Ghost ship

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title Ghost ship
Original title Ghost ship
Country of production USA , Australia
original language English
Publishing year 2002
length 88 minutes
Age rating FSK 18
Rod
Director Steve Beck
script Mark Hanlon ,
John Pogue
production Joel Silver ,
Robert Zemeckis ,
Gilbert Adler
music John Frizzell
camera Gale Tattersall
cut Roger Barton ,
Rebecca Weigold
occupation

Ghost Ship (alternative title: Ghost Ship - Das Geisterschiff , Ghost Ship - Sea of ​​Horror ) is a horror film from 2002 by director Steve Beck . It is not to be confused with the British film of the same name from 1952.

action

In the opening scene, a large crowd of upper-class people celebrate and dance on the Italian luxury liner Antonia Graza in the 1960s . People enjoy the music both in the great hall and on the foredeck. Katie Harwoods, a young girl traveling alone, sits alone on the sidelines and is cheered up by an officer with a game of letters. When the captain discovers her, he invites her to dance. The next scene shows a person's hand pulling a lever. A winch then pulls a thin steel cable that forms a square around the guests. When it is almost completely unwound, it tears abruptly from the holders on the railing and makes its way inexorably across the foredeck; the guests are all cut in two and sink dead to the ground. Only Katie survived due to her small height and screams in horror.

Forty years later, pilot Jack Ferriman contacted Captain Sean Murphy's rescue team from the Arctic Warrior in a bar ; During a reconnaissance flight in the Bering Strait off the coast of Alaska, he has seen an abandoned ship floating around and offers to take her there. Although the group has only just returned from a six-month salvage tour and their ship is no longer in the best condition, they agree, in the hope of getting the salvage rights for the "ghost ship" and getting rich.

After some time at sea, they discover Antonia Graza , missing since May 21, 1962 , who suddenly appears in front of the Arctic Warrior , invisible to the radar . In pouring rain, the explorers take their first steps on the ship that appeared out of nowhere. From then on, she seems to have been haunted by the disaster. They hear voices and team member Maureen sees "a little girl" - Katie for the first time during a near miss. They also find that the luxury liner is still imposing, but doomed. The ship is leaking, the engine room is flooded, all engines are unusable and the rudder is jammed. In a few days, the ship will hit a reef with its current course and will finally sink. In addition, the Arctic Warrior can not pull the Antonia Graza with its reduced machine power. When they re-enter the liner the next day to have another look around, they find a hold full of gold bars , and they decide to abandon the Antonia Graza and just salvage the gold. While the mechanic Santos clears the engine, the valve of a propane gas bottle opens behind him as if by magic; when helmsman Greer starts the engine, the Arctic Warrior explodes . Santos is killed and the rest of the crew is trapped on the doomed "ghost ship". So if you want to survive you have to save Antonia Graza .

The team set about repairing the leak in the Antonia Graza's hull and the rudder to save her from sinking. On their forays, the crew members also discover the corpses of some men who may not have been dead long, and they find a digital watch that did not exist in 1962. So you are not the first to discover the ship. The ghosts of the captain and Katie Harwoods inform Murphy and Maureen that some of the crew members of the Antonia Graza brutally murdered all passengers and the rest of the crew shortly after a single survivor and the cargo of gold bars were recovered from another wrecked ship, the Loreley had been. The survivor turned out to be a supernatural being who led the singer Francesca and her accomplices to conspire to mass murder, with Francesca being the ringleader and ultimately killing her accomplices. The stranger burned the dead one “mark” with which he can control them. He cannot pin the mark on souls without sin. He cannot control little Katie, who was still without sin when she died. The spirit-turned-captain explains to Sean Murphy who was rescued from the Loreley , whereupon the latter tries desperately to reach his crew.

Meanwhile, the mysterious stranger begins “harvesting” the souls that have just come on board: Greer is seduced by Francesca's ghost and falls into an elevator shaft; Murphy suddenly sees the slain Santos everywhere and finally tries, driven by hallucinations, to kill Maureen, whereupon his crew locks him in an empty water tank. After learning the truth about what happened forty years ago from Katie, Maureen tries to free Murphy, but finds the tank flooded and Murphy dead. From his hand slides the photo of the mysterious survivor who is responsible for all the events: it is Jack Ferriman. And this mercilessly kills everyone from their occupation who is no longer of any use to him.

After killing all of her comrades, Ferriman places Maureen in the engine room of the Antonia Graza and reveals his true nature. He is a servant of the devil whom he calls "boss". After a life full of sin, he is condemned to collect sinful souls on ghost ships and, as soon as they are full, deliver them in shiploads to hell. Again and again he leads rescue teams to the Antonia Graza in order to keep the ship seaworthy and at the same time to collect more souls. Maureen, who has charged the newly repaired hull with explosive charges in order to sink the ship for good, is drawn into a fight by Ferriman. After all, losing out in battle, she can trigger the explosive charge just in time and use it to sink the Antonia Graza . Ferriman is torn apart by the explosion. Guided by Katie's ghost, Maureen can leave the ship on time. The souls trapped on the ship rise around them and flee into the afterlife, with which Ferriman failed. Katie is now free too and disappears after a silent farewell. Maureen, the only survivor of the sinking of the Antonia Graza , is later discovered and rescued by another luxury liner. When leaving the ship in port, she sees to her horror from the ambulance Ferriman board the ship with his boxes full of gold bars to start a new "assignment". Maureen can't help but close the ambulance doors.

criticism

"Formally more complex, but bumpy told and hair-raising implemented horror film that tries to combine the dusty flair of horror films of the 1950s with a fashionably lacquered style."

- Lexicon of international film

background

  • The Antonia Graza is modeled on the sunken Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria in great detail. The interior, however, comes from the filmmakers' imagination.
  • In order to avoid the censorship, the people in the first scenes of the film were not beheaded but cut through.
  • When the Graza went down, only CGI effects were used. The budget was too small to sink a large model.
  • At a cost of $ 35 million, the film grossed $ 30 million in the United States. The film later had total revenues of $ 68 million.
  • The surname Ferriman (English ferryman "ferryman") is probably an allusion to Charon, the ferryman from Greek mythology who brought the dead across the river Acheron to the god of the dead Hades .
  • The story of Mary Celeste that Captain Sean Murphy tells at the beginning is partly true. Presumably the ship was abandoned by the crew because of alcohol fumes. The historical Mary Celeste was carrying industrial alcohol, but the film speaks of a load of cotton. Other details of the story told in the film, such as the year of the event and the route of the ship, do not match the historical events either.
  • Ghost ships were often ships on which the plague had raged. The dead were thrown overboard so that only the last dying were found later, so the ship was almost empty.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of release for Ghost Ship . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , September 2009 (PDF; accessed on February 4, 2018).
  2. ↑ Ghost Ship. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used