I have no idea why this movie suddenly popped up into my thoughts. I do remember that I had seen it during its initial theatrical run. That would be a difficult event to not remember. I was 19, in the Navy, and just getting seriously into RPGs. On that weekend Friday night me and my friends started a marathon AD&D game. We did not sleep but gamed right through the night and on into Saturday. by later Saturday we decided on a break in the game and went to the movies — Death Ship. After the movie we went back and continued gaming. Ah, the energies of youth.

I do remember I was not impressed with the film and tiny bits and pieces have stayed with me but really nearly off the movie was dumped by my data storage. Now, 35 years later I found myself thinking about the film and wondering what it really was like. Find a copy to watch proved to be a task, but one I completed sucessfully and earned out some e.p.

Death Ship is the story of a band of people who survive a cruise ship collision and find themselves adrift on debris in the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately for them the cause of their collision is the aforementioned Death Ship and when they spot it the next morning(?) (Not sure about that the lapse dissolves used after they are adrift makes any reasonable time estimation impossible.) They climb aboard its old and rusting hull. At once the ship proceeds to start killing them, throwing the Jewish comedian overboard.

A series of events pass when bad things happen to the survivors and one become possibly possessed by the ship, or perhaps simply enamored with it. the distinction is never made clear. There are psychotic breaks, or breaks in space/time, again the distinction is not clear, and eventually some of the survivors escape to rescue.

I made a post recently about the difference in my opinion between story and plot. This film is all plot, and very bad plot that is illogical and acausal, without any story. There are no characters of note, only the thinnest cardboard cutouts doing things to make the next scary event occur.

It is not surprising that I remembered so little of the movie as it contains nothing memorable.

Sorry about the scarcity of posts here lately. I’m engrossed in writing a new novel and that has taken up quite a bit of my new word output. So here’s a review of a film I streamed from Hulu.

The Living Skeleton is a 1968 Japanese horror film. I stumbled across it while browsing Criterion’s Catalog on Hulu. It promised an atmospheric, maritime-centric, ghost story. That sounded like a film worth at least a look-see. I am particularly fond of ghost stories and found several from Japanese cinema that worked quite well for me.

The story is about a freighter that is taken by pirates. (modern day freighter, not sailing ship.)  The crew are murdered and the ship considered lost at sea.  The film skips over a number of years to the sister or a woman murdered on the ship. She lives near the sea, working for a priest, and involved with a young man. The lost ship reappears on a foggy night and the young woman ventures aboard.

The story starts following the fate of the pirates as one by one they meet their deaths. All in all up to the point the film had been working for me. It is well acted, nicely photographed, and has plenty of atmosphere. My only quibble is editing. It lacked mystery because of the linear plot line. I would have favored an approach that started well after the pirate attack and brought the viewer up to speed with bits and bites of information.

*Spoiler Warning*

The film falls apart in the third act. After several well handled twists and very nicely staged ghost scenes the story reveals that there was no ghost. The ‘dead’sister survived the attack and managed to describe her attack so well that the surviving twin could track down the pirates and by her mere presence cause them to panic and die. The plot takes another terrible turn when it is revealed that not only did the ‘dead’ sister survive, but her groom did as well. Both have lived aboard the derelict ship, he as some sort of mad scientist inventing fantastic acids for bad guy disposal and third act ticking clocks.

The bad guys are killed, the sisters are killed, the mad scientist groom is killed, and the boyfriend is left alone and terribly confused.

This was a decent movie that had me buying in until they cheated and switched the genre. SF author Nancy Kress in her writing guides puts forth the idea that at the start of a story the artist and the audience enter into a contract, a promise, about what sort of thing they are going to experience, and that breaking this promise is a sure way to anger your participants. This film is an example of that failure.