Ghost Ship review

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"We Put the SIN in Cinema"

If you can't get enough old-school cinema through Charade remake The Truth About Charlie, the dated Warner Bros. logo and opening credits of Steve Beck's Ghost Ship should help you kick it all the way back to 1962 (one year before Charade was released). Aside from a very, very cool opening scene, in which something wonderfully gruesome happens to a whole lot of innocent people (if you've seen The Cube, it's pretty similar, but on a much larger scale), Ship is just another dumb American horror flick. A lot of people are saying it's like Event Horizon but in the ocean instead of space. Trouble is, they already made that film - it was called Deep Rising, and it was every bit as bad as Ship is.

I don't know about you, but when I hear the words "ghost" and "ship" together, I can't help but think of the Shit List definition of "ghost shit," which, of course, is the mysterious type of defecation that results in a mess on the toilet paper but an empty bowl. Ghost shits are a hundred times more mystifying than anything that happens in Ship, which is about a salvage ship with a ragtag crew of various misfits who, after being tipped off by a Canadian pilot (Desmond Harrington), discover the long-lost Italian cruise ship Antonia Graza in the Bering Sea. Following the lead of The Perfect Storm's greedy sailors who are ultimately punished for their gluttony, the Gabriel-Byrne-led team decide to attempt to tow the giant vessel back to sea because, as you no doubt already know, the Finders-Keepers/Losers-Weepers rule applies to anything found in international waters.

Predictably, they start dying one at a time, though the Black Guy (Isaiah Washington) doesn't go first, as one might expect (is there such a thing as the Cholo Rule?). Julianna Margulies, who is probably so happy she turned down ER's $20-million-a-year offer to make crap like this, is really the main character in Ship. Just to rub it in, she's cast alongside her former ER cohort (and real-life squeeze), Ron Eldard.

1:30 - R for strong violence/gore, language and sexuality

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Ghost Ship (2002)

Review of Ghost Ship (2002) by Jon Popick