Brenda's Review of Ghost Ship 2002 *Spoilers*

Transcript

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Good morning, this is Brenda, and I'm back with another review. Today I'm going to be reviewing 2002's Ghost Ship. I really can't believe this movie is 24 years old already. I haven't watched it in over 15 years, and I've had this happen with other movies, but do you ever go back and re-watch a movie from years ago and you find that a lot of those actors that you didn't recognize then have become really famous now? I was really excited to see Carl Urban in this movie. He plays Billy Butcher on the boys. We also have Emily Browning playing Katie. She dies at the beginning of the movie and becomes our little ghost girl. She was in Lemony Snicket's series of unfortunate events with Jim Carrey. She was also in Sucker Punch, and then I also knew her from The Uninvited. We also have the very easy on the eyes Desmond Harrington. He played Detective Quinn in Dexter, and he was also in Wrong Turn. Then we have Gabriel Byrne. He's the dad from Hereditary, and I also knew him from Stigmata and Vampire Academy. Also, if you're a fan of ER, you would see somebody else that you recognize in this movie. Ghost Ship has one of the most memorable opening scenes of any horror movie I've ever watched, and I went back to see if it looked a little cheesy, and I don't think it does. I think it stood the test of time. We see Katie, the ship's captain, and some of the passengers dancing on deck. The captain had noticed Katie was bored, so he went over and asked her to dance, so that's why she happened to be on the dance floor. We then see a hand pull some type of lever that's hooked to the cables. It pulls tight now, it cuts everything in half that's in its way. We started off seeing flowers that are cut in half, and then we see the cable itself and it has blood on it. In their final seconds, many of the couples are just looking at each other before they start to fall. Some of them their clothes fall first. Katie was the only child on the dance floor, and she was shorter than everybody else, so that's why she survived it and all these bodies are falling around her. I'm going to see if I can find just that opening scene on YouTube, and I'll post that on my Facebook page, Brendelyn Smith, podcast host and writer. It's definitely worth a watch even if you don't watch the rest of the movie. We then get to meet the salvage crew of the Arctic Warrior, which is a boat that goes to find ships that are lost at sea. They're approached by Jack, who is apparently a pilot who has found this boat but he needs help to pull it back in. He has pictures of the boat and wants to hire them for a 20% finder's fee. They agree and set out to find this boat. So it's dark and foggy and not falling by mud vein is playing in the background. And what they start to see isn't really consistent on the radar. They end up crashing into an ocean liner and see that it's the Antonia Grazza. I think this ocean liner was the holy grail for the captain of the tugboat. He knew it'd been floating around for 40 years and that it disappeared May 21st, 1962, and had carried over 600 passengers. Part of the salvage team goes onto the ocean liner to look it over to see what it needs. They find that there's no fuel, the compass is broken, there's repairs that need to be made. They also find a digital watch, which digital watches weren't around in 1962, so now they know that other people have been on the boat before. They find gold bars on the boat, so they know that they're going to be rich even if they can't get the ocean liner towed back. One of our salvagers, Maureen, starts to see Katie on more than one occasion. Katie tells her that she's not like the others on the ocean liner, and some of the other salvage members have encountered ghosts. Katie takes Maureen's hand and is able to show her what happened to all the passengers and crew. We get a montage that goes back and shows us the cable snapping, but we also see people getting shot near the swimming pool and rat poison is being put in the soup to be served in the dining room. John Frizzle's My Little Box is playing in the background while all this is going on. And Epps recognizes Jack. We learn that Jack is some kind of demon that is collecting souls. He was able to cause a gas leak, so the Arctic warrior ended up exploding, so now they have no way to get back to shore. Our demon slash Jack had been using the gold bars and the ocean liner as bait to get people on board to collect their souls. Salvager Marine Epps is our only survivor. She's able to use explosives to sink the ocean liner. This frees all the souls of the cruising passengers and Katie, who had been on the boat all this time. It appears that all of their souls are floating up to the heavens. Marine Epps is rescued and we see her in an ambulance at the end. Before the ambulance doors are closed, she sees men carrying containers of what looks like gold onto another cruise ship. These men happen to look like her salvage team and also Jack. So we can only assume that the demonic force is gonna take over another cruise liner. Even if you don't watch this entire movie, it is definitely worth going back to watch the opening scene. Now I've got an urge to take a cruise. Let's see how many wine glasses this movie deserves. Having the ghost on the boat does make it a little bit eerie, but I'm only gonna give that one half a wine glass because they're not that scary. I love the environment of this. I love an old rusty ship, so that gets a whole wine glass. As far as being evil, we have our hot demon, wine glass. I'm gonna give Katie two wine glasses on the empathy scale. We don't really see what happened to her. Um, Epps does find her skeleton hanging in a closet, but we also see crew members taking her in her room and closing the door, and I can only imagine what happens to her in there. I found it entertaining through the entire movie. I'll give it one wine glass for that. If I ever go back and watch it again, it'll probably be years from now. I definitely will go back and watch that first scene again. So this movie gets a total of five and a half wine glasses. My next review is going to be on my comfort movie, 1980s The Shining with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duval. So until then.