FLOATING SOME STANDARD-ISSUE SCARES.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

THE TITLE ``Ghost Ship'' says it all. The crew of an Alaskan salvage tug find a derelict Italian ocean liner that went missing 40 years earlier in the Bering Sea. They board, find some booty, see some strange things - and one by one die horribly. With minimal imagination, you could restage the whole thing in your bathtub.

Except that you probably wouldn't be able to do so in as slick and professional a manner as director Steven Beck (the ``Thirteen Ghosts'' remake), his crack crew of artisans and uniformly decent cast, which includes ``ER's'' Julianna Margulies as a tough chick with heart, Gabriel Byrne as an Irish skipper with a drinking problem and Australian actress Emily Browning as a sweet, dead little English girl.

Filmed mostly on artfully rotted sets, with miniatures for the high-seas stuff and good if unexceptional CG during the supernatural doings, the movie gives off an effective sense of eerie isolation without ever achieving a distinctive vision. Shock effects are skillful but not real exciting, the plot unfolds sensibly enough despite making little real sense in that modern horror movie kind of way, and the picture has nothing in common - other than ghosts and ships - with the previous productions that have borne the same title.

So, if you like your scares generic and cleanly dispatched, ``Ghost Ship'' is the movie for you. For a little more real creepiness and originality, though, you might want to give the less-disciplined but deeper, more haunting ``The Ring'' a call.

GHOST SHIP - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, language, nudity, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Julianna Margulies, Gabriel Byrne, Ron Eldard, Desmond Harrington, Isaiah Washington, Emily Browning.

Director: Steve Beck.

Running time: 1 hr. 29 min.

Playing: Citywide.

In a nutshell: Straightforward horror thriller about salvage operators stuck on a haunted luxury liner. There've been worse, there've been better - but mainly there have been more distinctive chillers.

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Isaiah Washington and Julianna Margulies struggle to keep afloat after their salvage crew investigates an old, abandoned ocean liner, in the spooky if unspectacular ``Ghost Ship.''