So at the end of the movie, the two point of view characters, who’ve sort of been given a chance to fix up their lives, give up trying to save themselves, throw themselves into the water, and get a new life. How much more obvious can you get? You know: water, new life, all that.
The surprise is that the movie was Ghost Voyage, the Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday night flick. Unusually, it didn’t feature giant snakes, wasps, reptiles, bugs, or dire natural disasters. It was just a fairly straightforward haunted ship movie with, I think, a very long backward glance at the John Garfield/Paul Henreid/Sydney Greenstreet movie Between Two Worlds, itself quite interesting and worth seeing if you can if only for the way Henreid’s character is a sort of burned-out Victor Laszlo, who has fought too long against too many and can’t take it any more.
The premise of both movies is that the newly dead find themselves on a ship - luxury liner in one case, tramp cargo ship in the other - that carries them to their fate, heaven or hell. Both ships feature a single crewman who serves as a guide - genial Edmund Gwenn in the first care, the far more sinister Cary-Hiroyuji Tagawa (can you say, The Great Kabai Sengh? I knew you could) in the other. In each, most of the characters go on to their destinations, but a couple are returned to life. Between Two Worlds spends more time setting up the characters and explaining why they meet their various fates, and it more elegant. Ghost Voyage doesn't waste much time with set up or character development, but the words “sin” and “redemption” actually show up. That hardly ever happens anymore unless it can serve some prurient interest. So it was a great surprise to see these topics even alluded to, much less being the focus of attention for the movie, much less one of Sci-Fi’s productions. It’s the sort of thing you keep an eye on.
As usual, there are gaping holes in the plot, but also an interesting twist or two - there are ghosts, demons, something, that the passengers encounter that are sometimes there to help the characters toward repentance - sometimes not.
Certainly, Ghost Voyage is movie as commodity or product, filling a slot in the schedule: but a little surprising nonetheless. Catch it on one of its many reruns (Sci Fi, remember) if you have nothing else to do.
