| 60 |
Washington Post
Richard Harrington
The plot doesn't always make sense, despite a thunderous explicatory montage halfway through, but as a fresh setting for terror shenanigans.
|
| 50 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Beck wants to dazzle the audience. I'd settle for a story.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Tribune
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.
|
| 50 |
Entertainment Weekly
Staff (Not credited)
That creaking noise you hear in Ghost Ship is the rattling of countless plot skeletons that have sunk before.
|
| 50 |
ReelViews
About as frightening as Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion.
|
| 50 |
Dallas Observer
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.
|
| 50 |
LA Weekly
If you take your ghost stories garnished with a dressing of sadism, sanctimony and silliness, go ahead and squander the nine bucks.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Sun-Times
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.
|
| 38 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
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.
|
| 38 |
Boston Globe
Pureed, predictable conflation of ''Alien'' and ''Titanic'' and ''The Shining.''
|
| 38 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Pretty much what you'd expect -- just another haunted house that happens to float.
|
| 38 |
Charlotte Observer
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.
|
| 30 |
The New York Times
So preoccupied with delivering its effects that it doesn't bother to make sense of its story.
|
| 30 |
Washington Post
Doesn't orchestrate the scares with much finesse.
|
| 30 |
Variety
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.
|
| 30 |
TV Guide
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.
|
| 30 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Likely to appeal only to undiscriminating nudity-- and gore -- starved adolescents.
|
| 25 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Carla Meyer
Stupid, derivative horror film that substitutes extreme gore for suspense.
|
| 25 |
New York Post
A big, incoherent bore, interesting only as an example of assembly-line movie-making gone awry.
|
| 25 |
Baltimore Sun
Ghost Ship would have been so much better if they'd just let the ship do more of the acting.
|
| 25 |
Miami Herald
Chris Hewitt
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.
|
| 20 |
Chicago Reader
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.
|
| 20 |
Austin Chronicle
Meandering, sub-aquatic mess: It's so bad it's good, but only if you slide in on a freebie.
|
| 20 |
Village Voice
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.
|
| 10 |
Los Angeles Times
See evil. See evil run. Run, evil, run all the way to cable television purgatory.
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