Captain Ashland (George Kennedy) is the captain of a cruise ship. He is on his last voyage before he retires. Captain Ashland is a cynical and disparaging man who doesn’t have a nice thing to say about anything. Replacing Ashland as Captain is Trevor Marshall (Richard Crenna). Marshall has brought his family on the voyage. With him are his wife Margaret (Sally Ann Howes), and his two children, Ben (Danny Higham) and Robin (Jennifer McKinney).
While Ashland is stuck in the dining room whining about the passengers, the bridge is having a problem. A phantom ship has been seen on radar heading straight for the cruise ship. The ship makes evasive maneuvers, but the mysterious ship continues to track the cruise ship. The two boats end up crashing into each other. The cruise ship sinks and only a few people survive to make it to some ship wreckage. Among the people that are adrift are Ashland, Marshall and his family, the ship’s entertainment emcee, Jackie (Saul Rubinek), a young officer named Nick (Nick Mancuso), and passengers Lori (Victoria Burgoyne) and Mrs. Sylvia Morgan (Kate Reid). Ashland had been injured and is unconscious.
Eventually they come across a black abandoned freighter. The survivors are unaware that this is the phantom ship that rammed the cruise ship and that it was used as a Nazi prisoner torture ship. The stranded passengers board the freighter. The ship begins to function on its own. The engines start and the anchor rises. The band of passengers inspects the ship but find no one else aboard. Soon people begin to die. The haunted ship takes on a life of its own. Marshall and Nick decide that they need to get off the ship as soon as possible. Before they can get everyone together the lifeboats release themselves. The survivors are trapped. When Ashland regains consciousness, he begins to take on the personality of a German Nazi captain and begins killing the remaining passengers to satisfy the death ship’s thirst for blood.
“Death Ship” was release in 1980 and was directed by Alvin Rakoff. It is a British and Canadian horror movie. The film was developed for television; however, it ended up being released to theaters. The German language version of the film removed any references to Nazis and violent content.
The movie is intense in parts and gross in parts but also rather slow paced. It does have some interesting camera angles that are noir reminiscent and add a lot of sinister vibes to the overall feeling of the film. I wasn’t very impressed with Kennedy’s performance as an overbearing sea captain. His vision of a Nazi possessed evil captain was a little better. There are some truly eerie scenes and some great cinematography, but the editing is a little choppy. The slowness of the film’s build up culminates in some fast and furious reveals at the end. The change in tempo is a little grinding and loses a little in the transition. It is a potentially good movie that missed the mark.
The black and white musical film shown in the movie is “Everything Is Rhythm” 1936. There are also some black and white newsreels that feature Adolf Hitler.