Sometimes I think that we genre fans who cling to cult and exploitation cinema and eagerly await new disc releases feel like the only audience for 4K restorations of, say, Canadian horror films from 1980. We might be the primary audience for things like a 4K restoration of Death Ship, complete with two new commentaries from some of the best film historians in the game, sure, but there’s another one out there. It’s the budding film fans, who are perhaps also budding collectors, who see these re-releases as spotlights for films they’d never before considered.
I mention this audience, specifically, because watching this new restoration, I couldn’t help but marvel at how surprisingly relevant this film is 46 years after its release.
You can sum up this film, part of the Canadian exploitation cinema boom that also included films like Black Christmas and Terror Train, with grindhouse brevity: A group of survivors from a wrecked cruise ship stumble upon a ghost freighter in the open ocean, only to find that it’s sentient, and it wants to kill all of them. There’s no dancing around the facts of this plot, no waiting until the last minute to reveal that the ship’s haunted and not just home to very devious, very sneaky sailors. From the jump, you are on a supernatural horror ride with very few stops.
Directed by Alvin Rakoff, a veteran in the chair who wasn’t really known for horror (though he did some disaster movie experience, which is key for this film), Death Ship plays like a film that’s haunted from the very beginning, and to make that clear the first thing we see other than open water is the title ship, looming in silhouette against a delicately painted evening sky. The opening sequence alone forces Rakoff to reckon with many lighting challenges, from shooting the lit portholes of a cruise ship at night from afar to imbuing the Death Ship itself with a sense of personality even before we get inside the hull.
The 4K restoration preserves all of that, and highlights how surprisingly beautiful this film is, particularly when Rakoff gets the luxury of gliding his camera across the water and shooting an empty ship with a grit that makes me wonder if he’d seen Ridley Scott’s Alien before production began. The print is occasionally jumpy with a missing frame or two, and the original compositions aren’t always the most elegant (there’s a lot of handheld stuff in this movie, not all of it great), but it’s a lovely restoration overall, and really enhances the things about this movie that were always worth preserving for present and future genre fans.
This is also a disc set that benefits deeply from its commentaries, which help to not just lay out the backstory of making the film, but shine a light on exactly why it feels so vital after all these years. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the film yet, but Death Ship is not just about a haunted ship. It’s about a haunted Nazi ship, and because its protagonists are cruise ship survivors, it becomes metaphorically about how fascism is still out there in the open water, like a predator, waiting to find unwitting, distracted new prey.
That might not be the most obvious element of the film at first glance, but it’s undeniably a key piece of its lingering appeal, and the commentary by film historians Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson will highlight this thematic oomph in beautiful ways that’ll forever shift the way you see the film. If you want to see the film from the perspective of the Canadian film industry and beyond at the time, the commentary by Paul Corupe and Jason Pichonsky, both experts on the subject, adds that context. Together, these two tracks tell the story of a film that has grown from exploitation horror fodder to a cult classic with unexpected dimensions still surfacing like wreckage in an ocean.
If you’re a collector and you don’t want to miss this disk, I don’t blame you, but if you’re a newcomer to the world of physical media and exploitation horror of the 1970s and 1980s, I think you especially might want to give this film a try.
Death Ship is available from Kino Lorber on April 14.
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