The tyranist's thoughts
I went into this one insisting that it was just a rip-off of Deep Rising, but came out willing to admit that it was original enough. Of course, it isn't completely original, is it? How many abandoned ship at sea stories can you think of that aren't pretty much identical with all the rest?
A young man approaches a salvage crew with a prospect too good to be true and manages to convince them that he should be paid for bringing it to their attention. They find the ship, and its past, and suddenly things go from weird to worse. Tell me, if the first thing you saw on a ship that had been abandoned for 40 years was a clean little girl in a white dress, would you stick around?
This one looked really bad. From the worst-ever tagline to the mediocre trailer, I just didn't think this one was going to be any good. It probably helped that I felt that way because I ended up feeling a little more than satisfied by the movie. At least it wasn't as spectacularly unoriginal as I had expected.
Still, there just doesn't seem to be a new lost-ship-at-sea story and this one doesn't do much to contribute to the lore. Its lone creative twist is interesting but doesn't really change anything in the end.
The movie was more gory than I expected and it had a lot of nice special effects. There were elements that I thought were under-used, including some of the actors. The script was nice and overall, I enjoyed the movie. It was worth seeing once. Perhaps you'll like it too, but then I may have ruined it for you by praising the movie.
Posted: March 15th, 2003

Rish's Reviews
A few years back, a roommate of mine was working for Joel Silver's office and he brought me home a script for a movie called Chimera, being developed by Warner Bros. for Dark Castle Entertainment. I read the script (about some salvagers who are driven insane and kill each other over a haunted cruise ship), enjoyed it somewhat, and when I heard the film was being made as Ghost Ship, I figured I didn't really need to go see it.
I can't decide if that was a mistake or not.
I gave the flick a casual watch the other day, and it wasn't great, but it wasn't awful, like I assumed it would be. It certainly boasted a bad title, no matter what other qualities it had. Sure, "Chimera" wasn't a great title, but this one is far worse, feeling to me like the worst kind of pandering to a brainless mainstream audience. But worse, as tyranist mentioned, was its godlessly stupid tagline: "Sea evil."
Helmed (pun not intended) by the director of Thirteen Ghosts, most of the cast is familiar, from Gabriel Byrne to Karl "Eomer" Urban to Emily "The hot little girl from A Series of Unfortunate Events Browning. I was a fan of Julianna Margolies from her work on "E.R." (same with co-star Ron Eldard), but she really doesn't seem brilliant to have left the show when she did. After all, this has to be her most successful project since then.
There were a lot of inventive shots, fun twists and turns, and convincing special effects. I don't think there was a single scare in the whole damn movie, but the film is actually quite entertaining, and pretty interesting, especially when we find out what the true threat is (more or less). It has a great opening, a nice premise, and a unique way of dispatching its characters (the opening wire sequence is unlike anything I've seen before . . . good stuff).
The same year another haunted ship movie, Below was released and instantly discarded (the same thing would happen the year after with competing childhood boogeyman stories Darkness Falls and They). While Below was a better film, this was enjoyable, clever, and except for ending on a wholly mediocre note, worth a low-level recommendation.
Best Scare: I was wrong, there was one body discovery scare that was pretty well done.
Posted: December 20, 2004