Director: James Oxford

Cast: Antonio Sabata Jr, Deana Russo, Nicholas Irons

Synopsis: A group of passengers plot their escape off a haunted ship to hell.

If you have seen more than a handful of films in your life you will know three things five minutes from the start of this film. You will know exactly why the disparate group of strangers awake on a mysterious cargo ship with no recollection of how they got there; you will know exactly which of these characters are going to survive the voyage; and you will know that the film is going to be crap.

This is an ultra-cheap horror movie made for TV (no bad words or boobs then) that must have been pitched as Outward Bound meets Saw. The characters who find themselves trapped aboard the spooky ship are immediately recognisable as cardboard stereotypes: the honest, hard-working NASCAR mechanic (who for some reason believes his knowledge of car mechanics will enable him to get the ship’s engines running again), the plucky heroine, the sleazy movie producer, the tough bad guys, the junkie, the sexpot starlet, etc. Unlike real people, none of them try to think back to the last thing they can remember in an attempt to figure out how or why they got aboard the ship, but simply wander around its deserted corridors mostly doing exactly what the ship’s mysterious Oriental steward had expressly warned them against doing. Combine the acting talents of all of these — with perhaps the exception of the hero and heroine — and you would probably have as much as you’d find in Steven Seagal’s left foot. But then even the finest actor would have trouble bringing the third-rate dialogue to life.

Our passengers are (too slowly) picked off one by one for various misdemeanours. One poor soul evens gets sucked down to hell for having a crafty smoke on deck before we even get to know him. Most of these deaths are unimaginative, and spoiled further by cheap CGI demons that are about as frightening as Casper the Ghost.

Don’t waste your time on this rubbish.