You’d be hard-pressed to find a horror movie free of plot holes. This is understandable, since the emphasis is on shocks – and often gore – rather than an airtight plot. And since these movies tend to count on characters doing dumb things to get themselves into peril, well, sound judgement by horror movie characters simply isn’t in the cards.
When you’re watching an average or better horror flick, these plot and character problems aren’t a big deal. After all, you spend most of the movie on the edge of your seat waiting for the next fright; you hardly have time for much analysis. And then there are fright flops like Ghost Ship that have far too few scary moments, and as a consequence, give you all sorts of time to think about how ludicrous the story is and how stupid – and inconsistent – its characters behave. The result – a sad excuse for horror that drifts more aimlessly than the ship in question, which has supposedly been floating about the high seas for 40 years.
The premise is pure B-movie goofiness – a hotshot salvage crew is offered the chance to take possession of a huge ocean liner that’s adrift in the Bering Strait. Imagining great wealth, the group, led by the wizened Murphy (Gabriel Byrne) and sparked by the fiery Epps (Julianna Margulies), heads its tugboat north in pursuit of this ghost ship. Once they find it, all Hell breaks loose, and the crew is soon splitting time between gloating over a huge wealth-inducing haul and running for their lives.
Since the scary moments here come far too rarely and are far too predictable when they do occur, we’re given lots of time to ponder the utter stupidity of this crew – one minute they find a bunch of dead bodies, and the next their giggling over the discovery of an old car in the ship’s cargo hold; one minute they’re screaming about some weird unexplainable occurrence, and the next it’s totally out of their minds as they deal with the mundane chores of salvage work. It’s as if two entirely distinct movies were spliced together – a horror movie and a Discovery Channel documentary on salvage work. Since the crew doesn’t seem too worked up about the supernatural events that seem to be enveloping them, it’s no surprise that the audience isn’t particularly engaged either; the group that I sat with through an advance screening sat ins tone silence through almost the entire movie, and this wasn’t because they were too scared to utter a peep.
The thrills – when they come – are standard stuff , as a crew member falls through the floor of the old ship, another gets blown up, and others encounter spookiness of various sorts. With a total of about three minutes of screen time devoted to character development, it’s no wonder that we don’t care a whole lot for this crew or their fate. And when the source of all the trouble finally is revealed, it’s hard to even work up enough interest to say, “Who cares?”
Ghost Ship is a lame horror movie that’s weak enough that you probably won’t worry about the awful dialogue and won’t bother wondering out loud how someone could have photos taken on the doomed vessel during its ill-fated 1962 voyage (they didn’t exactly have one-hour photo processing on board ships in that era), nor how someone could float in the Bering Strait over night and be rescued the next day alive and not looking the least bit like the ice cube they’d really be.
It’s dumb, but more importantly, it’s just not scary.
