Shining at sea

The dialogue - once the salvage crew of captain Gabriel Byrne, den mother Julianna Margulies et al board the eerily empty Italian cruise liner that went missing 40 years earlier - confirms every landlubber's suspicion that the shore is safer.

"We've just found a bunch of dead guys floating in the laundry room," is one of the milder announcements. "What does all that mean, then?" some simpleton asks.

Old horror hands will guess easily enough: it means some Stephen King fan, like director Steve Beck, has put The Shining out to sea.

Swimming pools, instead of lifts, fill with blood; spooks in the shape of little girls in party frocks stand and stare accusingly; and beautiful vamps morph into vengeful crones just as they're about to unzip their form-fitting ballgowns. The story's nothing but a ship of ghouls.

As usual, the production design outacts the actors, and the CGi effects destroy all logic; but there's one hell of a massacre when a steel hawser goes berserk and cuts up the guests, leaving folk standing up but sectioned as if by an egg-slicer - first their pants fall down, which is bad enough, then their heads fall off.

Ghost Ship
Cert: cert18