Ghost Ship Should Have Stayed Burried in the Sea of Out of Print Videos!
Ghost Ship is what happens when someone with no imagination and talent watches The Goonies and “Holes” and decides to take the most boring elements and make them into a movie. “Ghost Ship” is such a dud it’s not even funny. Literally. Well unless you get smashed and watch it for some Mystery Science Theater style fun making.
So lets start with the story. ‘Ghost Ship’ has a very simple plot. A group of kids find out about an ancient pirate ship buried in the Arizona desert after a photo mix up. Just so happens that these kids are going on a rock finding field trip for a week in the same place, and trick their teacher with a map identical to the one in the mixed up photos. At the same time a young chinese man, Charlie (Byron Chan) and Dr. Dunbar (Donald Phelps) are also after the treasure.
Charlie is trying to find the ship with Dunbar to prove it’s existence and bring honor back to his family, while Dr. Dunbar is just evil and greedy. Along the way some of the kids fall in love, they get stranded (and wind up eating quail?), their teacher Fred Towsend (Mattew Boston) rediscovers his love for teaching, they befriend Charlie and meet a pirate named Crusoe (Jay Robinson). Of course in the end they find the treasure, beat the bad guy, and come out enriched as people.
Acting wise, this film is like a bad middle school play. The only notable child actor in the film is Hedi Lucas who plays Christy in the film. Lucas as those of the original Nickelodeon generation may remember played Dina on “Salute your shorts.” Also of note was Jay Robinson who was a fun performer in “Ghost Ship” and was known for his portrayal of Caligula in “The Robe” and “Demitrius and the Gladiators”. The worst actor in the film is the star. Matthew Boston is a terrible unbelievable actor. He looks more like a pedophile than a middle school science teacher, and he acts like a really tame Groucho Marx.
The film is very dull, and lacks the special effects and cartoonish violence that made “Goonies” (which is after all what they were trying to emulate) such a fun children’s classic. Most of the film is spent talking, looking for rocks, or trying to find sticks, leaves and other yummy dessert food.
The sets we’re very cartoonish and unrealistic, especially Crusoe’s ship in the desert. The out side looked like “Queer Eye for the Pirate Guy” had painted it and there was an awful silver painted clothing store dummy tied to the front of the boat! Inside looked like Applebees, with just junk everywhere on the walls. Not Pirate junk, or old boat junk, just junk!
There is only one notable element in the whole film. Conrad Pope, a composer and orchestrator who has an extensive resume of films such as ‘Jurassic Park’, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean” Curse of the Black Pearl’ and the ‘Harry Potter’ films, composed a really wonderful, fun and adventurous score for “Ghost Ship”
The DVD transfer is fair. The video quality on my older t.v. was really dark, but the newer t.v. showed the ridiculous looking sets a lot clearer. There are 8 trailers for other made for video kids movies, as well as the trailer for this film. The only other extra on the DVD is a photo gallery which is extremely boring. The sound is pretty clear, if you want to hear the ridiculous dialog.
Over all, I’d say stay away from this movie. Troma’s 50th Street films picked this up but licensed it to another company for release. Their name appears nowhere on the DVD, lucky for them. If you check out the troma web site, the title is still on their list, and that’s really the only way you’d ever know the had anything to do with it. The film is really boring and has no true film merit for anyone, Troma fans or lovers of family films alike. In short “Ghost Ship” should have stayed sunk!
