Side Order of Ninjas

   Index  -  Reviews  -  Rants  -  Links
Latest Reviews


Top 5 Reviews

Kill Cruise (1990)

Der Skipper
the Storm
Bloody Atlantic


Cast:

Jurgen "This is better than House of the Dead" Prochnow is the Skipper
Elizabeth "I promise I will get hotter and less skanky..." Hurley is Lou
Patsy "Didn't I star in a movie with a Baldwin?" Kensit is Su


What the box says:

This thriller stars Jurgen Prochnow as an alcoholic sailor who agrees to deliver two young women to the Caribbean.


Plot:

Some guy is swimming to a boat in a storm. We see that the Skipper is yelling for his friend Hans and reports a man overboard using the radio. It doesn�t matter as Hans wins a one-way ticket to Davey Jones locker.

At the police station, the Skipper is questioned. He explains how the tiny ship was tossed. He vows to return to sea.

Some woman is waiting for the Skipper. Outside, the Skipper explains it was an accident. She runs off from him.

6 months later, a cop finds the Skipper at a bar. He vows to return to sea tomorrow much to the amusement of the other barflies.

The cop is getting dressed after servicing the skanky Su, Patsy Kensit. Su and Lu want the cop to talk with the Skipper to take them to sea.

Later, the girls are gussied up or skanked to the max. Lu gets the taste slapped out of her mouth for suggesting returning to England. They head to the bar.

The bartender welcomes our singing heroins. Heroines, you do need drugs to think they sound good.


Kinky Liz Hurley still couldn't keep Hugh Grant...
Skipper is watching them from a Bette Midler distance. He walks up right in of them to watch the performance.

A very lame strip chant starts. Su leaves the stage embarrassed by Lu who displays her wares for the tamest group of drunken guys. Imagine a group of polite drunk guys who slowly clap watching Elizabeth Hurley strip. Skipper starts a collection plate for the girls.

Afterwards, Su is counting the money. Lu and Su learn that the Skipper has a boat. They leave the bar together as drunken singing ensues.

Skipper awakens on his boat alone.

Later, at the bar the girls return. Skipper is awfully perplexed by this mess. They�re going to Barbados. The bartender mocks the Skipper more. To the breaking point, Skipper will sail away today.

The harbor patrol never believed Skipper�s story. They think the ship will return in 3 days with the Skipper and the dog.

The girls shave the Skipper.


Does the world need Jurgen Prochnow to be forcibly shaved?
Bad hula dancing ensues.

That night, Skipper plots the course. We hear his internal monologue about not being used to people. He is also unsure if there are enough supplies.

They watch the sunrise. Sailing ensues. Skipper is working as we see that Su is getting bored.

The girls keep talking about going to Barbados.

Skipper hides his drugs when Su comes into the cabin. After she leaves, we see that the Skipper is diabetic.

Su and Lu are sunning themselves. Skipper wants one of them on watch while he gets some rest. He awakens from hearing barrels and wreckage hit his boat.

Later, Lu is on watch.

Su has gotten extremely sun burnt. Skipper starts lubing her down when she starts acting all uppity and English.

Skipper and Lu are watching a cruise ship in the distance.

Captain�s log, Skipper is unsure he can trust either girl.

Lu helps Skipper with the sails. Bloody annoying Patsy Kensit ensues. She pitches a fit until Lu checks on her then gives her the silent treatment. Su is still recovering from her sunburn. She tries throwing herself at Skipper to no avail.

Later, Su claims the Skipper has made unwanted advances to her. Lu acts a bit more distant to him afterwards.

Su is searching through the cabin. She finds his passport, letters, and pictures of the woman from the start of the movie.

Lu is fixing Su�s hair like in the picture. Skipper is freaked out by this. He heads on deck to check the sails. Su is trying to screw with Skipper�s mind.

Su keeps ridiculing the Skipper. He gets pissed and storms off.

Later, he returns to find the cabin cleaned. Lu cleaned the cabin. Su is still bloody annoying.

Skipper radios the approaching ship on a collision course for them. The huge ship almost sinks them. The tiny ship was tossed again.

Su is still sun burnt and needing to be thrown in the Sarlaac pit.

The next day, Skipper and Lu are swimming. Su stays aboard and finds a used syringe in the trash.

As Lu and the Skipper race to the ship, they notice the ladder has been hoisted and hear the motor start. The ship circles around them. Skipper gets aboard and finds the steering wheel tied. He helps Lu get aboard.

They find the bloody annoying Su working a crossword puzzle. She claims the Skipper is no good for Lu.

At lunch, the Skipper wants to head back to Gibraltar. More bloody annoying Patsy Kensit ensues. More twisted mind games ensue.

Su claims that Skipper killed his girlfriend from the beginning of the movie. Lu is shown the letter and pictures. Skipper is also a junkie, too. Lu doubts the Skipper is as bad as Su suggests.

Sharks circle the boat. Skipper uses his spear gun on Jaws.


This is for my father, mother, brother, sister, 2nd cousin twice removed...
The girls are freaked by this.

That night, Lu pays a visit to the Skipper, as a romantic instrumental version of �When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again� plays in the background. She isn�t bothered about him killing his girlfriend. He explains she left him after their friend died. Mora blamed him for the death.

Su discovers Skipper�s hidden stash of insulin.

Skipper and Lu are going at it like rapid wombats.

Later, Lu returns to the room she shares with Su.

The next day, Skipper is swabbing the deck. He can�t find his insulin. Su faking sleep watches him search. He starts searching through their things. He explains he�ll go into diabetic shock. Su apparently doesn�t care about that fact.

Skipper ties a roe around Su and tosses her overboard. Lu begs for her to be brought back on board. Skipper puts out a distress call to any nearby ships with insulin.

Su is pulled back aboard. She refuses to reveal where the insulin is hidden. Skipper gives her 1 hour to give it up.

In the cabin, Su hides a knife.

Skipper starts getting the chills.

Lu is stuck in the middle of these two. She tries convincing him to drop them off at the closest island. He spots a nearby tanker and uses the flare gun. The tanker is a hallucination.

Lu pays a visit to Su. She finds the hidden insulin. The best part is when Su claims she wouldn�t have let the Skipper go into a diabetic coma.

Skipper has Lu measure the dosage. She also injects it into him.

Su hears the Skipper and Lu going at it enjoying a bit of afternoon delight.

Su is afraid of being left alone. After Skipper roams away from her, Lu and Su embrace.

Lu and Su are doing their crappy song and dance number the next day while the Skipper watches them.

As Su keeps dancing, Lu leaves for a minute. She returns with the spear gun and shoots the Skipper through the neck. Su is pretty freaked out by this.

Skipper slowly dies.

Su runs and hides in the cabin.

Lu is still on deck as the instrumental �When Johnny Comes Marching Home� is playing.

Skipper slides off the spear.

Su sees that Lu is heading for the cabin. Lu is perfectly calm after killing the Skipper.

Lu breaks into the cabin. Su wants to know why Skipper was killed. Apparently, he didn�t fit in with them. He was just a man.

Su is still pretty freaked out by this. Lu chokes her with a pillow.

Lu fixes some tea.

The ship sails into the fog.

The infamous screen crawl informs us the ship drifted to a Caribbean island 3 weeks later with no one on board.


What I say:

The number of original thrillers is quite small. In fact, the more popular ones always inspire others. How many movies has Fatal Attraction inspired? That one movie gave at least 10 years of low budget movies. Dead Calm wasn�t too bad of a movie. I never thought of it as a movie that could give us many thrillers. Hopefully, all the screenwriters watched Kill Cruise and that stopped the Dead Calm subgenre from being run ashore like the cruise ship in Speed 2.

Some characters are hard to follow. Others you want dropped into a meat grinder feet first. Kill Cruise isn't known for its widely beloved characters. These are people are more screwed up than the corner of the family you never talk to at the family reunion, or you might be that corner of the family.

Jurgen Prochnow isn�t a bad actor. I'm not sure if he could be considered a prolific actor. How could I not mention Replacement Killers? He has been in some pretty reviled movies like the David Lynch version of Dune. Jurgen has a high fatality rate in his movies, in practically every movie he dies. Has Jurgen Prochnow only been in one good movie set at sea? Das Boot, Kill Cruise or House of the Dead? No matter what you might think of House of the Dead, he is a good actor. How hard is it to play a dirty looking drunk sailor?

Patsy Kensit was just so annoying I was hoping for one of those sharks to jump out of the water and bite her head off. Somehow, acting like a super mega beeyotch isn't a good way to win friends. I was happy when Jurgen tossed her overboard. Where were the sharks when they were really needed? More than that, she is automatically right and considers herself a great detective. I'm not sure the point of trying to look like Jurgen's girlfriend or wife and also doing everything to screw with his mind or to kill him. Honey, normally, you don't want to antagonize people you suspect of being cold blooded murderers when you're trapped with them for several weeks.

Elizabeth Hurley can�t be too proud of this movie. Granted, she runs around naked and kills people. Too bad, Hugh Grant wasn�t one of the victims. I would love to hear Elizabeth Hurley's motivation for her dance in the bar. I thought the Austin Powers was the most embarrassing thing. Well, she's in a movie with Ice Cube. The name ecapes me right now. Bedazzled has a soft spot in my heart.

The bar scene near the beginning is pretty bad for hearing Hurley and Kensitt sing. Well, I can't quite understand the striptease scene. Most guys would be cheering for any girl stripping. They were doing at best a golf clap. Sure, the bar wasn't like a movie strip club. These guys should be more enthusiastic to see female flesh. How jaded do you have to be to not want to see a skanky Elizabeth Hurley strip?

I�m not quite sure why they had to have scene with sharks. I have to think that is probably the best scene in the movie. Sure it was padding the run time for a whole minute. It shows that a harpoon gun is on the ship. The girls are finally able to see that Jurgen can be violent and is more than a giant booze depository. Jaws 4 came out a couple of years earlier. It seems that the sharks at least distracted for a minute away from the personality issues.

Movie morality isn�t a subject that is easy or logical to discuss. That is why I�d prefer to just bring out a few things that make absolutely no sense to me. The first scene with the girls has a guy getting dressed after riding Patsy Kensit�s Champagne Supernova. So it seems she�s mayor of trollop land. However, during their stage performance, she is embarrassed by Elizabeth Hurley�s little dance. In fact, Patsy seems more angry and wanting revenge on the Skipper after he scorns her. The entire part where Patsy thinks that the Skipper kills his girlfriend is so much a red herring it should be in a jar with sour cream. If earlier, the police mention his girlfriend disappeared that would make a little more sense. The only clue is the police think he killed his friend. And, the beginning of the movie shows he didn�t do it.

For some reason, this movie makes you think if it came out a few years later. Both of the girls in Kill Cruise would be trying to seduce Jurgen with their feminine wiles regardless of him being a drunken dirty seaman (A bad pun could replace the previous word: seamen). Actually Patsy Kensit was in a movie like that a few years later Bitter Harvest with one of those lesser Baldwins. I don't have the time to keep which of them is which. One was the Shadow and another one was in Usual Suspects. Basic Instinct helped really bring back the idea of the psycho-sexual killer far from the realm of the mid 70s Italian giallo movies to today's movies.

The ending makes absolutely no sense. I feel that something is lost in the editing. Liz learns that Patsy is afraid of being deserted. Jurgen gets harpooned. Apparently, Liz believed everything that Patsy said about Jurgen earlier in the movie. Unfortunately, we never see one second where she accepts what the bloody annoying Patsy said. If that is confusing, what about the infamous screen crawl informing us that 3 weeks later the ship was found deserted? After Liz was the only survivor, she certainly didn't seem distraught about the 2 people she killed to commit suicide.

Ok, if Liz was so anti-Jurgen, why would they pork twice? Apparently, Liz enjoyed swinging the door both ways. For some reason, Liz professes certain Sapphic intentions or some Ellen Degeneres feelings for a particular woman that should have been shark feed. There wasn't indication of this anywhere previously to give the impression she was warm for Patsy's form. Unfortunately, Patsy was a bit more disturbed about witnessing a murder to see Liz�s affections.

This movie is floating around on a very cheap DVD. I had watched part of this movie many, many years ago. I could barely remember anything except the striptease near the beginning. This isn�t a movie you�d watch for the nudity. Only Ms. Hurley deigns to go al fresco. Patsy Kensit may not have because she hadn�t been chestically augmented yet.

Some things in movies shouldn�t be that funny. My copy of this movie has been dubbed on par with some anime. The occasional anime will have characters with certain American style accents. A character from a certain part of Japan will be given a Southern accent. And that accent will be something like �Ah�ve alwaze depended ona kindnez of strangersz.� That is about the dubbing for Liz Hurley and Patsy Kensit. The movie loves for the word Barbados to be used where they�re going. It is overemphasized as going to �BARBAIDOS.�

I've not really gone over many thrillers. Many like to not be considered "horror" movies to escape the typical horro movie disgust. However, many horror movies don't have any supernatural elements. Wouldn't that mean some horror movies would be considered thrillers? Shouldn't a thriller have some thrilling moments? Kill Cruise either had those moments cut. The end doesn't justify the means. Sorry, what I meant to say is plastering Liz Hurley on the cover doesn't justify this movie.



2 NINJAS

Quotable Dialogue

"You're beginning to get on my tits!"
"If you're the winner, I'm happy to lose."


Morals of the Story

Sailors love checkers.
Jets land near marinas.
Seamen love donuts.




Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1