Kill Cruise (1989) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy) and Tuna
It's a pretty popular themed cruise now on Norwegian Cruise Lines. I think the celebrity cruise is still number one, then the sports cruise, then the kill cruise. You see, one of your fellow passengers is a serial killer, and you have to find the right one before everyone on the ship is dead. The cruise line likes the business, but they don't get that many repeat customers.

Death, exciting and new. Come on board, we're expecting you. Welcome aboard, it's death ... death .... death ....
Of course, that has nothing to do with this movie, which is also called The Storm and Der Skipper.

Patsy Kensit and Liz Hurley play two working class English floozies drifting around in Gibraltar, making a subsistence living with a cheesy nightclub act. They want to go to the West Indies, and they end up falling in with a drunken German sailor who hasn't been able to sail since his last trip caused some people to die.

NUDITY REPORT
Elizabeth Hurley does a striptease in which her breast can be seen very briefly with a freeze-frame.

She is also seen on board in a man's shirt with no bra beneath, and her breast pops out a couple of times.

Patsy and Liz have no problem persuading the sailor to take them to Barbados, and the last 80 minutes of the film is simply the three of them on the sail. The German sailor is played by Jurgen Prochnow. (He's obviously had the experience. Remember him in Das Boot?)

Pretty much nothing happens for about 77 minutes. There is a bit of misdirection. We wonder if the captain is a junkie. It turns out he is simply a diabetic. We think Patsy is crazy with jealousy, and may be psychotic. It turns out that she's just afraid of being left alone when Hurley falls inevitably in love with the Cap'n. Hurley seems to be simply an innocent caught between these two monsters.

SPOILER

Needless to say, the last two minutes present an absolutely silly resolution to the situation. Completely out of left field, unexpectedly and for no reason, Hurley kills the captain, then smothers Kensit with a pillow when she protests.

Then we see a word caption that says "the boat drifted into port three weeks later. It was deserted."

The frigging end.

DVD info from Amazon

  • no widescreen

  • no significant features

  • poor transfer
Poor movie with a poor quality DVD transfer. 

Avoid it. 

Hurley's nudity isn't even visible without freeze-frame, and isn't even that visible with freeze-frame. Hurley does do a fairly good job in this film, she's much more animated than usual, much looser, and performs with a reasonably consistent working class accent.

TUNA's THOUGHTS
Kill Cruise (1990), aka Der Skipper, stars Jürgen Prochnow, Elizabeth Hurley and Patsy Kensit. Prochnow is a yacht owner who has turned to drink because his wife left him after her lover drowned at sea on Prochnow's very own yacht. Two bar entertainers (Hurley and Kensit) talk him into sailing them to Barbados. A triangle develops, and the journey is tense from the beginning. In case any of you want to see it, I will leave the plot at that, other than two say that it has a surprise ending that I didn't think fit with the rest of the film.

The plot never really engaged me, the motivations for the two women are not especially clear, and the ending was one of those that make you say "You've got to be shitting me." That, coupled with the poor DVD transfer, and this is an E+.
 

The Critics Vote

  • no reviews online

The People Vote ...

  • With their votes ... IMDB summary: IMDb voters score it 4.7/10
IMDb guideline: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence, about like three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, about like two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, about like two stars from the critics. Films under five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film, equivalent to about one and a half stars from the critics or less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

My own guideline: A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. C means it will only appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover appeal. D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre. F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

Based on this description, Scoopy says this film is an F. Tuna votes E+. The score is arbitrary, but the key point is this: we both hated it.

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