I’d love to say that I watched this movie again for the first time in like ten years amongst friends. The movie watched three out of four of us. Maybe three and a half because my best friend was awake in spurts. With that being said, I have a confession to make. I watched this movie on HBO when I was like 13 or 14. Was not supposed to be watching movies like this at that age, but somehow, I watched so many things that shaped my life at that age and wasn’t supposed to even know the name of these things. Anywho, I would always tell people that I was afraid of Ghost Ship and Thirteen Ghosts. I lied and I am ashamed. After rewatching this movie, I was dumb. This movie is in no way, shape, or form scary!
On Rotten Tomatoes, this film has a 15%, and in my opinion, that’s generous. The movie started out really well. The establishment of the team was clear. The mystery was introduced. Motivation was shallow, but we went with it. It was ok. You know what else this movie had going for it? The cast. At the time, I think Isaiah Washington, Gabriel Byrne, and Julianna Margulies were the notable stars here. You know who else was in this film? A young Billy Butcher and Violet Baudelaire otherwise known as Karl Urban and Emily Browning. The things you forget when you haven’t seen a movie in over ten years.
Here’s what fell flat. The mystery did not come together well in the end. Margulies plays Epps and Epps seems drawn to Katie (Browning), who was a young girl on the ship by herself, on her way to meet her parents when everyone is murdered. There is no foundation of Epps having a daughter or some type of past with girls or women. She was just able to see and talk to this spirit…because she, too, was a girl once. That was never explained.
Desmond Harrington, who plays the master mind murderer here Ferriman, was a pretty good villain. We had no idea he would be the person who orchestrated this entire ship murder and be dead. Here’s what doesn’t curl all the way over for me. His motivation was collecting souls to….deliver the souls to some store of “management,” as he put it, I assume he works for either the Devil or is a partner of Davy Jones. He won’t collecting souls in exchange for the release of his. He didn’t want someone else’s soul. He didn’t want to invade someone’s body to walk the earth as a human again to steal the gold and live well. Nothing like that. Just to collect souls to deliver to some entity that wasn’t clear.
Isaiah Washington’s dead was dumb. He knew he was following a ghost and said as such before he started following her. Why did you think you could have sex with her? She didn’t have you under a spell! She was just a ghost walking through the ship! That annoyed me.
In the beginning of this film, you wanted me to believe that these people believed that they could pull this ocean liner with the little tugboat they brought to sea. You also wanted me to believe that they thought they would be able to deliver this ship that had been lost at sea since 1962, that when they found it was just floating along, safely. You also want me to be ok with how they presented this gold murder-all-the-people-on-the-liner-that-saved-us plot. There’s a lot of things the movie does as it moves along that rests on the audience being like, “Ok,” and not asking any questions. As a friend of mine says, “That dog don’t hunt.”
Do any of you remember this film? Does anyone want to explain to me why I was afraid of this movie when I was like 12 ‘cause I don’t know anymore?
BLACK WATCH 