After a gross-out scene of violence on the stormy sea, The Ferryman (2007) cuts to a sunny day in New Zealand, with a young vaction group including our Mauri hero. They're preparing to board the Dionysus, a sailing yacht, having Fiji in mind as their destination.

We get to know an effective cast while they're out sailing, fishing, drinking, laughing, getting sun tans. It's nice to have a horror flick that assumes characterization is part of a decent film package, with actors of a quality who never let it feel like that part's dull.

They pick up a distress signal that calls them into a fog bank. There's a ghost-ship in the mist, with one living man (John Rhys-Davies) brought back to the yacht. We already know from the film's introductory scene this man is some kind of demon or evil spirit that can jump from a worn-out body to a fresh one by means of brutal stabbing with an ancient knife (which has no backstory of its own; the knife just is).

Last time, though, the creature jumped into a body dying of cancer, & so now takes an immediate interest in Zane (Julian Arahanga), the buff Mauri. Soon our best character is possessed by evil, while the Mauri's mind is trapped in the cancerous body, then thrown overboard. I must say, Rhys-Davies, who is usually a bit of a hack appearing in just anything as the same reliable but narrowly played character, in this film does rather a splendid job expressing his performance convincingly as two personalities.

The creature is pursued by a vengeful ship in the perpetual fog in which the Dionysus finds itself trapped. From Zane's body our psycho killer-demon stalks about the yacht, jumping bodies as he goes. His shocking cruelty becomes a reign of terror & death.

The evil is a vicious soul that thousands of years prior refused to pay the Ferryman (Ben Fransham) to cross the River Styx. It's the Ferryman who has pursued him ever since. And how nice to have a gore flick with imagination for a change!

Zane, after he'd been tossed into the ocean in the old sailor's sick body, manages to swim back to the ghost ship. There he begins making repairs on the engine, as he has no intention of just sitting this out & dying. Eventually he makes it back to the Dionysus. This has much more the tone of a heroic tale than one usually gets from a gore flick.

There are so many odd surprises tucked into this gruesome film; it delivers a lot. Zane's girlfriend (Amber Sainsbury) is an ex-nurse who still has nightmares of an appalling E.R. event, which has its own unfolding. With magic in Kathy's dream; the heroic return of Zane; the gut-wrenching tragedy of the dog; the knife with which bodies are swapped; the coin for the Ferryman; the weird tattoo that follows the demon from body to body; & Kathy's stand-off...there's just no shortage of grabbers reaching for the throat in this one.

And then there's a very nasty fillip at tale's end. By the time it's over, we realize there are no real heroes here; even the best people are not good people. But what is good is the fact that this rises well above the average for its genre, & is a startlingly good example of appalling horror.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl