Death Ship (1980)

Usually when I review a movie I have a clear-cut goal that I reach (sometimes) by the end: I tell you whether or not the movie itself is worth watching.

But with Death Ship, I find my work cut out for me - because even though I enjoyed the movie, I can't really recommend that you go out of your way to seek it.

Why? Well, I'll get to that but for now, let me give you a little back story on my choice for today.

Remember in my review of Zombie Holocaust when I referred to my ginormous satellite dish with which I discovered a new world of movies and TV shows at my disposal? It was thanks to this dish that I also found the wonderful world of superstations: TV stations which emanated from major cities around the country. Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas/Ft. Worth - they all had them. And New York City had a couple of them...but it was one of the Big Apple's big channels on which I caught Death Ship.

It was only a few minutes of the end, but I was enticed enough by the grungy look of the cinematography, the foreboding corridors of the ship and the sight of actors I readily recognized sloshing around in something I'd never heard of before to sit and watch what remained of it.

I had to find this one for my own.

Many years down the road, long after the dish bit the big one, I came across a copy of Death Ship and proceeded to watch the thing from beginning to end, absorbing every detail along the way. And it made me nostalgic.

By the end, I really missed my satellite dish.

Anyway: A small group of survivors from the collision of a large ocean liner find themselves rescued by a mysterious black ship that appears seemingly from nowhere. After exploring the dark hallways and abandoned rooms fore and aft, the disparate group find themselves being killed one by one under mysterious circumstances. It isn't until the stalwart Trevor Marshall (Richard Crenna) makes a startling discovery of why the ship saved them that it all makes horrifying sense, but by then it may be too late....

When you look at a movie which has a setup like this one, many things are taken for granted by the viewer. For one, you're going to expect foreboding atmosphere. For another, you're going to expect a lot of blood. And for the most important thing, you're going to expect a lot of acting that makes you believe that people are actually wandering around a cursed ship that will slowly take their lives.

I'll grant you the one on atmosphere. René Verzier did the cinematography and succeeded in making the affair as claustrophobic and unsettling as possible, even on the open sea, which was a stretch. Of course, he also did preliminary work on such efforts as the Marilyn Chambers horror film Rabid, the Hal Holbrook Deliverance rip Rituals and - God help me - the Barry Newman/"Mystery Science Theater 3000" classic City on Fire.

There's not much in the way of blood, though. Effects guys Michael Albrechtsen and Peter Hughes don't get much of a chance to ply their craft, you see, because writers John Robins, David P. Lewis and justly-famous schlockmeister Jack Hill build up suspense and a sense of nightmarish disjuncture throughout this flick and, for the most part, it works...but for something as outright schlocky and overwrought as Death Ship, there needs to be a LOT more blood than what there ended up being.

Oh sure, people get drowned, poisoned, suffocated, that sort of thing, but not a lot of spurting blood, gushing wounds, horrific ripped-apart deaths. When you name your movie Death Ship and the deaths are kind of subdued, that just doesn't cut it for the homies.

There is enough blood, however, in one justly-famous scene that will probably have you hitting replay over and over again. Maybe for more reasons than one. It has a woman, having just engaged in a hot sweaty boingy-boingy session with Nick Mancuso's character on a bed aboard the ship of death in question, go to the in-room shower and freshen up, only the shower quickly starts dispensing gallons of blood all over her and make her start spinning around helplessly whilst locked in.

Enjoy it while you can - this is the only nudity in the whole thing.

NOT that seeing any of the rest of the cast bare it all would be a good thing. Oh sure, we get to see the thespian talents of some pretty decent actors, but they don't exactly possess the physiques you dream of topless, so to speak. We're talking Richard Crenna, Saul Rubinek, Sally Ann Howes (remember her as Truly Scrumptious in the Dick Van Dyke classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?) and...

and...

Mistah George Kennedy, ladies and germs! The man who's been in more Airport movies than the planes themselves have! He plays the captain of the cruise ship that gets crunched and, dragged aboard the cursed ship o'death half-alive, strange things begin happening to him until...in a shocking denouement...he simply gets up, changes his uniform, and....

welllll...

He becomes a Nazi. Yep. he does. He doesn't have the accent, he doesn't "sieg heil" anybody and he never sprouts a thumb-width moustache but he becomes a Nazi. Black uniform, the eagle insignia holding a swastika, shoots a German rifle, the whole spiel.

Oh, did I forget to mention? The death ship in the movie Death Ship is actually a giant floating interrogation liner with numerous instruments of torture and chains and hooks and a big red Nazi propaganda room. And lots of mummified Nazi officers hanging up in meat coolers, too. Gotta have them, just for the scene where they all spring to life and feed on the flesh of the living...only that never happens in this movie. You wait for it, sure, you even expect it, but it ain't going to happen, so don't cheapen yourself by waiting for it.

Up to now, I've talked up a lot of Death Ship and been more or less fair about what it does accomplish, horror-wise. After all, atmosphere and intensity aren't the worst things a movie like this can bring to the table.

So, why can't I recommend it?

The biggest reason I have to steer hard starboard from Death Ship is because it is just too little of what you want from a movie about cursed ships, possessed boat captains and unsuspecting oafs wandering its doomed deck, just begging to be kacked. And when it doesn't have rotted skeletons or an overly-histrionic Nick Mancuso opening his mouth as wide as he can into the camera, it's really kind of boring. And not in a dramatic pause kind of way, either.

It has an Italian feel but filtered through American sensibilities, which means that any chance of a Dario Argento vibe is negated in favor of blood and guts, which is again negated by wanting to make it look and feel a little classier than what it was, which again was negated by trying to infuse more of what an international audience would want, which in and of itself is always a bad idea because, as movies like Virus (1980) and The Blue Bird (1976) prove, it makes as much sense as world-class chefs from Italy, France and Japan all trying to cook the same cheeseburger.

And as far as making the central villains Nazis, that's a pretty easy cop-out. I mean, this goes back to the 40s, where every other movie - big and small - had an evil Nazi as the main baddie. If you're writing a movie. no matter what it's about...and it can be about kids putting on a musical in their backyard or a courtroom drama or a mismatched pair of lovers...just pop in a bad guy with a German accent and some hidden Nazi memorabilia in his possession and the rest of the movie writes itself. BADLY, but it writes itself.

Just put them on a boat, even if they're already dead, their spirits haunting the craft and making it move along and seek victims, that's good enough.

So in the end, Death Ship sets out to make a scary movie, gets the atmosphere right, forgets the blood but in one scene, cops out on the villain and kind of fizzles out at the end. There are scenes that try, but it never succeeds altogether.

In fact, as I remember catching it on TV all those years ago, maybe Death Ship is one of those kinds of movies that are at their scariest when watched out of context.

A shame, since the scariest boat-bound movies we have otherwise are Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, Ghost Ship and Cuba Gooding Jr.'s Boat Trip.

And even then, I think Cuba Gooding Jr. has a big edge over George Kennedy, Nazis or no.