MFT: "Ghost Ship" opening scene

This is an opening scene from a schlocky 2002 horror flick titled "Ghost Ship". In it you can see an ordinary evening ballroom dancing on a lavish cruise ship sometime in the middle of the 20th century.

It is all glossy glitter posh mosh pit: beautiful singer twists around the microphone being all sensual singing tender slowly swinging song while posh lads and gals in fancy cloth are circling around the square being full of themselves. They have all the time in the world and stuff. It is as kitschy as it gets - champaign all over the place, happy faces with diamonds, lipstick and snow white mile wide smiles, gloves to the elbows, beehive hairdo's. It can go anywhere from this setup.

In the middle of all of this - there is a lonely little girl who is definitely "lost" in some sense and got nothing else to do but be there. She plays with a scrabble puzzle or something. Some dude from the crew helps her to solve it. Then a singer calls out those who are not on the dancefloor and so the captain of the ship invites little girl for a dance. Everything is cool.

Then some mysterious hand pulls the trigger and some suspicious wire starts to strain. Something bad is going to happen. But no one notices that because the song is so sweet and everyone are caught in a moment of absolute idyll. To add a bit of a morbid irony - the credits font is ironically designed after toothless asinine saccharine melodramas of old - all pink and twirly.

And then the wire goes off.

And the next thing we see is the wire trembling covered in blood and people confused, frozen in shock - not understanding what just happened. Then blood starts dripping and people start to fall apart. Most of them are cut precisely in half. Except for a little girl who is just psychologically traumatized by that slaughter. Some got their arms slashed off. One got an upper part of his head cut off.

There are many neat details like hand holding a cigarette falling off, clothes falling off a man before he falls apart; pair frozen in a dance pose - lady's lower part falls down while her man holds her upper part; sewn off hand reaching upwards before finally falling down; woman trying to handle a situation by putting herself back together; captain's blank stare moments before his head goes off.

It is gruesome and legitimately shocking. This episode also happens to be the only good part of otherwise passable horror flick.

After such promising start it turns into by the numbers affair with middling script, nondescript characters, meandering pace and supreme lack of focus - sometimes it is a paranoia-driven thriller, then its impressionist gothic horror, then its slasher with a haunted house as a killer and its a boat. It is utterly frustrating.

But the opening scene is brilliant and with a little help of YouTube it turns into a thing of its own.