Hapless survivors of a cruise ship disaster board the DEATH SHIP for a “holiday in hell” courtesy of Scorpion Releasing.

A mysterious vessel rams a luxury cruise ship leaving a raft full of survivors drifting into the path of the same ship anchored in the middle of nowhere. With Captain Ashland (George Kennedy, BOLERO) out of commission, Captain Marshall (Richard Crenna, THE EVIL) and crew member Nick (Nick Mancuso, NIGHTWING) get the others aboard the vessel including Marshall’s wife Margaret (Sally Anne Howes, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG!), his kids Robin (Jennifer McKinney, RUNNING) and Ben (Danny Higham, LOVE AT STAKE), tourist Lori (Victoria Burgoyne, GHOSTS CAN’T DO IT), Christian widow Sylvia (Kate Reid, EQUUS) and cheesy shipboard entertainer Jackie (Saul Rubinek, BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES). Far from being a safe haven, the ship has a life of its own and starts systematically eliminating the survivors. Meanwhile, Ashland – resentful at being retired and replaced with Marshall – starts experiencing SHINING-esque visions and signs of possession by the ship’s ghosts.

DEATH SHIP's originated as a screenplay by Jack Hill (SPIDER BABY), who receives story credit here alongside David P. Lewis (KLUTE) while TV director John Robins (HOT RESORT) receives script credit; and, frankly, Hill's "Blood Star" would have to have been more interesting than the final product. Despite a bloody nude shower scene, the film is not exploitative enough to be entertaining. Director Alvin Rakoff, a Toronto native who got his start in British television before moving onto films (including the May-December romance SAY HELLO TO YESTERDAY, also available from Scorpion Releasing) is no stranger to the genre, having directed nine episodes of sixteen-season series ARMCHAIR THRILLER as well as the short TV adaptation of the vampire story MRS. AMWORTH, and it seems evident that he prefers the more restrained approach to this film’s detriment as he and the high-profile cast are let down by the messily re-written script, the film's budget, and producer interference (as described in the film's featurette). The nine characters are also hardly the amusing cross-section of humanity you usually see in Irwin Allen-esque disaster movies (although it’s only technically a disaster movie for the first 15 or so minutes), and the film would probably have played better had they started after the disaster since the ocean-liner scenes introducing and establishing the characters are utterly boring: Kennedy grumbles, Crenna quips, Howes beams, Rubenik does his obnoxious entertainer shtick, the kids act cutesy, while Mancuso and Burgoyne tussle in a bedroom. The crash sequence is achieved through intercutting stock footage from an older film with a couple shots of the actors being tossed over tables in the dining room. The script does offers some tantalizing ideas – Nick's observation from the charts that the course of the ship goes in circles mirrors gruff Ashland's remarks about the monotony of the cruise ship's journeys – but the end result is a lot of wandering between death scenes shot with little flair. Kennedy and Crenna give their best on what looks like an arduous shoot, but it is hard to take very British Howes seriously when she looks at the 1940s photographs, layers of dust and decay, and rusty water and says, “I wonder where the crew are?” Although Burgoyne is there to strip and die, the first half of the film at least portrays her as more assertive than the other women; and, in an interesting reversal, Mancuso is the one who gets hysterical (although his death scene is the most ridiculous and needlessly protracted sequence). The cinematography of Rene Verzier (RABID) is the film’s most accomplished aspect, but the many artfully-framed and lit shots of the ship’s surfaces and corridors hardly inspire dread. Songwriter/library music composer Ivor Slaney’s score is far less effective than his experimental score for Norman Warren’s TERROR. The film was a collaboration between American producer Sandy Howard (CIRCLE OF IRON) and Canadian producer Harold Greenberg (PORKY’S), who had just worked together the previous year on the Canadian-produced TERROR TRAIN as well as Rakoff’s CITY ON FIRE (scripted by Hill) the same year. Producer Derek Gibson had worked for Howard until 1979 when he became head of production at Astral Bellevue, one of the companies behind DEATH SHIP, and would join Hemdale in the mid-1980s to produce THE TERMINATOR and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD among others.

Released theatrically by Avco Embassy, DEATH SHIP languished on VHS from Embassy before Nucleus Films released a stacked DVD in 2003 utilizing a so-so quality master. Scorpion was able to use the American interpositive for their 2012 DVD and Blu-ray as part of the Katarina's Nightmare Theater line. The image was much improved with richer color and detail, but the extras were skimpy in comparison, with an isolated score (on the Blu-ray) and a comic featurette called “Learn What the Ship is Saying” (3:43) in which German-born Waters translates the ship’s various intercom warnings, as well as deleted scenes (4:12) that first turned up on a TV broadcast (presumably reinserted to make up for cut violence). When Scorpion reissued the film on Blu-ray in 2018, they were able to utilize an interpositive that featured the deleted scenes (93:14 vs 90:44). The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen presentation still highlights the limitations of the production – including the mismatching stock footage – but also demonstrates the difference in technology in the last half-decade with more vibrant colors during the cruise ship scenes and the blood in ghost ship scenes where colors are generally more muted while bringing textures into relief from chipped paint to varnished wood and spider webs emphasizing the atmosphere of putrefaction even before the corpses, skeletons, and corroded flesh show up. While the previous edition featured a Canadian TVA Films logo before the main menu, Scorpion's reissue has an Avco Embassy logo before the feature as a separate titleset. The original mono track is included in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 while a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio remix has also been added – isolating the dialogue in the center channel and allowing the mono music and effects track to spread along the front with some frequencies of the score reaching the surrounds. The isolated score has also been carried over in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 while the optional English SDH subtitles have taken advantage of Waters' German lesson to transcribe the German dialogue (it is not translated but its intent should be apparent).

The reissue ports over the “Learn What the Ship is Saying” and the Katarina's Nightmare Theatre playback option, but Scorpion have thankfully licensed the Nucleus extras to fill out the package. The audio commentary by director Rakoff moderated by Jonathan Rigby identifies the stock footage as the MGM production THE LAST VOYAGE, acknowledges the film's usage of disaster movie elements in the first section – including the casting of Kennedy from the AIRPORT films and how Reed's role was intended for Shelley Winters (THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE) – reveals that Australian stuntman Grant Page (STUNT ROCK) did the film's stunts, while Rigby notes that similarities between the film and Dark Castle's GHOST SHIP while also suggesting that some of the commonalities between DEATH SHIP and some antecedents were part of the culture of the time (particularly the fascination with the Bermuda Triangle during the seventies as well as the various ghost ship legends). Rigby points out the film's lack of gore and possible post-production tinkering to goose up the film – including the sound work of David Appleby (BLACK CHRISTMAS) – while Rakoff admits that the script was thin and he just threw everything he had at it while also conceding that he should have better steeped himself in the horror genre before shooting.