GHOST SHIP (2002) Sinks, five minutes in Yeesh...I know originality isn't likely to be a remake's strong point, but I feel like I've seen this movie about a half-dozen times. Thing is, I only saw the first half before, and that was just once. This is another movie I had to rent twice because of a scratched disc. Note to self: no more renting stacks of movies unless there's something in there which I'm damn confident is going to be good. After a nice opening (pink 60's-print credits, a dance floor full of people getting cut in half), Ghost Ship goes to shit awfully quickly. In fact, the moment at which it goes to shit can be pinpointed with some exactitude - you know how when people get cut in half in the movies, they don't actually fall apart until they notice they've been cut in half? You look down, you're like Aw crap I've been cut in half, and then your torso slides off your legs and you're writhing in a pile of your own guts. It's pretty Wile E. Coyote, but I've accepted that it's part of the modern horror movie playbook as it applies to cutting people in half, and here it is applied with an emphasis on quantity heretofore unseen. Here's where it gets too silly though: when your arm's been so severed, and yet does not drop to the ground until you notice the injury. I can accept people still being able to stand for a few stunned seconds; but the arm thing, no. Even Final Destination 2 got this right. This happens to, like, everybody in the first five minutes of this movie, which never gets good again. A salvage crew (headed by the oft-lamented Gabriel Byrne) gets a tip from a landlubber that this cruise ship, that disappeared in the Atlantic forty years previous, has resurfaced around the Bering Strait - you do the navigation on that one. The landlubber (Desmond Harrington) serves much the same purpose as the girlfriend in Twister - to give the cast somebody to explain everything to for the benefit of us dumbass viewers. They find the ship, go on board to look around and some mildly "spooky" stuff happens (a clock goes BONG BONG BONG, they find a digital watch that shouldn't be on a ship that disappeared in the 60's, word puzzles twist themselves around to leave eerie messages that only the audience notices, and most expectedly, there's a little girl making ominous portents of danger, with a blue bow in her hair no less). (ticks off fingers) There's a twin False Scare By Prankster, the black guy doesn't have a hit record so he's as good as dead, the food turns into maggots, a flashback to the 1960 incident is accompanied by some wildly inappropriate phat beats, aaaaaand...it's directed by the guy who made that terrible 13 Ghosts remake. I'm trying to think of what in this movie works after that intro, and I'm simply not comfortable thinking this hard about this movie. The mighty power of my brain has only so many seconds left until it expires with the rest of me. Nice sets? BACK TO THE G's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE