FANTASIA OBSCURA: What’s Worse Than a Spooky Haunted Ship? A Haunted Nazi Ship, of Course!
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, though, you never realize that you’ve gone too far until you blow RIGHT through that wall…
Death Ship (1980)
Distributed by: Avco Embassy Pictures (US)
Directed by: Alvin Rakoff
How do you know when you went beyond where you should have stopped?
Is it the moment when you make a joke to a crowd and their laughter stops as they stare at you incredulously? Is it when you get up after having a few drinks and feel the floor slide out from under you? Is it when you get into a heated discussion with a loved one, and after you say the wrong thing the other person shuts down and cries?
Most of us have a flash of insight that kicks in, to keep us from making those mistakes. We realize what’s likely to happen and hold ourselves back, a decent dose of good sense to know when to stop before it goes wrong.
Which, sadly, these folks lacked…
We open as the credits come up on screen on a cargo ship under power. After a few flyaround shots, we see brief flashes of a cruise ship, which gets the engines aboard her going full ahead. We notice that she’s abandoned, her crew nowhere to be found, even though orders are coming over the horn in German as she seems to change heading.
We then concentrate on the cruise ship we saw briefly, where at the helm Captain Ashland (George Kennedy) is coming down hard on his crew for the smallest infractions. They don’t much like him, and neither does the shipping line; we find out through dialog that this is his last command, and that three days later he’s going to give up the helm to Captain Trevor Marshall (Richard Crenna) on account of his having a much better work disposition with the crew and passengers than Ashland could ever muster.
Ashland is spending his last command showing Marshall the ropes, and trying not to let the revelers at the masquerade ball (or anyone else) tip him over the edge. Which, he’s failing at badly, considering who’s around him: We have Trevor’s wife Margaret (Sally Anne Howes) who can’t help but look embarrassed for Ashland as his career sails away. We have the Marshall kids, Robin (Jennifer McKinney) who you can tell looking at her that she’s not that enamored of her younger brother Ben (Danny Higham), who in just about every scene he’s in proclaims that he really has to pee. There’s the ship’s officer Nick (Nick Mancuso) whose position aboard the ship we never find out, as he spends most of his early screen time with Lori (Victoria Burgoyne) who’s his “one cruise stand” ifyouknowwhatImean. There the passenger Sylvia Morgan (Kate Reid) who’s a bit too uptight and squirrelly, and the ship’s entertainment Jackie (Saul Rubinek) who’s loose and annoying in the way most on-stage hosts were back then. With this lot, it’s a safe assumption that Ashland just wanted to end it right there and then.
So of course our freighter comes for the cruise ship at ramming speed, and proceeds to do quite a bit of damage as she strikes the cruise ship’s hull. (So much damage that it looks like other vessels nearby took a hit as well. Which is the only way to explain why the footage of a ship going down from The Last Voyage which they spliced into the film that doesn’t look at all like it belongs in this film is put here…)
Everyone described above (somehow) escapes the sinking of the cruise ship, and all end up on the same piece of debris, hoping for a rescue. Unfortunately, the first vessel they come across is their attacker, which looms over them suddenly.
They manage to get themselves aboard the ship, which they discover is unmanned and appears to have been drifting for a long time, so long that cobwebs cover a lot of the bulkheads. (How the spiders ever got aboard the vessel to begin with, we’re never told…). And yet the ship functions as though crewed. We watch as cabin doors open and close by themselves, the ship’s film projector plays clips from Everything is Rhythm for the kids all by itself, and the winching picks up and drowns Jackie overboard, which doesn’t seem to faze the survivors that much.
While everyone else is getting creepy feelings, especially the later victims who die horrible deaths, Captain Ashland feels right at home. In fact, the ship seems to like him, and even helps him find one of the old captain’s uniforms which somehow fits him well for him to wear as he becomes master of the ship, a ship that tortures those it does not like and expects to have blood from its compliment in order to survive.
And also, we discover, a ship that was a Nazi POW camp on the high seas…
And here, we have to stop and ask, “Der Fu…?” For a film that tries so hard (if badly) to set up something horrible at sea, they had plenty they could have played with. Ever since the Flying Dutchman was written about in 1790 and the Del Gratia found the Marie Celeste adrift in 1872, there were plenty of hauntings and spooky things sailing the waters that they could have gone with. Demons, curses, vengeful sea gods, angry citizens of Atlantis, plenty of material.
But they had to go with Nazis, because they needed something truly horrific to cover the fact that otherwise this film didn’t have much else to offer. It’s a reveal that doesn’t make sense; why would the Nazis waste a ship as a torture platform, especially as their navy was always easy pickings for the British and Americans? Did Donitz get huffy at a staff meeting in Berlin after a bad encounter with Himmler and tried to show him was ist was?
They didn’t just gild the lily here, they threw it into a kilogram of molten gold without thinking it through. It’s handled so clumsily when we do get to the big reveal that desperation doesn’t just reek, it shoots out the pores with the pressure of a bilge pump. We’re left after that to ask after the bad reveal, “Do we really need to deal with Nazis now?”
Must. Resist. Obvious. Comment!
Having the film go into that territory seems while watching it that its crew knew they had to go big because there was nothing else they could have used that would work. Rakoff, whose only genre work this was, discussed in interviews later that the ship was very much a Hollywood diva; she could only be filmed for two hours under power before her engines gave up on her and she quit. The rest of the shots of her were her at anchor, even though this film’s set on the high sea.
The rest of the sets and effects are likewise threadbare, much as the script was. With a budget of $4.5 million Canadian (about $10 million US in today’s currency), the only place they seemed to have gotten their money’s worth was in the acting; in the aggregate most of the performances work here, excluding Kennedy’s turn towards malevolence that never feels well-grounded as he goes bad badly.
There are plenty of films about haunted seas that can be seen that didn’t have to pull a cheap scare out of desperation like Death Ship did. There are better films, like 1944’s Between Two Worlds or 2002’s Ghost Ship. There are a few that are worse, which if the tide’s right may come ashore in Rebeat sometime.
But if you really, really need to see Nazis in your sea adventures, you may want to consider 1960’s Sink the Bismarck!…
NEXT TIME: Are we really going to look at this cinematic genius’ only genre pic next week? And what is real, anyway…?
