Review of the film “Ship of Ghosts” by Gary Shore

At the box office – Haunting of The Queen Mary by Gary Shore. A complex but senselessly crafted horror film shot aboard the legendary transatlantic liner the Queen Mary fascinated at first Mikhail Trofimenkov with its retro aesthetic.

Gary Shore chose a classic, easily recognizable, but, alas, out of reach even for more talented directors than him, Gary Shore chose a model for his film. Ghost Ship is simply a godless imitation of Stanley Kubrick’s great The Shining (1980). Only instead of the high-mountain Overlook Hotel closed for the winter, the action is played out aboard the Queen Mary, a cruising legend. Both in the hotel and on the liner, nightmarish murders were once committed, and here and there the air is poisoned with mystical miasma, and the rich interiors are inhabited by ghosts doomed to eternal return.

Even Kubrick’s and Shore’s weapon of crime is identical: an axe. True, Shore lets on the screen more blood than Kubrick. And the episode with the woman wandering down the corridor with a fire ax sticking out of her back, yes, can be considered a masterpiece of thrash.

At Kubrick, the unsuccessful writer Jack Torrance fell into the trap of damned space, having settled down as a winter caretaker in the hope of working on a new book, with his wife and young son. In The Ship of Ghosts, the not-too-successful journalists Patrick (Joel Fry) and Ann (Alice Eve) and their midget son Lucas, who got the opportunity to live on board the liner for a couple of days to sculpt an advertising essay about it, become unwitting mediums and victims of the liner .

The fact is that the giant liner, launched in 1936, plowed the Atlantic for thirty-one years, until it got permanently laid up in Long Beach, California. During the war, he managed, changing his name to the “Gray Ghost”, to serve his homeland, transporting more than ten thousand soldiers to Europe at a time. And now it has been museumified, insanely popular, and the clouds of visitors are attracted not so much by the real history and retro-luxury of “Mary”, as by the legends about the sinister and mystical events associated with it.

Some ghosts on board still live as much as one and a half hundred. Shore tried to pull them out on the screen to the maximum. From the “woman in white”, the bride of the murdered soldier, who smashed her face on the piano, which she always plays, to the sailor scalded to death, always returning on board, no matter how another psychopathic captain, involved in occult secrets, tried to kill him completely. From an orchestra playing like on the Titanic to WWII recruits obsessed with mortal fear.

The action takes place in two time layers: in 1938, when the clumsy battle took place, and in our days, when Lucas uncorked the mystical tunnel to the past. Although it is more correct to speak not about layers, but about a temporary salad. The plot is cut so finely that the transitions from one era to another sometimes elude the viewer. But it’s still half the trouble.

The retroplast of the film is captivating at first: the carefree luxury on the eve of a world military catastrophe is filmed incomparably. Especially compared to the inexpressive present. A Halloween carnival party for a “clean” audience that is infiltrated by a family of third-grade outside actors. Masks, spurs, jazz. Hollywood producer dressed as Harlequin and Fred Astaire (Wesley Alphin) himself dressed as Zorro. (Astaire’s plug-in tap dance, paired with the daughter of those same actors, is generally the best thing in the film.) And at the same time, hidden under one of the masks, the monstrously mutilated face of a World War I veteran. The hell of the hold, where, through the fault of the obsessed captain, the very release of steam occurs. And of course, an ax that crushes skulls and bones while a feast lasts in the wardroom during the plague.

Everything would be fine, but that’s just the script of a two-hour film ends somewhere in half an hour after it starts. During this time, Shor told and showed everything he could and wanted. The suspense ends with the script. The worst thing happened at the very beginning, and no matter how much Shore mimics, say, the classic bathroom murder scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the limit of fear has been exhausted.

Further, according to all the laws of the universe, compote begins in the genre “he scares me, but I’m not scared.” Even the heroes of the film themselves are not afraid, no matter what, unidentified mystical, no squelching, no screaming, no gurgling and no running in the background, leaving bloody traces. The Ship of Ghosts could have been made into a spectacular 40-minute movie, but Shore threatens that this is only the first part of a trilogy set aboard the Mary. Not otherwise, he also fell into a temporary hole and dreams of replenishing the secular community of ghosts.