With such a generic title, you'd think this movie could at least deliver what the title suggests? A boat that's haunted can't be so hard, can it? Ghost Ship did it fairly well, after all. So, with a movie called Haunted Boat, all I ask is for a boat (check) and some sort of haunting. And, this is where the movie fails spectacularly.
The plot seems straight forward at first. Six party-loving teenage twits board a boat that was gifted to one of them as a birthday present and head to Catalina to party some more. The party loving teens get stalked/killed/haunted/sick/stupid is a pretty standard starting point in horror movie plots, albeit one beaten so thin that I can't imagine a good movie with that plot coming out any time soon. Our Haunted Boat teens either have great fake ID's, or they know the right people, because they are clubbing in the first scene and getting completely hammered. Or, they actually supposed to be over 21, as they look, and the writers can't even get their characters straight.
As for the characters, these are as paper-thin as the plot (another failure of modern horror). There's the insipid brunette lovelorn naive girl. There's the inane sexy, take charge guy. This is guy Naïve Girl has a crush on and they share some sort of "Why didn't we ever get together?" moment at the beginning. There's the vacuous, bitchy blond. She's the brunette's best friend, but they hate each other throughout the whole movie. There's the other vacuous blond, but this one is sexy and possibly Australian (or has cotton in her mouth, I couldn't tell). Then, there's Kevin, the owner of the boat and birthday boy. He's a stoner, with a bad heart and used to be on the swim team. His friends think he retarded. Yes, he dies first. And lastly, there's the other vapid guy who does nothing except knowing "everything about boats." He knew so much about boats that he didn't check to see if it had a working radio first. As with most ridiculous movies with moronic characters, the characters names are not really worth remembering.
The director first tries to introduce you to the fact that this boat is haunted by flashing something on screen in the dark so fast you barely register that it happened. I hate these false "jump" scares in place of real horror because they are incredibly stupid, but the scare tactic happened so fast in this case that I was mostly left mildly confused. Was it something wrong with the film? The editing? Was it a subliminal message? I had to rewind it and single-frame step my DVD player to see what I was supposed to be scared of. Eh. It was some sort of irritated looking albino.
This subliminal ad brought to you by Stay Puft marshmallows.
Our party-loving teens clean up their party boat so they can trash it again when they party that night. Did I mention they like to party? They get wasted and play strip truth-or-take–a-shot. Naïve girl gets all jealous that Take Charge Guy wants to engage in a boring soft core porn scene with Australian girl and huffs out of the cramped cabin into the night where nothing happens. The kids wake up in the morning to discover that somehow they've dropped anchor over night and are dead in the water, despite the Master Boater assuring them he left the boat on full-throttle or whatever all night before he passed out. Luckily Kevin shows up to entice them into smoking some "doobage" (he seriously says that) and they forget all about their problems. Oh, never mind. They take the opportunity to set up the plot by explaining all the ways they are afraid to die. The writer failed Writing Interesting Exposition class in school, I see.
Remember how much everyone bitched that the talking scenes in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof were boring and pointless? Tarantino's scenes served a basic purpose at least, despite what you think of them; they were a throwback, or homage, to '70's Grindhouse flicks. The talking scenes (and there are two notable ones) in Haunted Boat serve no purpose but to waste time. The characters don't really get killed by a supernatural force exploiting their fears because the end of the movie negates everything that had just happened in the film. And, if we exclude the end of the film, only one of the characters, Kevin, sort of gets killed by his fear, but there is not a supernatural force that looms over his death.
Let me explain: After the doobage smoking comes to a close, the Take Charge Guy and the cotton mouthed Australian retreat to engage in some sexy times while the rest of the dullards decide work on their skin cancer and swim. The Blonde Bitch mildly teases Kevin into doing an unnecessary back flip into the ocean right after he revealed that he was afraid of having a heart attack and drowning. So, what happens? He has a heart attack and drowns, or is possibly eaten by a poorly rendered blind CGI shark that bashes its head on the camera resulting in an explosion of blood. Of course, it takes a minute for anyone to try and save Kevin (who is physically smaller than all the girls, I might add) because they have to get Take Charge Guy to save Kevin for some reason. The two blondes live up to their hair color stereotype when they try to use their cell phones to call for help and seem surprised that they can't connect to those buoy cell phone towers in the Pacific.
So, Kevin's dead and the kids are lost with no radio and the engine has stopped and… hey, let's toke and tell ghost stories. There are really no words that can explain how stupid and pointless this scene is, but I'll try. First, THESE STORIES HAVE NO BEARING ON THE PLOT WHATSOEVER. The ghosts in them don't manifest to haunt them later. The encounters with ghosts have not induced any character development, nor does telling the stories induce development of any sort in anything. Second, the ghost stories these idiots tell are about as haunted as this haunted boat gets, besides the Albino face that flashes almost subliminally in the scene every once in awhile. That's right. The most haunted this Haunted Boat gets is when Naïve Girl and Bitchy Blonde tell stupid stories about the one time one saw an Amish guy on a elevator and the other was hit on by the whisper of a guy that had gotten pegged by a car earlier in the day. The Australian girl tells some fucked up horror version of Snow White and Rose Red as if the story is supposed to be true. If you are going to tell Grimm fairytales, you don't have to horror-ize them to make the scary and fucked up; the guys wrote 'em like that already. Also, these stories aren't scary in any sense of the word except maybe scary bad.
After this boring detour of the main story the Australian chick decides to add some life-and-death tension by going and having a seizure. The other characters help her by failing CPR 101 by holding her down, trying to prevent her from swallowing her tongue by putting something in her mouth (swallowing your tongue cannot happen and don't put things in the person's mouth) and not turning her head after she vomits. (Choking on your own vomit would suck. Don't let this happen to a person having a seizure by turning them to the left side after the seizure ends.) . Oh, and they gave her Valium (pronounced "volume" for some reason). The Australian chick goes into a sort of coma after this, apparently because her friends know absolutely nothing about how the body works or very basic medical care.
Take Charge Guy and Master Boater decide their best option is to go out into the fog in the middle of the ocean and try to find a doctor. You know, those roving, seafaring doctors that open their practices out in the middle of the sea to help cure the Stupid Scurvy often developed by dumb teens in crappy horror movies. While the guys are drifting around in their dinghy another guy who sort of looks like the subliminal albino shows up to freak out the Blonde Bitch. He offers to help their sort of comatose Australian friend while she rants and raves about bugs on her and something in her ear.
If, at this point, you care to recall the beginning of the movie, you might remember that her fear is being eaten by bugs. Well, she doesn't really get eaten by bugs, nor is she really tortured by them. You might expect in movie that has a catch saying that each character "must face the terror of the one thing he fears most in the world, and each must answer to a fate of his own making," that there will be bugs driving her crazy the rest of the movie and subsequently kill her. Actually, the creepy albino pulls a bug out her ear and she vomits slugs Ron Weasley style and then goes back to sleep. Blonde Bitch doesn't like the creepy guy and threatens to kill him until he gets off their boat. So, he leaves. Yeah, he just leaves. That's It. The guy they've been sort of setting up to be out freaky Albino ghost killer just says, "Okay. I'm gone."
After that, Take Charge Guy and Master Boater come back but say absolutely nothing about their hunt for a seafaring doctor despite Naïve Girl's constant chattering and play-by-play of what just happened. The guys act sort of catatonic until Naïve Girl and Blonde Bitch decide to go to bed, leaving the guys sitting at a table having said absolutely nothing since they got back. I guess it's not a big deal that the guys you sent for help come back as vegetables. So, the guys disappear into a fog and leave behind the image of a melting Kabuki face.
In the morning, the Blonde Bitch goes into the bathroom and gets electrocuted by some exposed wires. This is death is rendered even more idiotic by the fact that Blond Bitch's fear was to be brutally killed by a stranger. So, how is her fear realized and her fate made by being electrocuted? Naïve Girl wakes up and freaks out until she finds a black cat in the cabin and cuddles with it all night until the real, less foggy guys show up. You read that right. The real guys show up, but then the girls disappear leaving Take Charge Guy alone. Take Charge Guy is then attacked by CGI-ish version himself. I think. His fear was to be killed by someone close to him, and there is no one closer to you than yourself! Except, he wasn't really attacked by himself because it was all a dream of Naïve Girl's.
There are several sequences in this part dreamed by several of the characters and I can't really remember the point of them or the order, but the final sequence is presumable not a dream and thus is the only one that matters. Naïve Girl wakes up the morning after their first drunken party and discovers that everything that had just happened was all a dream and her friends have died of drug overdoses. I think. They show track marks on one of the girl's arms, so I think this is the point the movie is trying to make. Naïve girl's fear is being alone, so she promptly freaks out and hangs herself off the side of the boat. Luckily some guys spot her and save her.
And, here comes the clincher! She was alone on the boat the WHOLE TIME! Everything was dream and a fantasy! The whole thing! The harbor master says in a voice over that he told her not to take the boat alone! Wow! What a twist, huh? And, for an even better twist, Naïve Girl goes to the harbor, sees her nonexistent friends taking the boat out and goes with them where they disappear into the horizon. Wow. That's better than all the M. Night Shyamalan twists put together. The whole, "haunted by their own fears" thing was all just a dream of Naïve Girl's and thus the whole movie is rendered moot. I think it's pretty damn amazing to invalidate your whole movie by trying to be too clever with your twists.
Luckily, my viewing of Haunted Boat was just a dream, so I suffer no ill effects from its lack of coherent plot and baffling dialogue, directing and acting. Though, when I woke up this morning I had a desire to smoke some doobage… doh!
Bonus: Most Idiotic Moment
The Naive Girl spots a very dead canary that Master Boater had been looking at on deck. She says in the most insipid voice. "Oh! What a pretty bird! Is it sick?" And, Master Boater says flatly, "It's dead." And she looks surprised. Well, as surprised as the actress can look.
