THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2002
FILM
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 7
'Ghost Ship'sinks quickly
FILM
The sounds of an Italian lounge singer waft through the air as the passengers aboard a cruise ship dance and sip champagne. At the corner of the dance floor, a little girl in a blue dress is playing with a string of beads. On each bead is a different letter, and the girl rearranges the beads to spell "I am bored," beautifully summing up the only thing I felt like screaming while watching Ghost Ship.
Peter Black pblack@kansan.com
Sure, the preview never made Ghost Ship look very good, especially with a tag line like "sea evil", but at least there was hope that director Steve Beck, (Thirteen Ghosts) would be able to create another somewhat frightening film just in time for Halloween. However, the film never even stirs the waters of being frightening. All it does, in fact, is drown in a pool of clichés.
Contributed art
By now, everyone should know that greed will only lead to your demise. The idea has been exploited in thousands of movies, like all the Indiana Jones films, but Ghost Ship decides to travel those waters again. A pilot, Desmond Harrington, proposes to a crew of ocean salvagers (Gabriel Byrne, Julianna Margulies and Ron Eldard) to recover a mysterious ship he had discovered on one of his flights over
the Bering Strait. Enticed by the allure of possible riches, the crew tracks down the ocean liner despite its disappearing and reappearing on the radar.
Julianna Margulies stars in Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures' horror film Ghost Ship.
Slowly, the members of the crew begin to figure out that an unexplainable force is keeping them on the ship. A freak propane accident blows up their tug boat and forces
Once aboard, the crew creeps through the darkness of the rust-covered hallways like intruders in the night. Their flashlights light the dim corridors showing a neverending possibility of rooms slowly revealing evidence that something horrible had happened aboard the ship. Bullet holes line the walls of an emptied pool, containers of rat poison line kitchen counters, and a bloodied razor blade lies crusted to a sink bowl.
'GHOST SHIP' *1/2(OUT OF FOUR)
Rated R for strong violence, language and sexuality
Playing at Southwind 12,3433 Iowa St.
them to try to repair the cruise ship to save their lives. But one by one, they are gruesomely killed.
The crew decides to split up and send each member out to explore the ship alone and work in some unnecessary nudity. Ghost Ship continues to re-use elements from all other horror films but forgets one
thing horror films are supposed to be scary. All the surprises lurking around the dark corners of this film stick out like a lighthouse in the night.
Ghost Ship has few life jackets to help it stay afloat. An intriguing music video-like flashback uses slow- and fast-motion camera work to show the spree of killings that took place on the ship. The film did come up with new and horrible ways to die. Even though the film pushes the limits on grotesque scenes of death, the rest of Ghost Ship never lives up to the grittiness of those scenes, leaving the film to sink.