Review of Lost Voyage

This low-budget cross between GHOST SHIP and EVENT HORIZON has a motley crew boarding a long-missing luxury liner during a building storm in the good old Bermuda Triangle. The ship has been missing for 25 years, yet appears as new as the day it disappeared. No one is on board, but the salvage crew hears weird noises practically from the moment they set foot on board. They also find a rocking horse that rocks all on its own -- until a cameraman from a local TV station sees through his lens a strange-looking child sitting on its back. Then one of the salvage team is killed in gruesome fashion by an unseen hand. I think you can guess where this is going. A very hairy Judd Nelson plays an academic and part-time ghost finder whose parents were aboard the liner back in 1972 when it disappeared into the mist. Lance Henrickson, God bless him, plays the leader of the salvage crew and is his usual irascible self, much as he was in AvP, HELLRAISER: HELLWORLD and a dozen other mostly bad horror flicks of recent vintage. He simply sails through this one, no pun intended. The rest of the cast is TV-generic, although the guy who dies first and the cameraman get to deliver the best lines in this cliché-ridden script. Some decent special effects involving the liner and a rescue helicopter do not save this made for video flick, but it it is worth watching for the first half, which builds up a little suspense along the lines of the Kubrick version of THE SHINING or that Treat Williams magnum opus about a giant, man-eating creature aboard an abandoned luxury liner. Heck, we even get shadowy figures occasionally passing across the foreground from time to time, as if Jason were back on the loose. LOST VOYAGE unfortunately goes to hell in the second half. Literally and figuratively. Having Nelson explain to Henrickson what has been going on late in the movie, which is right out of EVENT HORIZON, only makes things worse. Last week's episode of GHOST WHISPERER, involving a vengeful ghost aboard a luxury liner, was better than this.