Following two rather crappy and unnecessary remakes of “House on Haunted Hill” and “13 Ghosts”, Dark Castle Films brings us yet another CGI laden snoozfest that while not a remake of any kind in the sense of it’s previous ventures, in of itself “Ghost Ship” can hardly be called “unique” in any way, shape, or form. The “story” as it is, deals with a salvage crew discovering a rather large and abandoned ship drifting aimlessly on the open ocean. Of course as things go a terrible history surrounds the vessel and once aboard, our salvage team soon discovers these spooks are not of the “Casper the Friendly Ghost” variety. This one initially started off with a bang and really got my (false) hopes up early on. I won’t ruin too much of it for you, as it is the best part of the film, but think of about fifty passengers suddenly merging with some very sharp and taught steel wire. It’s extremely bloody and messy, and hell…even that CGI shit looked good for a change! To bad this was the best scene and we still have about 90 minutes to go.

The rest of the film is your basic “annoying and non-personable cast stuck in dangerous place which they can’t escape” scenario which we all have seen about a million times before. None of the actors really grabbed my attention, and from an audience standpoint, I really did not care who lived or died. That’s not a good thing folks. The actors also hardly seemed spooked by all the supernatural shit going down around them, as they converse quite casually with the ghosts and with one dude even trying to score with a ghostly broad…what the fuck was that all about? If the people in the movie are not bothered by all the spooky shit going down around them, why should the audience? To be fair, the film did look pretty good, and the set design and overall appearance of the haunted vessel was fairly impressive. To bad the filmmakers could not create a decent scare out of it all. The flick was rather bloody but it’s all of the CGI variety, which just never looks right to me. Though I will admit that “hook through the jaw” bit did make me squirm a tad. In a sense, “Ghost Ship” suffers from the same problems that plagued Dark Castle’s previous films. The overall feel is much to slick and clean feeling, sort of like, yes; you guessed it…a damn MTV video. We also get way to many quick cuts that serve no point other than to give the viewer a headache and a bad case of “what the hell is going on” syndrome. The film also tries to serve up a rather congested and confusing reason for why all this ghostly stuff is happening, and truth be told, I still don’t really understand any of it.

Now, even though I knew this one was going to be pretty crappy, what really irks me about this flick is that it so blatantly rips off 1980’s cheesy “Death Ship” and practically no one in the mainstream audience seems to recognize this. The story may be different and all, but c’mon Dark Castle and Warner Brothers, did you have to steal the poster art from “Death Ship” as well? I guess they did. If you have to watch this one, watch that impressive opening scene, then turn off the VCR to save 90 minutes of your life.