GHOST SHIP []
Slow-moving maritime horror. Running time: 98 minutes. Rated R (gore, violence, naked breasts). At the Chelsea West, the Union Square, the Kips Bay, others.
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THERE is one good scene in Steve Beck’s never-ending “Ghost Ship” – if you like your horror gruesome – and it takes place within the first five minutes.
Apart from this one sequence, “Ghost Ship” is a big, incoherent bore, interesting only as an example of assembly-line movie-making gone awry.
And it is shocking only to the extent that screenwriters Mark Hanlon and John Pogue and “13 Ghosts” director Beck were presumably paid a criminally large amount of money for such uninspired, lazy work.
As you sit there, the seconds slowly passing, you can almost hear them ticking off a checklist of elements from various, more successful movies and throwing them into the mix, in the hope that it will come together enough to satisfy a dumb, undemanding audience.
You’ve got the “Alien” set-up: a bunch of cynical working stiffs who have to split up and walk around with flashlights like moving targets until only the tough chick in a tank-top is left alive.
You’ve got those creepy corridors and ballrooms intermittently peopled with ghosts out of “The Shining.”
You’ve got one of those frightening little girls with a pale face and an English accent.
You’ve got the temptation of gold turning comrades into murderous enemies, stolen from “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “Leprechaun,” etc.
Plus, of course, all the standard issue special effects: walls that pour with blood, initially appetizing food that’s suddenly crawling with maggots and the beautiful woman who morphs into a hag.
To link all these pieces, the filmmakers borrow the premise of the sci-fi/supernatural thriller “Event Horizon” (itself an unsuccessful if creepy cross between “Alien” and “The Shining”), except that their theology makes even less sense: something to do with a maritime demon who collects the souls of sinners and good ghosts trapped between worlds.
Julianna Margulies, a fine, intelligent actress who deserves better roles, stars as Epps, the salvager with perfectly groomed eyebrows.
As her fellow crew members, Captain Gabriel Byrne (almost comatose), engineer Alex Dimitriades, and first mate Isaiah Washington inhabit old racist stereotypes: an Irishman so desperate for booze he’ll drink a ghost’s whiskey, a Mexican obsessed with cars and a straight-arrow black guy undone by his desire for a half-naked white woman.