Grade: D+

It’s been a very wet Halloween season–if not weather-wise, at least in terms of movies designed to feed the holiday spirit. First came “The Ring,” whose heroine not only took an elaborate ferry ride to a remote island but wound up drenched at the bottom of a deep well where the solution to the mystery was submerged. Then there was a haunted-sub flick, “Below.” And now we’ve got “Ghost Ship,” in which the vessel is above water; but the movie’s still a soggy, shapeless mess.

The premise of the picture is perilously close to the 1999 bomb “Virus”–something which probably bothered the makers little since very few people bothered to see that stinker. Still, the idea isn’t any better the second time around. The intrepid, profit-seeking crew of a tugboat finds the wreckage of a ship that could make them rich–but on boarding it, they find themselves threatened by mysterious evil. In “Virus,” the bogeyman was some sort of alien electrical creature that had taken over a massive transport boat; here it’s just ordinary spooks trapped in the wreckage of the palatial Italian liner, the Antonia Graza, which disappeared mysteriously in 1962.

“Ship” thus tries to pique our interest by adding a dose of “Titanic” to the “Virus” formula, but we’re still left with endless scenes of cardboard characters creeping about dark hallways and long-deserted cabins while the hulk creaks and groans until some apparition shows up to offer a quick, inconclusive jolt. There’s an eventual explanation for the ship’s demise and reappearance, of course, and for the presence of the spirits there, but it’s the sort of thing Rod Serling would have relegated to the reject pile forty years ago, and ultimately it’s just a dumb excuse for a waterlogged equivalent of a haunted house movie.

This sort of simpleminded creep-fest can work, if done with style and panache. But director Steve Beck, who fumbled badly with his first feature, the dreadful remake of “Thirteen Ghosts,” shows no more affinity for the genre in this instance. (Once again Robert Zemeckis, devotee of William Castle-style schlock, serves as producer. He seems intent on proving that lots of younger fellows can make thrillers even worse than his own “What Lies Beneath.”) Beck does manage a fairly stylish, if terribly gory (and rather constricted), opening sequence set back in 1962, but once the creaky plot revs into motion, his touch grows heavy and uncertain; he aims to recapture the initial stylishness in a flashback recounting the original disaster that befell the ship, but the elaborate sequence has too much blood and other unpleasantries, and ends up as a cheap imitation of the ghostly ballroom episodes in Kubrick’s “The Shining.” The cast manfully goes through the motions to little effect, stuck as they are in utterly caricatured roles. Julianna Margulies is Epps, the strong, self-reliant woman (a bargain-basement version of “Alien”‘s Ripley); Gabriel Byrne plays the sad-faced, world-weary tug captain (not quite as embarrassing as Donald Sutherland’s “Virus” skipper, but quite shy of his best); Desmond Harrington is the handsome aircraft pilot who finds the ship and joins the salvage crew, but who’s just a trifle odd; Ron Eldard is the extroverted expedition member smitten with Epps and Isaiah Washington the by-the-book first officer; and Karl Urban and Alex Dimitriades are, respectively, the sloppy tech wiz and the grubby engineer. Little Emily Browning plays Katie, a sort of Casperette the Friendly Ghost who contacts Epps in order to reveal the answers to the mysteries, in predictably heart-tugging fashion.

As usual in such tales, everything is shot in an undistinguished gloom, by Gale Tattersall, and suffused with a turgid, lumbering score, provided this time around by John Frizzell.

It’s not surprising that at the end of the day, the “Ghost Ship” sinks. Long before that, it stinks–not as badly as “Thirteen Ghosts,” but pretty pungently nonetheless.

“I guess the message is, the unexamined life can get you in a lot of trouble. If you don’t have any perspective on who you are and the effects of your behavior, watch out.” That’s the way writer-director Paul Schrader, whose dark, often disturbing scripts and films have been causing controversy and deep discussion ever since “Taxi Driver” in 1976, summed up his newest work “Auto Focus” during a recent visit to Dallas. He was joined in the interview by Greg Kinnear, who appears in the picture as Bob Crane, the chipper star of TV’s “Hogan’s Heroes” who had a distinctly dark side–though supposedly a happily married man, he used his celebrity to arrange an endless string of one-night stands with women, and videotaped his encounters with the help of an equally lascivious buddy named James Carpenter (played by Schrader favorite Willem Dafoe). After Crane’s television popularity ebbed and his career collapsed, he was murdered in an Arizona motel in 1978–a still-unsolved crime, though Carpenter was tried and acquitted of it much later and is still thought by many to have been the killer.

“It’s a character study,” Schrader explained, describing Crane as “not suicidal, but self- destructive. He spent twenty-two years creating something from virtually nothing. And then he reaches a point in his life where things aren’t going too well and his behavior starts to ruin or destroy everything he has accomplished. And he can’t stop. I don’t think you’d need a better definition of addiction than that.” But, he added, what affected the actor was more than just addiction. “Narcissism comes into it,” he opined. “People did say about Bob that the excitement of filming was equal to the excitement of sex. It’s not quite as simple as [his] being a sex addict.”

Schrader distinguished between what he called “good Bob” and “bad Bob” in describing how the picture was eventually edited down to its final length. “The first cut was about fifteen minutes longer,” he recalled. “Besides the normal process of tightening, most of the material that came out of the film came out of the first half. You know, good Bob just wasn’t as interesting as bad Bob. That sort of indicates where my interest [in the story] lay.”

Kinnear took up the distinction in the sides of the Crane character when asked how he prepared for the role. “I couldn’t prepare for the one without the other, because he was a combination of all these things at the end of the day,” he said. “Personality traits in good Bob were present in bad Bob. When he’s towards the latter part of the movie and going through some pretty dark places, he’s still painfully unaware of what’s going on–there’s an obliviousness about the damage that he’s doing to the people around him…. There are these little incremental slips that keep pushing him…little incremental changes in his behavior and in the things that go on around him, and suddenly he finds himself in the trouble that he is.” He added: “Where the sex addiction ends and his using his celebrity to procure women begins is a very blurry line.” Schrader emphasized the “delightful irony” of the character: “This guy prides himself in creating the persona of the guy who’s in on the joke, the hip guy…. Well, the joke finally becomes his life, and he’s the one who doesn’t get it.”

Schrader was also fascinated by the Crane-Carpenter relationship. “One of the things that drew me into [the project] was the similarity of the Crane-Carpenter dynamic to the one in ‘Prick Up Your Ears,’ the Joe Orton-Kenneth [Halliwell] relationship, which was obviously a gay relationship that ended in murder. That dynamic was always under the surface.” Kinnear added: “I think that he did see himself as the all-American heterosexual male…. But there was this kind of co-dependency where they were very needy of each other, and did have this odd friendship. They were each leading the other down this horribly wrong path.”

“Auto Focus” portrays the transition from “good Bob” to “bad Bob” not only in terms of its story arc, but in more subtle cinematic ways, too. The process began when the production designer suggested early in the planning that as the narrative progressed, the sets should get more and more cluttered. “That idea spread through the whole concept of the film,” Schrader said. “In the color palette, the hair and makeup and wardrobe, the change in film stock and camera style, the music, and in some ways even the writing–the writing is much more disconnected at the end than it is at the beginning, and therefore if the writing is more disconnected, the performance gets more disconnected [too]…. The goal was, just like an addict wakes up one day and realizes he’s living a different life–‘What happened to my old life, where did it go, when did it change?’–in a viewer [there’s] ‘Wait a second, this is not the movie I was watching an hour ago–where did that movie go? When did it become this movie?’ That’s [the effect] we were after. It was a fairly simplistic notion in the beginning, but in the execution I think it became more sophisticated.”

Though “Auto Focus” is a serious work, both Kinnear and Schrader could joke in talking about it. When asked how he prepared for his role, Kinnear recalled talking about the late actor with Crane’s oldest son (who appears in the film as an interviewer), and added: “And I watched far too many episodes of ‘Hogan’s Heroes,’ and yes, I did watch ‘Superdad’ [Crane’s 1974 Disney comedy, a notorious bomb]–lest you think I didn’t do my damn research!” And in response to a query about whether he and Kinnear would collaborate again, Schrader said, with a straight face, “Yeah, we’re gonna do the Superman story–the George Reeves story.” After a pause, he added: “And then we’re gonna do the Robert Blake story.”

General laughter ensued.