If there is one thing I am a sucker for, it's really good movie cover art. Death Ship is one of those films that had me at hello. What I can't believe is that I never heard of this film before until this year after finding a post about it on Instagram.
The cover art of this film is quite atmospheric, unique, and downright eerie.
Our synopsis is this: A cruise ship sailing in the night is struck by an unknown "ghost ship" causing the ship to sink in minutes. The captain along with some crew members, a family, and small handful of passengers survive and manage to make it onto a life boat in time. After paddling their way through the ocean they find an ominuous black ship drifting about in the ocean. To their surprise, the ship is completely vacant of a crew or passangers but instead is full of nightmares.
Trouble starts as this mystery ship takes on a life of its own. Things move on their own causing fatal freak accidents. The surviving captain of the cruise ship becomes posessed by the ghost ship and it's original nonexistant crew. Once the survivors discover dead bodies in torture mechanisms, skeletone remains, and a freezer of corpses along with Nazi memorbilia and film reels, we learn that they are in fact on an abandoned Nazi ship in which a lot of people were killed on (both before and after the original nazi crew were aboard).
The horror content offers a good variety..posession, hauntings, ship wrecks, and Nazism (Is this even a real word?) The technical effects of the film aren't exactly the best. We have rough cuts, lack of footage of the actual cruise ship sinking, no footage of how people got from point A to point B... From what I heard, they also took external shots of the ship from another movie. But lets be real...if you want a "ship wreck" movie, you watch big blockbusters like The Posiedon Adventure, Titanic, etc. This is a low budget horror flick, so you can't expect big budget effects, only cut corners, which I think could have been done a little more smoothly. The film had a lot of innovative concepts, so I feel that dealines and time restraints got the best of some of this movie.
This film however does present amazing cinematography using menacing angles from below, making our ghost ship even more eerie and threatening. My favorite shot is when the survivors on the life raft arrive to the front point of the mysterious ghost ship as it menacingly floats almost directly above them from behind. Some other note worthy scenes were the blood shower which used some unusual angles, and also the ship deck funeral in which a body was thrown off the ship to a watery grave. The shot of the body bag being dropped from the side of the ship and making a big splash I found to be a little unsettling and effective.
I am really glad I got to see this sunken treasure of a movie (get it?). It offers a lot in only 90 minutes. What you see on the movie cover is what you get.
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