Overall Rating
  Awesome: 18.8%
Worth A Look: 15.38%
Average: 6.84%
Pretty Bad: 26.5%
Total Crap: 32.48%
6 reviews, 81 user ratings
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| Ghost Ship |
by Scott Weinberg
"Yes I understand: it's a SHIP with GHOSTS on it. Let's move on."
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I must admit that I was pretty excited to hear about the inception of 'Dark Castle Entertainment' a few years back. A joint effort between producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and William Malone, this outfit promised sleek and slimy high-end horror fare for the "Tales from the Crypt" crowd. Three years later, the production company boasts a surprisingly sad record of 0 and 3.The first offering from Dark Castle was a silly little guilty pleasure called The House on Haunted Hill. Remake of a popular old mini-classic and directed with a ham-fisted style by Malone (FearDotCom), this one blew its load in a clever prologue involving a runaway elevator. An interesting cast (Famke Janssen, Geoffrey Rush, Chris Kattan, Jeffrey Combs) and welcome sense of humor made a tired flick somewhat entertaining, though it's hardly "must see" fodder for the horror freak.
Next up was the blatantly non-sensical 13 Ghosts, yet another remake - and a movie nearly unwatchable in its ineptitude. First-time director Steve Beck hoped that a few flashy effects and swanky production design would camoflauge the stupidity; they don't. The ghost characters could have made this one a cult favorite, only they were essentially ignored...in favor of Shannon Elizabeth and Matthew Lillard. Now that's just sad.
Beck gets a second shot with Ghost Ship, a movie that (much like its predecessors) opens with a gruesomely cool bang, offers a meager handful of colorfully nasty moments, and ends before the 90-minute mark. Gabriel Byrne and Julianna Margulies are the ghost chasers this time out and instead of a haunted house - we get a boat. OK, I've been burned twice so far but I do love my cheeseball horror flicks, so Ghost Ship looked promising.
It's as if this Dark Castle crew are crawling before they can walk, which is fine...even if the process is taking longer than it should. I mean, is there ANY reason that a horror movie should have 45 consecutive minutes of 'slow hallway searches'?? I'm all for setting a mood and a creepy atmosphere, but there's no denying that the first two acts of this film are woefully dull.
Taken as a feature-length take on the adored Tales from the Crypt series, the Dark Castle flicks should certainly entertain fans of 'mainstream horror'. Each movie is loud and sloppy and stupid, but there's nothing really wrong with that. (I know from experience that this type of horror movie is the favorite of 12-year-old film freaks the world over.) But each movie represents a whole lot of wasted potential.
There's an attempt here to bring an old-fashioned sense of 'creepy atmosphere' to these movies, and that's certainly to be commended, but here's a tip: Hire better screenwriters! The dialogue in a Ghost Ship need not be William Faulkner, but how difficult is it to pen interesting dialogue? There's only so many ways to explain that you're about to go wandering down a dank, wet hallway, so stop straining yourself.
It should be mentioned that the set design and interiors of the haunted vessel are more than effectively creepy and moodily lit. So I just did.
Gabriel Byrne earns a nice paycheck, seeming bored as a salvage crew captain. Margulies simply isn't a very convincing actress, and let's just leave it at that. (Pretty hair, though.) The supporting cast is a collection of Eldards and Isaiahs, each one doomed to a pitifully underwhelming demise. None of the characters are even remotely interesting, so when their death scenes are equally as bland...horror fans get annoyed.
To those hardcore gore freaks, here's what I can offer: a very very cool prologue that I won't spoil by telling you how sloppily nasty is truly is, but it's damn good. Late in the film there's also a rather well-conceived 'backstory montage' that actually got me to like what I was seeing. The body count (prologue aside) is distressingly low, and the 'kill shots' (though clever in conception) are drab in execution.
Of the three Dark Castle flicks we've seen so far, two are 'passable for horror fans' and one's 'just awful'. (Decide for yourself which are which.) Here's hoping that the Castle guys learn a way to stretch their 30-minute premises into a feature-length film. The best parts from these three flicks would make one damn serviceable little horror movie, so the potential is clearly there.
The DVD offers a quartet of intermittently informative EPK featurettes: Visual FX, Max on Set: Ghost Ship, Designing Ghost Ship and (my favorite) A Closer Look at the Gore. There's also a click-heavy annoyance (Secrets of the Anotnio Graza) that offers four brief 'backstories' from the film, the original theatrical trailer, cast/crew filmographies and a Mudvayne music video.Update: Dark Castle's fourth movie was "Gothika" - easily their worst so far. Next up is a remake of "House of Wax". Keep your fingers crossed.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6251&reviewer=128
originally posted: 05/01/04 21:35:27
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USA
25-Oct-2002 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
05-Dec-2002
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