Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Prof. Popinjay

I’m not into horror. I should say I’m not into most types of horror. I hate supernatural paranormal stuff for the most part because the rules are so ambiguous. It tends to make for bad writing. I hate senseless gore. I’m not into disturbing imagery or situations. Yeah, call me milk toast if you want but I’ve seen enough of it and I don’t care to see any more. That being said, I do like monster films. I love Godzilla, the Mummy, Alien. Alien is by far one of my favorite franchises ever. So I don’t know. I guess I straddle the fence and it’s purely a matter of my own preference based on a very nitpicky set of criteria that I should probably stop attempting to explain.

You know what else I love? Abandoned places and derelict vessels, especially where water is involved. I’ll watch countless YouTube videos exploring these things. I watch in a perpetual state of simultaneous dread and wonder. The feeling I imagine most people get while watching something horrific, I revel in while some urban explorer traverses an abandoned bunker or while some intrepid scuba diver flippers their way through a half sunken ship. Even more intriguing is the notion of an abandoned ship still afloat. Can you imagine being on the high seas and some crewless rotting man-made behemoth silently floats by in the fog! I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it!

So when I saw the poster for Ghost Ship I admit I was fascinated and I had lots of questions about exactly what kind of horror movie it was because I knew eventually I was going to brave it.

Was it horrific? Sure, there were some things. But it wasn’t a gore fest thankfully. Mostly just spooky stuff and jump scares. Oh no, Karl Urban thought he was eating canned corn but it was actually maggots! WoOoOoOo! SpoOoOoky! Whatever.

Did it satisfy my need to see derelict vessels? Yeah, pretty decently. I might even watch it again if someone wanted to.

I have one teensy complaint. The early 2000 standard teeny-bopper horror album used as the soundtrack for this film was absolute cookie cutter. Was there a horror film back then that didn’t feature Drowning Pool screaming “LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR! LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR.” Mediocre. This film could have been much more suspenseful and much more epic and so much more timeless if Elliot Goldenthal or Jerry Goldsmith were allowed to add their genius to the musical score. What we get is John Frizzel letting you know when to be startled with a few screeching violins and some discordant trumpets. But the demographic was teeny-boppers so cliché y2k metal bands is what we have to hear.  Ho hum.

Tolerable movie though.