Director: Robert Gottschalk
Writers: Paul Strait from a story by Robert Gottschalk
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: YouTube
After finding an abandoned ship, a fishing crew turns it into a charter vessel. Only the drug smugglers who previously owned the boat want it—and its cargo—back.
The first thing I’ll say about this movie is that it’s tonally strange. We open with a trio of fishermen, our heroes, stumbling across an abandoned yacht. As they explore the ship, they find it’s very chi-chi and also that it looks like the owners left in a hurry. Near the mast, they find the corpse of a sailor who died in the midst of trying to raise a flag upside-down to indicate distress. The ship’s name: Medusa.
Nice set-up, right? Sounds kind of spooky, kind of curious, and has plenty of hooks to make you go, “What next?” Even as I write it out I’m thinking this would be a great set-up for a role-playing game in just about any setting or genre. What’s problematic is the movie never surrenders it’s semi-goofy tone, nor does the movie commit to it. Push things a little further and you have Abbott and Costello Meet Davy Jones. Dial it back and you have a seafaring film noir. The movie, despite ramping up the risk, never sticks the tone.
Anyway, they bring the ship back to shore, turn it in to the Coast Guard and claim it as salvage. The Coast Guard gives the ship to them on the condition that the trio let the authorities run ads in the newspaper for the trio’s new charter service. The suspicion is that the boat belongs to the notorious smuggler Anselmo and the plan is to use the trio as bait.
Things go as you’d expect: someone rents the boat, they get hijacked, and it turns out their customer was working for Anselmo. They now have to take Anselmo and his goons to a new location where Anselmo promises to leave them with the boat and never bother them again. There are, of course, double-crosses, the captain of the boat figures out Anselmo is smuggling heroin, and that’s a bridge too far for him. Anselmo and his team leave the ship as promised, but he’s planted a bomb. The customer who betrayed the crew has since fallen in love with the captain’s fiancee and passed her a message warning of the bomb. Captain finds it, saves the ship, but Anselmo tries to shoot everyone on board. The customer turns on Anselmo, ramming their speedboat into the ship, killing them both. Crew leave with their ship and return safely to port. THE END.
Ultimately it’s not a bad movie, but, as I said, it never quite finds its tone. There’s also the problem of the characters doing a whole lot of sitting still in the face of danger. They don’t try to escape their situation or make plans to get away. Instead, they do as their told and otherwise don’t make any dramatic choices… in this semi-dramatic film. Also, in classic MST3k-fashion, the hero, the captain of the ship, is a doughy white guy that doesn’t do anything. It’s his colleague who previously has been the comic relief in the film who kills one of the gangsters and it’s the customer working for Anselmo who kills himself and the big boss. I guess his strategy of sitting still, of, no pun intended, not rocking the boat, worked in the end, but it wasn’t what I expected from a movie.
Overall, it’s a perfectly watchable film, which is ironic since my copy was literally unwatchable. Of the 500 movies I have on these Mill Creek sets, this is the only one I couldn’t rip to my computer. Luckily, someone posted a copy to YouTube, which I’ve linked above. That’s the version I watched. The flick is harmless and fine to have on in the background and has enough space and curious choices to leave itself open to riffing as well.
It’s an okay flick. Not much more to say than that.
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