Death Ship (1980)

[Neville]

Plot: The survivors of a line cruiser board an abandoned ship in the middle of the ocean. Soon its aparent that they're not welcome. The engines and other machinery have a life on their own, and they start plotting the murder of the passengers. While the captain of the cruiser seems to surrend his will to the ship, the rest of the people try to find out what is going on.

Comments: I was wondering if I should post this on the "good movies" board. It certainly is a B-movie, but it is an above average one. Basically, that's because it does right what many movies of its type forget to do, which is to build an atmosphere and to try hard to stablish that the ship is a living, malevolent organism.

That these two things are achieved with a low budget is a testament to the profesionality of director Alvin Rakoff. Unfortunately, the film saves the gory details for the last act, but meanwhile we do get a lot of footage of the engine room, where elements whose function we don't exactly know suddenly come to life. And many interior shots of the ship are accompanied by distorted -and not subtitled- outbursts of German. Add a little creative camerawork to the mix -at some point the camera pans through the whole ship... from upside down- and that's it.

Well, that's not it. You see, the camerawork is very inventive, but it can't disguise how cheesy the deaths are, or how long it takes for us to get the answers. At one point, a hook grabs a sailor by its leg, lowers him to sea level, dunks him into the water and, not happy with that, rises him to the top of the ship and lets him go. Later on, a yummy female victim is subjected to a long blood shower only to be thrown overboard minutes later. Either the spirits who govern the ship can't decide how to deal with the victims or they are prone to overkill.

Oh, and yeah, the cast is interesting. There's a pre-Rambo Richard Crenna, and George Kennedy is here too, as the captain who goes bananas. He does the best acting of the movie, which is not saying much.

[BUREINPARESU]

This one actually creeped me a bit when I was younger, I've wanted to see it since then.

[Monster Jungle X-Ray]

This is one that I haven't seen since the late '80s, but what I remember of it was a pretty effective ghost thriller. Wasn't this remade kind of recently?

[Neville]

No, but more recent horror films, such as "Virus" or "Ghost Ship" have things in common.

[Jack]

That sounds pretty interesting, I'll try to check it out sometime.  I've seen "Ghost Ship", the first 5 minutes were awesome, but after that it immediately descended into eye-rolling clichés and predictability.  Virus is a favorite of mine though.

[Monster Jungle X-Ray]

No, but more recent horror films, such as "Virus" or "Ghost Ship" have things in common.

Ahh yes, Ghost Ship was what I was thinking of there.

[voltron]

I love this movie. George Kennedy is da man! 

[horrorfanatic]

Not a bad movie I rented this years ago on VHS before DVDs came about.It was an interesting creepy horror suspense thriller.The movie had a lot of WTF moments also .

[schmendrik]

Not a bad movie I rented this years ago on VHS before DVDs came about.It was an interesting creepy horror suspense thriller.The movie had a lot of WTF moments also .

I think I caught this one while channel-surfing one night, and it caught my attention enough to watch it to the end.

[Zebra 3]

Not even George Kennedy can save this disappointing movie.

[FatFreddysCat]

I saw this one last night for the first time in over 25 years. I remember "Death Ship" turned up pretty frequently on cable in the early 80s and I had been pretty creeped out by it as a 12 year old. Watching it last night, I wondered why, cuz it's slow moving and horribly acted. The similarly themed "Ghost Ship" (2002) was no great shakes, but it was light-years ahead of this. (To be fair, the budget on "Death Ship" probably wouldn't even cover the cost of the on-set catering for "Ghost Ship," but still...)

Am I a bad person for wishing that something awful would happen to that annoying little kid who kept stopping to pee every five minutes? 

I was also surprised to see a very young Saul Rubinek, who I know better as "Artie" from SyFy Channel's "Warehouse 13," in this... he was the cruise-ship comedian who got tossed into the ocean by the Death Ship's swinging hook early on in the film.