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2/26/2021

Ghost Ship (2002) or, Turkey Ship

 

A super-imposed human skull underlines the ominous prospects on this poster for Steve Beck's Ghost Ship

A group of daredevils, who salvage shipwrecks for money, get a tip about a large ship, which has been missing for 40 years...

 

Ghost Ship is written by Mark Hanlon (Buddy Boy (1999)) and John Pogue (The Skulls (2000)) and directed by Steve Beck (Thirteen Ghosts (2001)).

A confusion of styles and silly cardboard-like characters mar this producers' conceptualized, special effects-driven horror adventure, done with a typical credo of its time that exhausting cross-cutting will in itself magically produce excitement, (not true.)

The plot gets increasingly jumbled and strange, and not even the cast, which has several capable actors, resembles a resource in this studio-molded nightmare of a turkey.

 



Watch a 3-minute scene from the film here

 

Cost: 20 mil. $

Box office: 68.3 mil. $ 

= Box office success (returned 3.41 times its cost)

[Ghost Ship premiered 22 October (California) and runs 90 minutes. Hanlon's 1996 spec script Chimera was the basis of the film. Shooting took place from January - April 2002 in Australia, Nova Scotia and Vancouver, British Columbia. The film opened #3, behind fellow new release Jackass: The Movie and holdover hit The Ring, to an 11.5 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another week in the top 5 (#5) and grossed 30.1 mil. $ (44.1 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Spain with 6.2 mil. $ (9.1 %) and Japan with 3.8 mil. $ (5.6 %). Roger Ebert gave the film a 2/4 star review, translating to a notch over this one. Beck left filmmaking after Ghost Ship. Gabriel Byrne (Capital (2012)) returned in Shade (2003); Julianna Margulies (The Sopranos (2006-07)) in 3 TV credits prior to her theatrical return in Slingshot (2005). Ghost Ship is rotten at 16 % with a 3.90/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]


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