Courtesy Syfy
Ghost Voyage continues the tradition of Thirt13n Ghosts, Saw II, and Cube in creating a house of horrors where the protagonists are lucky if they survive. The "house" in this case is an abandoned cargo ship. The characters wake up next to each other to be greeted by a steward (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) who politely but firmly explains the rules: Do not breach any closed doors, enter the captain's quarters, refuse any orders from a member of the crew, or smoke. He then promptly disappears.
Sounds simple, right? Not so fast. Because the collected gaggle of hoodlums, thieves, and thugs are all one-note stereotypes: the sleazy film producer (Adrian Neil), the slutty aspiring actress (Julian Berlin, tragically underused here), the thug (Nicholas Irons), the noble but tortured main man (Antonio Sabato Jr.), the noble but tortured hot chick (the delicious Deanna Russo), and other idiots there to die for our amusement. Very few of these people can resist temptation. In fact, they're so corrupt that some of them start scheming to take over the cargo ship and sell it to the highest bidder. You get the impression that if these characters were in a similar situation (say, the weird house in Saw II) they'd give the exact same speech: "You know with the real estate market on the upswing I bet we could sell this creepy crack house for a good dollar!"
Personality flaws not withstanding, Ghost Voyage has an interesting premise. As the characters interact with the ship and break all the rules, they have flashbacks to their past lives and the sins they committed. Encapsulating these sins in Ghost Voyage's running time sometimes feels forced, like the arsonists who decide to smoke out the steward by setting a metal ship's door ablaze.
The monsters also fit the crime: we have a smoke monster that murders those who smoke and fire monster that burns those who try to…burn people, I guess. The special effects are passable, with the fire monster -- a giant skull with four claw-tipped flaming tentacles – particularly noteworthy. Other effects are less impressive.
But the actors commit the real sins here. Sabato Jr. carefully enunciates every line, as if he's afraid he might forget something. Russo tries hard but simply doesn't have the emotional heft to convey her character's grief. The awful accents of some of the characters, foreign and otherwise, begin to grate after a few sentences. The art of these kinds of films is in conveying personalities with broad strokes before killing them off. Instead, director James Oxford resorts to stereotypical parodies of human beings. When they die, it's hard to feel bad for them.
Any film confined to a single location places much more of a burden on its actors because there's less for them to do physically. Ghost Voyage has some good ideas but doesn't have a competent enough cast to pull them off. Combining Ghostbusters with No Exit, Ghost Voyage is a cruise to nowhere -- lots of promise but not a lot of direction.
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