Haunted Boat (2005)

Haunted Boat commits the most grievous sin a cheap horror movie can: taking itself too seriously. A quarter of the way into the film, the characters have a mind-blowingly vapid metaphysical discussion. "I choose to believe in what is around me. We all create our own universe." "Wow, Christina, I didn't know you were so smart!" This conversation, reminiscent of the ones between Plato and Socrates, turns out to be the most important part of the film, which centers around a college-aged group taking their friend's boat to Catalina Island. They never make it. The first death is the movie's high point: the boatowner, who has a bad heart, is peer-pressured into swimming, and consequently has an apparent heart-attack and drowns. The movie only goes downhill from there. The pointlessness peaks when an incredibly creepy man (pictured), whose parents are doctors, shows up in a rowboat and helps one of the girls, who is seizing and vomiting. After he helps her out (she had eaten worms to help her lose weight), he simply leaves. The entire sequence takes 15 minutes and after the fact nothing has happened. Sadly, this is foreshadowing for the movie's ending. By the end, the lone surviving Christina, driven to despair, decides to hang herself. A passing boater saves her before she dies, saying "Why is she alone out here on this boat?" And it is then we learn the movie's secret: there never was a group of friends, only a lonely girl's delusions. The movie ends with Christina joining her imaginary cohorts on yet another enjoyable ocean cruise, smug in its belief that the viewer has been blown away. It is easy to prove incorrect the movie's driving philosophy: if it were true that humans could simply create their own universe, I would have no recollection of having seen Haunted Boat.

Kill Meter: 0. Seriously, no one dies. Jesus.

Quote: "I am not staying onboard with an epileptic!"

Grade: F

Lesson Learned: No boats. Also, though it sounds grisly, body counts are important. What happens, when, at the end, you learn nothing really happened? Lastly, even if we can't find one on our own, we don't need a horror movie to give us a worldview.

IMDB Link