The cruise ship in Ghost Ship is really just a floating haunted house.

Lost at sea on its maiden voyage in 1954, the Italian luxury liner Antonia Graza quickly became a bit of an urban legend.

When a Canadian pilot named Jack Ferriman (Desmond Harrington) tells Sean Murphy (Gabriel Byrne), the captain of a salvage tug, that he has spied a huge rusting ship at sea, Murphy is excited.

Rumour has it the Antonia Graza's passengers were carrying much of their immense wealth with them on their fated voyage.

The audience knows something Murphy and his crew don't even suspect, or they wouldn't be rushing out to board the Antonia Graza, repair her and tow her to land to claim her riches.

The night the Antonia Graza lost all contact with this world, something evil and terrifying happened to the passengers and that evil was trapped aboard the ship with the corpses.

Given the graphic carnage of the opening sequence, Ghost Ship should have been far scarier and creepier than it is.

It's a sequence people will be talking about for a long time, but once the salvage crew arrives, there's nothing that comes near to matching it.

What's waiting for the crew and the audience are a host of standard horror movie devices such as gallons of blood appearing and disappearing and an abundance of mutilated body parts that tumble onto unsuspecting searchers.

There are skeletons in closets and ghosts that range from ghastly to sweet to seductive.

Ghost Ship docks courtesy of Dark Castle Entertainment, the Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis company which has given spook fans their Halloween fright thrills these past two years with House on Haunted Hill and Thirteen Ghosts.

Like its predecessors, Ghost Ship is slickly made and features actors having some campy fun with their characterizations.

As salvage diver Maureen Epps, Julianna Margulies looks suspiciously like Sigourney Weaver in her Alien flicks.

Margulies has the same steely, no-nonsense attitude to her work and the men on her team. Even the evil spirits learn to fear her wrath.

As fellow divers and welders, Ron Eldard and Karl Urban are meant to supply the comic relief, especially with a scene in which they foolishly eat from tins of food they discover.

Byrne plays everything dead serious, which is meant to help ground the film in some kind of reality, as difficult as that is given the preposterous events happening around him.

Ghost Ship is a bit of a fun ride while it lasts, but it's not likely to get many viewers to line up for a return voyage.

(This film is rated AA)

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