bad due to an absence of good, it’s a genuinely unpleasant experience. All of the characters were either mildly hateful or at the very least unpleasant to spend time with. Having it just be a ghost ship should have been enough but instead they had to work in this not-technically-a-demon character and add something about gold and collecting souls? I should also say that the movie does not deserve that opening. It should have happened in a 1976 giallo film called ‘Heron with the Golden Beak.’ John Saxon would be the second lead and it would have at least two eye-stabbing scenes. Cameron Mitchell would cameo and in the now out-of-print Criterion DVD issued in 2004 there’d be an entire commentary track by an audibly coked-up Quentin Tarantino. Nicolas Winding Refn wouldn’t be able to shut up about it. I would’ve liked to have watched a more interesting movie, is my point.