Director – Gary Shore, Screenplay – Stephen Oliver & Gary Shore, Story – Stephen Oliver & Tom Vaughan, Producers – Laurie Cook, Mali Elfman, Nicolas Ferrall, Jason Newmark, Nigel Sinclair, Thorsten Schumacher, Lars Sylvest & Brett Tomberlin, Photography – Isaac Bauman, Music – Jason & Nolan Livesay, Visual Effects Supervisor – Matthew Kemper, Visual Effects – Riddlemonk, Special Effects Supervisor – Keith Harding, Makeup Design – Chloe Edwards, Production Design – Gary MacKay. Production Company – Imagination Design Works Productions/White Horse Pictures/Rocket Science.
Cast
Alice Eve (Anne Calder), Joel Fry (Patrick Calder), Dorian Lough (Bittner), Will Coban (David Ratch), Nell Hudson (Gwen Ratch), Jim Piddock (Captain Carradine), Florrie May Wilkinson (Jackie Ratch), Lenny Rush (Lukas Calder), Wesley Alfvin (Fred Astaire), Tim Downie (Gibson), Adam Grayson (Chief Engineer)
Plot
In 1938 aboard the transatlantic luxury liner Queen Mary. David Ratch, his wife Gwen and their daughter Jackie attend a dinner, with he posing as a military officer to get a table. At the same time, Captain Carradine is warned by his engineers that the boiler is overheating and close to exploding, but refuses to order the ship to stop. After David’s imposture is exposed, the evening ends in a bloody slaughter. In the present-day, estranged couple Patrick and Anne Calder come aboard the Queen Mary where it is now permanently berthed in Long Beach, California. He wants to write a book about the ship’s history, while she has the idea of setting up a virtual tour of the ship. Their son Lukas goes missing below decks and experiences something supernatural. On their return to the Queen Mary while it is closed for renovation, Patrick and Anne encounter the ghosts that still haunt the ship.
The Queen Mary is an existing ship. It was built by the Cunard Line and launched in 1936. It served as a transatlantic cruise liner for several years but was then converted for use as a troopship during World War II and then back again to an ocean liner before being retired from service in 1967. It was then permanently moored in Long Beach, California, where it is owned by the city and has been converted into a tourist attraction.
Of more interest to us here is that The Queen Mary is now renting itself out as a film locale – where apparently everything from The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Thirteenth Floor (1999) to Pearl Harbor (2001), The Aviator (2004) and episodes of Baywatch (1989-2001) have been shot there. Before Haunting of the Queen Mary came out there was The Asylum’s not dissimilar Titanic 666 (2022), which was also shot aboard the Queen Mary.
Haunting of the Queen Mary was the second film for Irish director Gary Shore. Emerging out music videos and commercials, Shore made his directorial debut with Dracula Untold (2014), which was intended to launch Universal’s Dark Universe revival of the Famous Monsters but instead proved a big flop. Indeed, that film’s failure appeared to torpedo Shore’s chances in the Hollywood mainstream and he did not direct another film for the next nine years up to Haunting of the Queen Mary, aside from the St Patrick’s Day episode of the horror anthology Holidays (2016).
Murder aboard the Queen Mary
The idea of a film about a haunted ship didn’t do much for me – it felt like a throwback to older films like Ghost Ship (1952) or Death Ship (1980), at most recent something like Ghost Ship (2002). Certainly, as it starts in, you are impressed by the fact that the film does much to incorporate the history of the real Queen Mary, quoting facts, figures and pieces of trivia, even screening newsreel footage and photos of celebrity passengers. If anything, the film that this resembles in The X Files episode Triangle (1999), which was also shot on board the Queen Mary, but audaciously took place in a Long Take (one continuous camera movement) at the same time as things kept flipping back and forward between the present and 1939.
And certainly, Haunting of the Queen Mary is made with much more of a budget and an expansive feel for the use of the ship as a locale than Titanic 666 did. There are even touches such as having a cameo appearance from Fred Astaire – although the actor cast (Wesley Alfvin) looks nothing like Astaire. (There is also the rather amusing scene where the Astaire-alike invites young Florrie May Wilkinson up to dance a duet where she (an amateur) manages to perform a routine first time off that two people would have to rehearse to be able to do).
I started to like Haunting of the Queen Mary the more it went on (and it is quite a long film too at 125 minutes). I ended up more impressed with Gary Shore here than the work he did on Dracula Untold. There is the odd nifty effect – the outlandish one of a gnarled hand forcing its way out of Alice Eve’s cellphone and trying to strangle her. There are constantly ghostly figures appearing – assorted figures seen lurking in the background, and most evidently the ghost of a barman that appears in the empty bar, or the woman playing the piano who abruptly batters her head to a bloody pulp on the keys. There are some quite sophisticated scenes that in the space of a single shot cut between action in 1938 and then to have someone round the same corner in the present seconds later.
