10 Movies You Turned Off After The Opening Scene
6. Ghost Ship (2002)
Some films have to be switched off in the first ten minutes because they are plain abysmal, others set the bar so high that the rest of the film pales in comparison. Take Ghost Ship as exhibit A; if this opening scene didn't (ahem) split the audience in two, nothing will.
It's 1962 and aboard the Italian cruise ship MS Antonia Graza, it's formal dance night on the ship, ball gowns and tuxedo's elegantly swoosh around the deck. Someone, however, has rigged a nasty surprise: a steel cable, attached to a very fast winch, whips across the deck too fast for the revelling passengers to notice. Before they can fully appreciate what's happened, their bisected bodies begin to drop to the deck, save for little Katie (a very fresh-faced Emily Browning) who is luckily too short to be fatally clothes-lined.
Flash forward to 2002 and a salvage ship comes across the Graza, now floating aimlessly at sea and lost for decades. What follows is standard haunted house fare - the crew are picked off one by one, ultimately revealing the motivation for the massacre; there's a LOT of gold on board. Katie is the sole survivor and acts as a ghostly guide for the idiots now turning against each other in service to a sea faring 'collector of souls' type of demon, disguised as a crew member.
With little to no internal logic and nothing that comes close to the WTF opening (you can find more of those here), Ghost Ship, regrettably, should remain lost at sea - forever.