Review of Death Ship

A prime example of a potentially solid and effective fright film premise being done in by a deplorably inept and spiritless execution. The basic narrative set-up is novel and intriguing (Jack Hill co-wrote the story): a gigantic crewless haunted freighter powered by the demonic evil of the brutish Nazis that once manned it keeps said Nazi torture and sadism alive throughout the decades by sinking luxury ocean liners and allowing their survivors to board it so the foul festering behemoth can bump 'em off and derive energy to sustain itself from their precious lifeforce. Unfortunately, Alvin Rakoff's lifeless, fumbling, snoozing-at-the-helm direction totally ruins any vitality or creepiness needed to make the promising plot work. Rene Verzier's hideously mannered cinematography hurts matters all the more, overusing nausea-inducing zoom-ins, annoyingly tilted camera angles, whiplash-causing overhead shots, and some strenuously labored slow motion to an irritating extreme. The crucial miscasting of George Kennedy as the luxury liner's gruff captain who after boarding the Nazi ship degenerates into a ranting, demented, murderous crazy-as-an-outhouse-rat loons constitutes as another grave error. A friendly, comforting, avuncular screen presence, Kennedy's cuddly over-sized teddy bear persona proves to be all wrong for the part, therefor making his character's gradual descent into madness laughable instead of frightening. Richard Crenna as the fretful, worried out of his skull hero likewise is pretty embarrassing: glum and dejected, Crenna carries himself with the defeated, resigned air of a man who knows he's trapped in a turkey and mostly grits his way through the whole rotten mess. The big shock scenes are seriously bungled as well, especially a limply staged drowning and an excessively bloody "Psycho"-style shower sequence that goes on forever. Only in the last reel when a bunch of revolting decomposed skeletons in tattered rags are discovered does the movie finally deliver a few uneasy shudders, but by then it's much too little way too late to compensate for the grueling tedium which precedes it. The death ship itself, a 50-year-old Canadian coast guard ice-breaker called the "N.B. McLean," sizes up as a fabulously ghastly monstrosity -- dark, rusty, and grotesquely immense, with dimly lit hallways covered in cobwebs -- but just like the lackluster cinematic clunker it's stuck in it proves to be slow, meandering, heavy-handed and ultimately quite dead in the water.