Ghost Ship
Metascore
28 out of 100

Generally unfavorable reviews - based on 25 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 25
  2. Mixed: 8 out of 25
  3. Negative: 17 out of 25
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  1. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Richard Harrington
    60
    The plot doesn't always make sense, despite a thunderous explicatory montage halfway through, but as a fresh setting for terror shenanigans.
  2. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    50
    Is the film worth seeing? Depends. It breaks no new ground as horror movies go, but it does introduce an intriguing location, and it's well made technically. It's better than you expect but not as good as you hope.
  3. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Loren King
    50
    An adequate horror movie for the Halloween season, but it too easily sinks into haunted-house-film conventions, even if the haunted house is decked out as an Italian luxury liner.
  4. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    50
    About as frightening as Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion.
  5. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Staff (Not credited)
    50
    That creaking noise you hear in Ghost Ship is the rattling of countless plot skeletons that have sunk before.
  6. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Sean Axmaker
    50
    Beck wants to dazzle the audience. I'd settle for a story.
  7. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    50
    If you take your ghost stories garnished with a dressing of sadism, sanctimony and silliness, go ahead and squander the nine bucks.
  8. Dallas Observer
    Reviewed by: Gregory Weinkauf
    50
    Not scary enough for its own good, Beck's Ghost Ship ends up stuck, enjoyably enough, between the Scylla of schlock and the Charybdis of camp.
  9. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    38
    Although there are several truly jolting scares, there's also an abundance of hackneyed dialogue and more silly satanic business than you can shake a severed limb at.
  10. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    38
    Pureed, predictable conflation of ''Alien'' and ''Titanic'' and ''The Shining.''
  11. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Rick Groen
    38
    Pretty much what you'd expect -- just another haunted house that happens to float.
  12. Charlotte Observer
    Reviewed by: Lawrence Toppman
    38
    Ghost Ship, which can best be described by altering one consonant in the second word, sustains the stylishness of its opening for exactly three minutes.
  13. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    30
    The movie is simultaneously soft and icky; the gross-out effects are grafted onto a sub-"Tales from the Crypt" ghost story that never scares up any serious chills.
  14. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Nathan Rabin
    30
    Likely to appeal only to undiscriminating nudity-- and gore -- starved adolescents.
  15. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Stephen Holden
    30
    So preoccupied with delivering its effects that it doesn't bother to make sense of its story.
  16. Variety
    Reviewed by: Robert Koehler
    30
    Launched with a few surprising touches and a disturbingly bloody prelude, horror pic collapses under the weight of its own dull conception and weak direction, dialogue and character portraits.
  17. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Ann Hornaday
    30
    Doesn't orchestrate the scares with much finesse.
  18. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Chris Hewitt
    25
    Coincidentally, this is the second movie in two weeks about a haunted seafaring vessel ("Below" is the other), and if you see just one, this shouldn't be it.
  19. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Foreman
    25
    A big, incoherent bore, interesting only as an example of assembly-line movie-making gone awry.
  20. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Carla Meyer
    25
    Stupid, derivative horror film that substitutes extreme gore for suspense.
  21. Baltimore Sun
    Reviewed by: Chris Kaltenbach
    25
    Ghost Ship would have been so much better if they'd just let the ship do more of the acting.
    All this critic's reviews
  22. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    20
    Meandering, sub-aquatic mess: It's so bad it's good, but only if you slide in on a freebie.
  23. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Mark Holcomb
    20
    Despite a couple of inventive CGI effects (one involving mass evisceration), the results are more predictable and less frightening than a Con Ed bill in mid August.
  24. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
    20
    A better name for it would have been the Herschell Gordon Lewis: the godfather of gore himself couldn't have topped this succession of grisly deaths.
  25. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    10
    See evil. See evil run. Run, evil, run all the way to cable television purgatory.

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
6.2 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 66 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 30 out of 47
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 47
  3. Negative: 12 out of 47
  1. eTurkey
    3
    This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view. Good lord, what a brainless film. Don't waste your money renting this on DVD or even your bandwidth torrenting it from the internet. Just stay away. Believe you me, it's not worth the trouble of trying to make sense of the overall plot. To discover halfway throughout the movie that one of the main characters, Jack Ferriman, is actually a sub-servant of Satan himself is just too damn far-fetched, even for the most optimistic viewers. One of the ONLY redeeming factors about 'Ghost Ship' is a disemboweled scene early on in the picture. That's it!… Full Review »
  2. Annoymous1
    3
    Terrible ending, No scares, Plain blood and gore...Its a cluttered mess with and no enjoyment. The only good thing that made me put 3 instead of 0 was the typically same but worser Titanic.… Full Review »
  3. Rikiege
    4
    It is a very bad movie .. but the idea is good.
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