Ghost Ship-Big Boat Blues

Sing along! "It's the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgeraaaa....", wait, no...it's the Antonia Graza. There's a difference! Really!

Ghost Ship

Rating: **1/2
DVD
Directed by Steve Beck
Gabriel Byrne .... Captain Sean Murphy
Julianna Margulies .... Maureen Epps
Ron Eldard .... Dodge
Desmond Harrington .... Jack Ferriman
Isaiah Washington .... Greer

91 mins

http://www.ghostshipmovie.com/

Terror on the high seas. It's trite, I know, but it's APT, and that counts for plenty.

An oceangoing grand ball gets cut short, literally, by the surprise failing of a piece of high-tension electrical cable. I have to admit, it's a real surprise watching patrons fall to pieces in the first FIVE MINUTES of the movie. Boy, just when you thought things couldn't get any more hellacious!

The sole survivor of this incident is a young girl who was too short to be affected by the suddenly tensed line.

Then we fast-forward to the present day, and a handful of oceangoing scavengers towing a large hunk of something or other that represents a LOT of scrap metal tonnage. The crew of the salvager is celebrating their success when an arctic weather pilot brings them an interesting offer--a boat adrift in international waters in the Bering Strait.

The Arctic Warrior, our salvage team's boat, goes in to seek after the boat and runs afoul of trouble early on. The boat's radar only sporadically picks up the massive vessel, which turns out to be an ocean liner. Thus, in the middle of a pouring rainstorm, the Arctic Warrior slams bow-on into the Antonia Graza, our giant ocean liner.

Murphy, the Arctic Warrior's captain, knows the Antonia Graza and her story well, although he doesn't know the story of the deaths on deck.

Murphy and company's first foray onto the Graza doesn't end well--the flooring gives way beneath a crewmate and almost sends him falling into what looks like a ballroom. One of the crew spots a little girl standing in the ballroom--the same little girl who survived the bloodbath on the Graza in the first place.

Weird things continue to abound as the crew explores the ship. One crewmember, Epps, who saw the little girl in the ballroom, knocks her head on the marble floor of a swimming pool. Her head wound bleeds slightly, and the blood flows INTO a hole in the pool. The pool is also littered with aging shell casings. After Epps leaves, the pool fills with blood, pouring in from the bullet holes.
[BB]
Worse yet, a flood of water and corpses pours out of a ventilation shaft. FRESH corpses. Month-old corpses. Shortly thereafter, Epps stumbles across a surprise in the cargo hold--a strongbox filled with gold bars.

Make that strongboxes.

The crew packs up the gold in universal acclaim and poises to load it onto the Arctic Warrior, but the Arctic Warrior has troubles of its own. The boat starts...

..and explodes.

Someone, rather someTHING, had opened the valve on a propane tank. When the boat started, the propane caught, explosively. The Arctic Warrior dies in a burst of flames.

Now our crew is stranded on the Antonia Graza, and the weirdness only gets weirder. Food, sealed in cans, suddenly goes maggoty. Ghosts appear from out of nowhere, and the crew starts dying.

The little girl takes Epps on a little psychic mystery tour, showing Epps what happened on the night in question.

EVERYTHING.

So you can probably guess what happens to the Antonia Graza.

And in a bit of a twist ending, well, I'll let you catch the twist. It's a nifty little surprise on this otherwise predictable junket.

Extra features, and there are quite a bit, include English, French and Spanish subtitles, and your choice of English or French dialogue. They make a special point of telling you that it was dubbed in Quebec. There's a cast and crew featurette, a documentary, a subsection called "Secrets of the Antonia Graza", which is a puzzle game that gives you four extra stories. I suspect these may be deleted scenes, cleverly packaged. There's a visual effects featurette, a SPECIAL effects featurette devoted solely to the gore, a theatrical trailer, a featurette about the set design and even a music video. AND if you've got a DVD-ROM drive, there's even MORE features.

I haven't seen this many features on a DVD in a long time. Now if they could have only made the story a little less lackluster.

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