Does 2002’s Ghost Ship provide a remake of Val Lewton’s 1943 thriller The Ghost Ship? Nope.

Oh – well, it must rework 1952’s scary Ghost Ship, right? Again nope.

It feels odd for the 2002 flick to reuse that title and not connect to either of the earlier films. However, I guess those involved figured Ghost Ship offered a lively enough moniker to crank it out again.

In 1962, the Italian ocean liner Antonia Graza goes missing in the Bering Sea. 40 years later, a salvage team locates it and claims it.

When they explore the long-abandoned vessel, the crew discovers weird anomalies. These imply that perhaps some supernatural factors persist and threaten the living who explore the craft.

As noted, the 2002 Ghost Ship doesn’t formally remake the 1952 flick, but the pair share similarities. Although the 1943 movie offers a noir tale of obsession, both the 1952 and 2002 flicks opt for fare that accentuates the “ghost” part of the title.

Which makes sense and opens the film to some chilling potential. Unfortunately, the end result fails to capitalize on these possibilities.

At its core, Ghost Ship does boast opportunities to succeed. No, its basic tale of a haunted vessel doesn’t seem especially original, but it still could bring some good scares and tension.

Unfortunately, director Steve Beck can’t do anything with the material. Beck primarily worked in visual effects and TV commercials, with Ghost Ship as his second of two big-screen directorial efforts.

Though uninventive, I felt 2001’s Thir13en Ghosts offered a reasonably fun ride. That led me to hope Ghost Ship would become similarly engaging.

Instead, Beck saddles the movie with a leaden pace and next to no chills. Beck pours on creepy atmosphere and the usual jump scares but he can’t find any way to create a real sense of terror or dread.

We get missteps right out of the gate, as Ghost Ship opens with a prologue that shows what happened to the vessel in 1962. This exists solely to give viewers eager for gore some graphic violence before they must sit through extended exposition.

Plenty of movies do this, as they want to provide the typical horror audience a taste of blood before the story then makes them wait a while for more content of that sort. I dislike these choices, though, as they feel gratuitous and undercut suspense.

Unquestionably, that becomes an issue here. Without the prologue, we enter the Antonia Graza with the same curiosity as the salvage crew.

With that preface, though, we stand multiple steps ahead of the movie’s characters. As Alfred Hitchcock often showed, this technique can work to create tension since it means viewers might experience a sense of dread as they wait for the roles to catch up with them.

Steve Beck ain’t Hitchcock, though, and his dreary direction means that we feel no anxiety about the impending terror and we don’t really care about the characters. The screenplay from Mark Hanlon and John Pogue forms loose stereotypes and nothing more, so we find little reason to bond with these folks.

That script also feels cobbled together from bits and pieces stolen from more famous movies. Throw a rock at the screen and you can identify obvious influences like The Shining, Alien and The Thing, among other efforts.

Ghost Ship does come with a more than capable cast. We get a group that includes Gabriel Byrne, Julianna Margulies, Isaiah Washington, Ron Eldard, and Karl Urban.

They seem wholly overqualified for this tepid cheese. None of them manage to do much with their thin roles.

Throw in some CG effects that haven’t aged well and Ghost Ship winds up as a dull stab at horror. Don’t expect thrills or chills from this flat and uninspired supernatural tale.

Ghost Ship appears in an aspect ratio of approximately 1.85:1 on this Blu-ray Disc. Though not a great image, the picture usually worked acceptably well.

During darker shots, some noise reduction appeared to come into play, and that resulted in a few elements that came across as a bit soft and awkward. Most of the film displayed pretty good delineation, though.

No issues with jagged edges or moiré effects appeared, and I saw light edge haloes. Print flaws presented a smattering of small specks but nothing substantial.

Ghost Ship came with a palette that leaned a little blue. We still got a reasonable array of tones, though, and the Blu-ray made them look fairly appealing.

Blacks felt dark and tight, while shadows offered good clarity. Nothing here excelled but the image seemed largely satisfactory.

As a horror flick, Ghost Ship offered a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack with plenty of atmosphere. This meant a good sense of place throughout the movie.

In addition, the mix kicked to life during the film’s occasional scare-oriented scenes. All of these helped make this a pretty engaging soundscape, if not a great one.

Audio quality seemed positive, with speech that remained natural and concise. Music offered appealing range and clarity as well.

Effects came across as accurate and full, with nice low-end as appropriate. Expect a soundtrack that suited the story well.

As we shift to extras, we get five featurettes. Max on Set goes for 15 minutes, four seconds and brings notes from producers Joel Silver and Gilbert Adler, director Steven Beck, production designer Graham “Grace” Walker, visual effects supervisor Dale Duguid, and actors Gabriel Byrne, Julianna Margulies, Karl Urban, Isaiah Washington, Desmond Harrington, Ron Eldard and Emily Browning.

The program covers story and characters, cast and performances, sets and locations, and various effects.

Visual Effects goes for five minutes, 42 seconds. It provides info from Adler, Silver, Walker, and Beck.

Unsurprisingly, this one looks at the different effects in the movie. It proves reasonably informative.

With A Closer Look at the Gore, we find a five-minute, 32-second reel. This one offers statements from Adler, Beck, Duguid and effects creators Jason Baird and Howard Berger.

This one looks at the practical effects of the film. Like the prior reel, it offers an efficient overview.

Designing the Ghost Ship lasts six minutes, two seconds. We locate comments from Adler, Duguid, and Beck.

We get info about the design of the titular boat and its creation as well as related elements. This turns into another worthwhile summary.

Via Secrets of the Antonia Graza, we get an interactive feature in which viewers need to solve a puzzle. If you select the right letters, you get to watch

“Secrets” offers a relic from the DVD era of the early 2000s in which disc producers went nuts with gimmicks. Blu-rays largely disposed with this nonsense but this one just ported over the original, all its irritating choices intact.

Is the content you access worth the hassle? Not really.

Each clip runs between one minute, 14 seconds and two minutes even for a total of six minutes, six seconds. We get some cheap dramatic “explorations” of the titular boat without anything memorable.

In addition to the movie’s trailer, we conclude with a music video for “Falling” from Mudvayne. The song offers the kind of awful aggro Nu Metal popular in the early 2000s, and the video just shows random snippets from the movie. No thanks.

With a capable cast and a sturdy premise, Ghost Ship offered the potential to deliver a solid horror tale. However, the movie lacks any form of creativity or inspiration, so it winds up as a sluggish and tedious 91 minutes of drudgery. The Blu-ray comes with dated but generally positive picture, pretty good audio and a mediocre mix of bonus materials. While not a genuinely terrible supernatural scarefest, Ghost Ship nonetheless fails to do much to entertain.

Note that Ghost Ship originally came out on Blu-ray in 2009. This 2025 reissue offers a literal reissue of that disc, so don't expect changes/upgrades in any way. Shout Factory put out their own version in 2020 but based on what I've read, it simply recycled the same scan used for the old BD.