Patrons voted last month, and now we’re reviewing Ghost Ship, and it’s… from the early 2000’s. If you are in the mood for some modern schlock, then maybe it’s worth the $3 to watch the whole movie. But really, this movie’s opening scene sets expectations way too high for itself.

Ghost Ship is about a Ghost Ship filled with Ship Ghosts that’s discovered by a salvage crew that eventually become Ship Ghosts on the Ghost Ship.

The salvage crew aboard the tugboat HMS Whogivesafuck, are given a lead on an abandoned ship in the Bering Strait. The information is brought to them by Jack Ferriman, a Canadian Air Force pilot who insists on coming along with them on their salvage operation because he looks too handsome to be in just one scene.

The crew sails out to the ship and discovers it’s a missing 1960’s Italian ocean liner called the Antonia Graza, which suffered a tragic boating accident that bifurcated most of it’s passengers. 

As they lazily wander around the corridors talking about working, they find out that this SHIP has more GHOST than they bargained for.

Ghost Ship is described by Roger Ebert as “It’s better than you expect but not as good as you hope.” Which is pretty accurate, but still pretty generous considering expectations going in are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The movie starts out with one of the best schlocky gory sequences in all of horror. Really, If you watched the opening scene and just walked away, you wouldn’t be missing much.

The rest of the film is a pretty standard slow burn haunted house story set on a boat. The problem with that set up is that it requires the supposed professional salvage workers to do exactly zero work for an hour and 4 minutes of the 91 minute runtime. There is a little bit of mystery unraveling going on during that first hour, but most of the action happens in the last 20 minutes.

It’s not a good movie, but it has a good cast, and it is salvaged by the bookends of it’s ridiculous beginning and ending.

If you would like to watch something better from the same time, check out Dead End, which could easily have been called ghost car.

3/10

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