One Of Karl Urban's Earliest Roles Was In This Underrated Horror Movie

Not too many people remember Steve Beck's 2002 horror film "Ghost Ship." If anything stands out about the movie, it's the amazing opening sequence wherein the audience learns how the titular ship became a ghost ship in the first place. It seems that in 1962, on a luxury ocean liner called the Antonia Graza, a group of wealthy Italian partiers were having a marvelous dance up on the ship's deck when a malfunctioning winch, attached to a strong cable, snapped, and ... well, the resulting disaster will stick in your memory. There is one survivor, a young girl named Katie, played by a young Emily Browning.

Fast-forward to the present, and the bulk of "Ghost Ship" follows a group of salvagers that find and aim to plunder the Antonia Graza, which has been adrift for 40 years. The salvage team is led by Captain Sean Murphy, played by Gabriel Byrne. The rest of the salvage team is played by a nice cross-section of talented actors, including Julianna Margulies, Isaiah Washington, and Karl Urban in one of his earliest roles. At least half of these people, if not all of them, will meet some kind of supernatural demise before the film's conclusion. /Film once called it one of the best offshore horror movies of all time.

As the salvage team pokes around on the ghost ship, ghostly things begin happening. The tugboat the team drove out to the Antonia Graza mysteriously explodes, for one, stranding everyone on board. Of course, the ghosts of dead Antonia Graza passengers begin appearing in the shadows, alternately seducing, tricking, or murdering the cast. "Ghost Ship" is hardly a classic, but it's not as bad as its 14% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 128 reviews) would have you believe.

Apart from its gory opening, "Ghost Ship" also features a few good, creepy moments. I liked the scene wherein a bullet-hole-riddled wall on the Antonia Garza begins bleeding and filling the room with blood. There is a fun scene wherein two characters, including one played by Ron Eldard, begin chowing down on some ghostly food (the fools) only to have the food turn to maggots in their mouths. It should be noted that Eldard and his co-star Margulies were an item at the time, so maybe he felt comfortable eating bugs as a way of impressing his girlfriend. Eldard and Margulies broke up the year after "Ghost Ship," however, so one might posit that it wasn't a successful attempt. As for Karl Urban (who is the other character eating bugs), he plays a guy named Munder. Munder gets crushed to death before the movie ends. Sorry, Munder. 

"Ghost Ship" was actually a money-maker. On a modest $20 million budget, the film made over $68 million worldwide. It was swallowed in American theaters, however, by "Jackass: The Movie." This, despite its October 25 release, only six days before Halloween. Of course, Gore Verbinski's juggernaut ghost story "The Ring" was released the week prior, and it was still overwhelming a lot of its competition.

It was also already Oscar season, and awards contenders like "Frida" and "Punch-Drunk Love" were released on either side of "Ghost Ship," getting a lot more critical attention. In many important ways, "Ghost Ship" fell down a hole. It suffered the same fate as several other horror movies released around the same time. "Ghost Ship" is about as popular as "Abandon," "They," and the most terrifying of the lot, "The Hot Chick."

Critics, as mentioned, weren't kind to "Ghost Ship." Roger Ebert really hit the nail on the head in his two-star review, writing that it's "better than you expect, but but not as good as you hope." He also noted the killer opening scene, writing: 

"The most absorbing passages in the film involve their exploration of the deserted liner. The quality of the art direction and photography actually evoke some of the same creepy, haunting majesty of those documentaries about descents to the grave of the Titanic. There's more scariness because we know how the original passengers and crew members died (that opening scene has a grisly humor), and because the ship still seems haunted–not only by that sad-eyed little girl, but perhaps by others." 

It was the setting, Ebert said, that redeemed "Ghost Ship," although not enough for him to recommend it. Manohla Dargis, from the Los Angeles Times, wrote in her one-star review that director Steve Beck (who also did that celebrated remake of "Thirteen Ghosts") didn't really have much of a screenplay to deal with, and tried to offset the film's lack of substance with an abundance of gore. It didn't work. She began her review with the dismissive sentences: "See evil. See evil run. Run, evil, run all the way to cable television purgatory." This was a riff on the film's unbearably stupid poster tagline "SEA EVIL." 

Of course, what seemed rote in 2002 may be seen as bracing in the '20s. Haunting movies definitely had a moment via the "Conjuring" and "Insidious" series, and many younger horror nuts may like the slickness and style of Beck's movie. One can watch the film on Kanopy, and you already know if it's going to be worth your time.