Death Ship (1980)

              Ah, this is the good stuff.

              ‘Death Ship’ is a Canadian-British co-production, and although I can’t find proof of it anywhere I’m convinced this entire movie only exists because somehow one of the producers involved had access to a derelict ship. It was directed by Alvin Rakoff at the tail-end of a thirty-year career making film, tv shows, and stage productions. None of them were particularly memorable, which is probably why so much of his Wikipedia entry is made up of lists of the actors he worked with (to be fair he worked with a lot of great actors, just not in their most memorable roles). For example he directed Sean Connery in a 1957 staging of ‘Requiem for a Heavyweight,’ his first starring role. He cast an unknown Alan Rickman as Tybalt in a 1978 production of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ He directed Rod Steiger in 1961's ‘World in my Pocket,’ Roger Moore in 1969’s ‘Crossplot,’ Henry Fonda in 1979’s ‘City on Fire,’ and finally Elliott Gould in 1981’s ‘Dirty Tricks.’ Whatever class he to brought to his celebrated theater work he did not really bring to the world of film.

This title does not lie to you, it is a ship of death.

              The writers are fairly obscure as well. The story is credited to Jack Hill and David P. Lewis, with the screenplay to John Robins. Jack Hill’s a name people in the right circles might know, he’s the writer slash director for a number of cult and quasi-cult films, such as ‘Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told,’ ‘Switchblade Sisters,’ ‘Coffy,’ and ‘Foxy Brown.’ David P. Lewis had done a lot of decent tv work before this, including episodes of “Get Christie Love!,” “McMillan and Wife,” and ‘Playback,’ a season 4 episode of “Columbo.” John Robins was better known as a British tv director, helming episodes of “The Benny Hill Show” and later “Charles in Charge.” I’m only surprised that the people behind a movie about a possessed Nazi death ship roaming the Atlantic weren’t more sleazy.

              The cast is made up of, frankly, two C-listers and a bunch of nobodies, with one exception. The eventual lead is Trevor Marshall as played by Richard Crenna. He did a lot of tv work, but if anyone recognizes him these days it’s as the increasingly ludicrous Col. Trautman in the ‘Rambo’ films. He wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire around the time this movie was made. The eventual antagonist is Captain Ashland, played by George Kennedy. Anyone even partially familiar with bad movies of the 70’s and 80’s cannot be surprised that he’s in something like this. For every halfway-respectable role the guy took, like ‘The Eiger Sanction’ or (eventually) ‘The Naked Gun’ there were about four of these schlock properties. The exceptional person is a too-short portrayal of the band MC Jackie, the first victim of the titular death ship, played by a nigh-fetal Saul Rubinek. He ends up being the only actor in the movie able to convey nuance with his face.

              The premise is ludicrous, but of course the premise is ludicrous, the movie’s called ‘Death Ship.’ The idea is that somehow a Nazi prison ship became possessed by the spirits of its crew (and maybe its unwilling passengers?) and has spent the decades since the war roaming the Atlantic in search of blood. The first thing I wanted to do was attack the very idea of a large Nazi prison ship, because why would they need a ship when they had all those prisons? Then I did an internet search for ‘nazi death ship’ and turned up an example in the SS Cap Arcona, so I’m going to drop this entire line of inquiry. I also made sure that my browsing history was turned off.

              The movie opens on an unnamed cruise ship somewhere in the Atlantic. We never get an idea of the size of the ship, so I’m going to pretend it’s the Norway, supposedly the largest cruise liner on the sea in 1980 with a passenger capacity of 2,181 with 800 crew members. Let’s just round that up to 3,000 people on board the ship. We get about twelve minutes to enjoy the interior sets of what they’re asking us to pretend is a cruise ship before unrelated footage of the titular death ship is implied by editing to crash into the stock footage of a cruise liner and it all sinks, leaving a total of nine survivors. Luckily all of them were the passengers who had speaking lines in those first twelve minutes, meaning the movie didn’t have to pay extra to any of the 2,991 dead people that nobody mentions for the rest of the movie.

              We cut from the admittedly impressive stock footage of an engine room flooding with water and crew members hastily preparing to abandon ship (taken from the 1960 film ‘The Last Voyage’) directly to eight people on what I guess is a life raft? It’s wooden and square and doesn’t seem to have any supplies. They are as follows: the ship’s first mate Trevor Marshall, his wife Margaret, his two kids Robin and Ben, another member of the crew named Nick and his cruise-fling Lori, an older passenger named Sylvie, and Saul Rubinek as poor Jackie. We spend a minute or two with the characters, enough time to wonder how these people are the only survivors when at the time of the crash they were all in wildly different parts of the ship, when Marshall’s daughter sees something in the water. They crowd over to look and up pops a very wet George Kennedy as Captain Ashland. I need to stress that the ship sank at night and it’s now clearly daytime, there is no wreckage or other signs of either ship anywhere to the horizon, and he makes no sound before he surfaces right next to the boat. Don’t worry, though, because none of this is ever explained and it doesn’t have any impact on the plot.

              I should talk about the death ship, because most of the movie is set there. It’s clear the production had access to an actual ship, though it’s impossible for me to say if it was still in service or not. The movie was low-budget enough that it seems very unlikely that they had access to a large water tank, so the shots of the ship at sea almost have to be real. It’s entirely possible they parked the thing just offshore somewhere and pointed the cameras away from land. A lot of the interiors of the ship seem authentic as well, or at least the hallways and stairwells between decks seem too large and elaborate to have been built just for this movie. There’s a pretty good chance that a lot of the interior rooms and the bridge of the ship itself were sets, but again it’s impossible to tell. Maybe that says good things about the production design, but at the same time I wasn’t exactly scouring the screen for telltale signs of movie magic. From the look of it I’d guess it was originally some kind of cargo ship, there are cranes and pulleys on the deck and at least one large set of swinging doors that open into the hold. I’m sure anyone decently familiar with ships could tell that it wasn’t a prison ship and certainly wasn’t left over from the 1940’s, but maybe the makers of this movie were more diligent in tracking down something authentic than I know.

              Once the captain’s been pulled onto the raft an indeterminate amount of time passes. The survivors drift along until they come back across the death ship. They apparently all fell asleep for hours because nobody notices until they’re about thirty feet from the hull. Most of them manage to clamber aboard by using an old gangplank hanging off the side, then they start hauling the captain on board. We cut to one of several pieces of stock footage of engine parts moving, which is our subtle clue that the death ship has some death is store for us. Some pistons pump, some steam gets released, and suddenly the gangplank beneath the captain and his helpers gives way, dumping them into the ocean. Someone up top drops a rope down and they start to climb up. Just as George Kennedy makes his way halfway up some more mechanical stock footage appears and a bunch of oil is dumped right in his face. I point this out because Kennedy’s face is on camera when it happens and he’s just covered in the stuff. There are several points in this movie where I questioned the producers’ commitment to safety.

That's Captain Kennedy to you, sailor.

              No sooner is everyone on board than it decides to kill poor baby Saul Rubinek. In order to subtly convey to the audience that the ship isn’t strictly speaking normal we get alternating stock footage of machinery and several shots of levers and dials and switches moving and shifting and flipping on their own. Just in case we forgot there are ghosts on board. Jackie manages to get a foot tangled in a line and a crane jerks him up and out over the water. It raises him as high as it can go, and either they really dangled Saul Rubinek up there or they got a decent stand-in. He’s then dropped into the water and drowns grasping at the side of the ship.

              Moving on remarkably fast (although these are the same people not freaked out about the other 2,991 deaths they already witnessed, what’s one more), the survivors slowly start to explore the ship, looking for the crew. They also do this very annoying editing thing where sometimes at random a character will wander by the site of their future death and the film splices in a few frames from their death scene. There are a few instances of frenetic editing in the movie that don’t add anything but irritation. Meanwhile Captain Ashland is semi-comatose and slumped beside a doorway. It was established during the introductory scenes that he’s a giant prick, he hates being captain of a cruise liner after “forty years at sea” (Kennedy was 65 at the time of filming, so fine), and that this voyage of the cruise liner was his last as he’s very much being forced into retirement. While he’s slumped there he starts to hear someone speaking to him in German (the version I watched didn’t have the option of translated subtitles but I’m comfortable assuming is was at least Nazi-adjacent). Ashland is half-asleep and doesn’t really react to the words, but from later actions I’m pretty sure he was into whatever he was told. Soon the others have found a couple of rooms they can crash in and he’s carted over there.

              Meanwhile everyone else is discovering that the ship seems to be completely abandoned, most everything covered in cobwebs, but none of the sheets or pillows have deteriorated, which you’d think would happen if a ship was continuously at sea for forty years with no crew to change them. There’s also fresh water in the pipes and intermittent electricity, though that I can slightly overlook as some of the survivors do wander down to the engine room and confirm that the ship is running even though there’s no fuel, if ghosts can power a diesel engine it can spin up a converter. They even discover a small movie theater with a working projector. The little old lady, who doesn’t know any of the survivors so clearly is next to go, eats a couple pieces of hard candy she found on board (which the ominous music informed us is bad news) then apparently starts to either decompose or sprout cancerous growths all over, it’s hard to tell. Everyone else freaks out and runs away, so she stumbles along back to the sleeping quarters, where Captain Ashland has now woken up and is happy to strangle her to death. It’s never really made clear what his deal is, by the way. Here when he’s strangling this lady we see a POV shot from his perspective and he sees a young male sailor in a white hat instead (now I’ve added ‘nazi sailor uniform’ to my list of searches, and from the twenty seconds or so I spent looking it doesn’t seem they wore white hats). By the time someone else rushes in she’s dead and the captain has taken a shower, apparently back to his old self. He claims she died of a seizure and that he’ll be taking command now.

              You can kind of already tell where the rest of this is going. The captain terrorizes the survivors and kills them one by one until he’s killed by the ship itself. Ashland is either possessed by the former captain or somehow entranced by the vessel, it’s not very well established. He only ever talks English, remembers his entire life, and knows who everyone on the ship is. Except during the funeral scene for the now-dead old lady he reads from a German language bible. But also at the very end, when the ship is choosing to chase another cruise liner and not go after the remaining survivors, he yells at it to obey and starts shooting at the bridge and then the engine room. It’s inconsistent. I will say it’s fairly satisfying when the ship gets tired of him and tips him over onto a set of gears that slowly chew into him, that’s a decent death.

              The other two kills are interesting ideas done badly. The woman coded as a slut by the rest of the movie dies because she felt like taking a shower. After the old lady funeral everyone heads off to bed, with Marshall and his family in one room while Lori and Nick grab a room for themselves on a different floor about halfway across the ship. Clear thinking, these people. They flirt a little, then she heads into the shower. Earlier in the movie they at least point out they’re going to need to boil any water they find before they drink it, here she just hops in. Which is a shame, since the water quickly turns to blood and the door becomes stuck shut. After failing to smash the door in Nick goes looking for help, meanwhile the poor actress playing Lori has to spin around and around in an upside-down blood fountain for what must have been some time, given the amount of fluid that collects at the bottom of the shower. She eventually collapses into a huddle at the bottom of the stall and I guess dies? Because the next time we see her she’s being lugged to the side of the ship by Ashland. In full view of everyone he raises the dead, naked, bloody corpse over his head, yells “Unto almighty God, we commit her soul and we commit her body to the deep,” then tosses her over.

I admit, this would make for a bad day.

              Nick’s death is conceptually sound, it just doesn’t really play on camera, and its scene contains one of two completely mystifying edits. Everyone is now in a rush to get off of the death ship. The lifeboats have already been ditched and the remaining survivors are running around like idiots. The only odd person out is Nick, since we know they’re not going to kill the two little kids and so their parents are probably fine as well, so we follow him as he runs around shirtlessly. We’ve also been getting forward-flashes to his death scene and he was topless there, so we’re all ready for it. He and Marshall come across a room full of Nazi flags and documentation, and the soundtrack and the framing both act like we didn’t figure out the Nazi thing a long time ago. They leave it in horror and end up back in the room with the film projector, which starts showing Nazi war propaganda. They try to turn the projector off, even smash it to the ground at one point, but the lights and the noise grow louder and louder and then Nick takes a swing at the bright light in his face and he’s up on deck falling past a dodging Ashland and down through those big double doors and splashes into the water-filled hold. He splutters to the surface as Ashland smugly pulls a lever, lifting up a net made of hawsers and a horde of half-decomposed bodies that Nick is now in the middle of. He starts screaming hysterically and trying to claw his way out, which is pretty horrific. Especially since it wasn’t shot in slow-motion but they slowed it down anyways so it’s jerky and annoying to watch. Eventually Ashland pulls another lever and snaps the net shut on him, encasing him in bodies, then drops it into the water. I guess Nick just gave up instead of still trying to get out, and I can’t really blame him. We then cut back to Marshall, still in the projector room cowering from the lights and sound. Ashland’s reverb-heavy voice starts to cut in saying “This ship needs blood, Marshall” and “the blood of your wife and your children,” suchlike over and over and the scene intercuts Marshall cowering with Kennedy seated somewhere completely else saying these words apparently to someone, and then after another cut Marshall is just seated across a dinner table from Ashland, a nice little dinner laid out before them. Marshall slowly notices he’s not being assaulted by Nazi film strips and instantly stabs Ashland and runs away.

              This is as good a place as any to shove in a complaint I have about the end of the film. I’m not going to worry about spoilers because nobody cares. At the very end, after everyone has either been killed or survives, the ship is shown pursuing and ultimately colliding with another passenger liner. It has been at the very most a week since the sinking at the beginning of the movie. It’s probably closer to three days. Except for at the very end there is no sign during any of that time that anyone is looking for survivors. I get that the death ship kept traveling after the initial collision, although that doesn’t explain how a raft drifting overnight could overtake them (and don’t argue that the ship wanted them for their blood, it collapsed a gangplank to keep them off and it certainly didn’t get any blood from the people who died in the water), and maybe it would take a couple of days to mobilize any rescue. Fine with all that. But this ending means that the body count for the ship is hovering in the neighborhood of five thousand people in a week. The ship has supposedly been doing this for forty years. Unless what we saw at the beginning of the movie was the very first time the ship succeeded in killing anyone and it now has an all-consuming taste for more, I’m pretty sure someone would have noticed a long time ago that the cruise industry was rapidly running out of boats.

              This wasn’t a good movie, but I read the title before I watched it, I can’t be mad at it for that. And I’m not, I got about as much memorable nonsense out of this movie as I could reasonably expect from something called ‘Death Ship.’ We have some decent 70’s era Italian exploitation vibes from this, probably due to the prevalent overdubbing and the presence of exactly one (1) American movie veteran, but it’s much less sleazy. There’s the nude blood shower scene, which you better believe was included in all of the trailers, but for a movie like this that’s a shockingly low amount of of nudity. The kills were frankly disappointing, the only blood we saw was produced by the ship, the deaths were either by strangling or drowning. I guess Lori did die from the blood shower. Oh, and George Kennedy did have his arm torn off on screen, that’s not nothing. But considering it’s from 1980 and rated R it could have either been much worse or much better. If you’re a fan of old B-movies I’d say give it a watch, it could be fun with friends, but if you’re primarily interested in horror or gore you can safely skip this one.