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DEATH
SHIP
PLOT
It's Captain Ashland's last voyage with the ship, when his ship
mysteriously start taking in water and sinks, a few survivors has
to rescue themselves onto an old abandoned German ship. Everything
on the ship seems to be in function, so they decide to stay until
the rescue team gets there... unfortunately, the ship has other
plans than for them to get rescued.
REVIEW
All right, so you've been wanting to see this movie for a long time,
and you cannot find even one somewhat positive review for it...
Why? Is it really that bad? The answer is NO, I really enjoyed this
flick as much as any other average nonslasher horror movie from the
80's. It has tons of flaws, but common, who cares how the ship gets
the petrol to run, it's a horror movie for crying out loud. So let's
start with the review shall we?
When I started watching this I wasn't expecting anything else than
a low budget crap fest, but to my surprise, this was actually quite
entertaining. The movie is kind of suspenseful, not scary suspense-
ful, but you know, when you want your characters to make it until
the end. Something that hit me while watching this movie was that
the 2002 horror flick Ghost Ship, not only rips off by taking
almost the exact same poster and having the almost identical title.
But it also rips off by using all kinds of elements from this movie.
And Yes, I agree, anyone could have thought this movie up, but it's
still a very original movie right? This was the first real Ghost
Ship movie, and to my surprise there has only been one movie like
this since then, why did this movie not work at the cinemas? Lack
of gore? Lack of famous characters? You tell me.
Now to the acting, the acting is actually a lot better than I could
ever imagine. Since there are only a few characters, you get to
know them quite fast, and that's totally a plus for this movie.
Also, in A LOT of movies, you want to see the characters die, but
in this, I was kind of hoping that everyone would survive... well
everyone except one person, if you've seen the movie you'll know
what I'm on about. The directing is also quite good, but at many
times it's very dark and hard to see what's going on. Some scenes
are also directed in a way that they look cheesy, for example the
scenes where you get to see all the engines pumping or whatever the
hell those things are called. But overall, I would probably
recommend this over Ghost Ship, at least this movie doesn't have
stupid things like people not being afraid of ghosts.
GORE
As I said before, this movie lacks in the gore department, and
would probably have been a hell lot of more entertaining if it just
squeezed in some gore in the death scenes. We do get to see some
blood, but it's way overused so it looks pretty fake, we also get
to see a lot of rotten skeletons, and some people hung up on meat-
hooks, so it's not totally unsatisfying.
SOUNDTRACK
In the opening we have some eerie dark sounds but I don't know if
we can call it music, well I guess it's kind of music, but it
reminded me of the sounds that the Japanese Ring opens with.
We also get some 40's music played by a vinyl, and oh does that
scene not work well on every horror movie you've seen it in?
And to top it all we get some German nazi propaganda music, great
stuff, still nothing very memorable, but I couldn't have chosen
the soundtrack better myself so I shouldn't complain.
BOTTOM LINE
Instead of seeing Ghost Ship, track this down, far more original,
and quite entertaining, although, it could've used the same gore-
amount as Ghost Ship had since it was pretty dry. Hopefully, Anchor
Bay or Image Entertainment will pick this up and release it on DVD,
for god knows it needs a DVD release. It's quite high budget for
the time it was made so I am surprised it's not released at least
in some country on DVD yet, but if you've heard anything else,
please tell me, and I will be right there with my credit card.
Review
By: AnthroFred
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