‘Death Ship’ Could Have Been ‘Alien’ on the High Seas, Instead It’s a Forgettable ‘80s Horror Effort
I have a rather odd relationship with Alvin Rakoff’s 1980 horror film Death Ship. It’s a feature that shows ample promise and boasts a strong premise, yet sadly stops well short of greatness. I desperately wanted to like Death Ship, but John Robins’ unpolished screenplay (along with myriad other challenges) stops the flick from functioning as well as it ought to. Despite that, I revisit the picture from time to time, hoping maybe I’ll finally really connect with it. Each time I repeat that pattern, I come away disappointed. What can I say, I’m a glutton for punishment.
The film features some impressive death scenes; the setting is plenty claustrophobic; and the core skeletal outline does show a certain level of promise. If only the film also featured better editing, a stronger screenplay, and a few additional tweaks, this might well have been Alien on the high seas. Instead, Death Ship is a horror thriller that never lives up to its considerable potential.
What is Death Ship about?
Death Ship follows a motley assortment of guests and crew members who narrowly escape a cruise ship with their lives intact after a possessed ocean liner crashes into it, promptly sinking the vacationer-filled vessel. Among the survivors are Captain Ashland (George Kennedy), who is finishing up his last seafaring voyage before retirement, his replacement, Trevor (Richard Crenna), Trevor’s spouse, Margaret (Sally Ann Howes), their two children (Jennifer McKinney and Danny Higham), and a handful of other tertiary characters seemingly only present within the narrative to bog down the proceedings.
The castaways unknowingly take refuge on the very same vessel that sank their previous ship. Worse yet, the core cast has no idea that the ocean liner upon which they’ve taken refuge just so happens to be an SS prison ship with deadly designs for the unsuspecting passengers.
Despite not working as a whole, the film has elements that keep me coming back to it.
One reason I keep coming back to this film with an utterly unrealistic level of optimism is the fact that it starts off with a certain level of promise. The first act is actually pretty good. The crash that sets up the core story is a pretty great start, featuring engaging visuals that really get the blood pumping.
Another entry in the plus column is the way Rakoff imbues the vessel with a personality, making it feel very much like a sentient character. That aspect is only helped by René Verzier’s cinematography. The late DP frames the ship nicely, showcasing plenty of dizzying camera angles likely to disorient the viewer and render them ill at ease.
I also see ample merit in some of the finer details, for instance, the ship uses the blood of its innocent victims as fuel. That’s a really neat idea that adds to the tension of some of the picture’s more effective moments.
As I mentioned earlier, Death Ship seems to take some of its cues from Alien, using haunted house tropes and relocating them far from the comfort of home. Similar to Ridley Scott’s space opera, the cast of Death Ship is stranded without a lifeline. That’s a tried-and-true premise that all but guarantees a baseline of tension. While there certainly is a palpable baseline of tension here, it’s frequently upended by a haphazard narrative that never fully commits to the scares within.
The bad is just as prevalent as the good.
As for what really doesn’t work, some of the picture’s problems stem from the overstuffed cast that fractures the narrative perspective between far more viewpoints than necessary. The screenplay could have scaled back the scope and instead just followed a smaller handful of survivors. Six would have been a good number. Instead, we have no fewer than nine castaways who board the mysterious vessel.
That includes the incoming captain’s children amongst the core group, who do far more harm than good, and frequently distract from the tension. The children have deliberately ‘cute’ dialogue that adds nothing to the proceedings. Worse yet, convention dictates that the little tykes probably aren’t going to succumb to the ship’s sinister forces at any point, which does little to sustain the unease needed to keep the audience invested. I could almost liken the experience to being stuck babysitting a couple of bratty kids when all you want to do is escape into a horror movie.
Death Ship continuously gets in the way of its own success by jumping between sometimes-harrowing action sequences and the decidedly less appealing antics of the captain’s precocious brood. Just as the picture builds sustained momentum, we return to something far less enticing, like the children’s bedtime ritual.
Each time Rakoff begins to build atmospheric tension, it feels like we’re starting fresh, rather than snowballing into increasingly intense territory. Excising the children entirely would have been a wise choice; however, putting them in significant peril with far greater frequency might have gone a long way toward evening out the persistent valleys and plateaus.
The final verdict on Death Ship
All in all, Death Ship gets almost as much wrong as it gets right, making this a mixed bag filled with unrealized potential. Perhaps the film would be a good candidate for a remake. Allowing a fresh set of eyes to mine the proceedings for what works and eschew what clearly doesn’t might be a great way to effectively bring the potential I’ve always seen inside this uneven effort to life.
The film has some really neat ideas that come dangerously close to working. I might even go so far as to say that it’s a solid pick for a ‘bad movie night’ with friends. Death Ship is entertaining enough that your pals won’t hate you for making them watch it, yet the flick also delivers enough unintentional comedy and camp to fit the bill.
If you are curious to see where you stand on this uneven effort, you can find Death Ship streaming on Prime Video as of the drafting of this post.
Categorized:Editorials
