Lifeboat (1944)

There's a terrific scene early on where the lifeboat swings around and our attention moves from Tallulah Bankhead's character, who falls out of focus and becomes slightly muted, to a group of other characters towards the front of the boat, who come into focus and become audible, revealing how cleverly Alfred Hitchcock manages and keeps interesting his adaptation of John Steinbeck's story, a confined-space war drama set almost start to finish on a lifeboat.

★★★★☆

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Dead Calm (1989)

Phillip Noyce sailed Nicole Kidman from the Australian small-time to the Hollywood big screen with his adaptation of Charles Williams' Dead Calm, a nautical thriller about a couple, Kidman's Rae Ingram and her husband John (Sam Neill) - characters who first appeared in Williams' Aground - on a sailing trip to recover from tragedy, but while becalmed they spot a yacht in distress and make the mistake of stopping to help the yacht's sole survivor (Billy Zane, in 1989, youthful and smouldering) - the confined-space thrills-at-sea has a beautiful simplicity with the three characters in a sphere of action no larger that just the speck of a yacht in the ocean..

★★★★☆

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Deep Rising (1998)

Imagine Die Hard banged together with Alien, without the sophistication, on a cruise liner at sea, with a cheesy Big Trouble In Little China sort of all-American goofball lead and BTILC-esque special effects, and you've got this zany cult classic, so bad it's fun, about a hijacked boat full of torpedoes, a cruise ship overrun with winding gnashing alien (?) creatures, some ghastly body horror, and if it sounds mad consider the rumors that the never-made sequel, Deep Rising 2, was to be set on Skull Island and feature King Kong, as if this original weren't already loopy enough!

★★★☆☆

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River Wild (2023)

There's not much connecting this thriller to the 1990's The River Wild starring Meryl Streep except the title and the fact that whitewater rafting and a psychopath feature, but beyond these things, this is a grim crime story, charmless and full of low budget nasty realism, not high adventure, that makes it feel more like a re-enactment on that 48 Hour tv true crime doco, the sort you might snap off when it gets too bleak.

★★☆☆☆

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Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)

Sandra Bullock's character, Alex, wasn't this annoying in number one, I don't think - she whines incessantly about past boyfriends and driving badly and serves only as potential collateral loss in a police operation - while Jason Patric, bravely stepping in where Keanu left off, plays a hero left looking ridiculous as the plot has him leap unhelpfully toward lifeboats and psychically navigate flooded ship corridors, and the writing lets down Willem Dafoe, too, playing the villain who unnecessarily kidnaps Alex when he already has what he wants, leaving this sequel feeling like it is the product of writers asked to follow up a hit at super speed and with no brakes. 

★★☆☆☆

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Poseidon (2006)

The string of action setpieces that makes up Wolfgang Petersen's 2006 remake of The Poseidon Adventure, including high-up tightrope walks over flames, underwater traversal of long winding corridors, and crawls through air ducts and elevator shafts, keeps the adventure, um, buoyant, but it is hard to care much given the disaster movie's, um, lack of depth: the uncharismatic group of survivors we follow through the upturned cruise liner are nothing more than faces - a sad-duck daughter of a former New York mayor, the former New York mayor, a stowaway, and a grifter of some sort - and we get no bigger picture of them or of the disaster itself - how, for instance, does the group know which way to go; do any of them have anything they care about back on land; why do they only encounter a next and a next obstacle and not, say, other people, and what is happening at all anywhere beyond their confined-space sphere of action - in the ballroom or in a rescue operation team somewhere, say, or, say, anywhere else in the world?

★★★☆☆

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The Mystery Of The Mary Celeste (aka 'Phantom Ship') (1935)

The And Then There Were None explanation postulated in this 1935 horror thriller with Bela Lugosi is based, says an opening credit titlecard, on the findings of the Attorney-General in Gibraltar and though history has deemed him, Frederick Solly-Flood, an imbecile, the appeal of this movie is that Flood's account of the unexplained abandonment of The Mary Celeste in 1872, though certainly not presented here convincingly, came not far removed in time from the actual events, unlike so many other fanciful and outlandish theories that have sprung up and combined and morphed over the one hundred and fifty years since, blurring Mary Celeste fact and fiction.

★★★☆☆

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Triangle (2009)

Six pretty young things aboard a capsized yacht believe themselves rescued when a cruise ship passes by, but on board the ship, in the faded opulence of echoey, abandoned hotel-like interiors, the group discovers creepy things like, impossibly, signs they've been on the ship before and, creepily, messages scrawled in blood, and, optimistically (for the writers), some allusions to another more memorable horror movie - things that don't really make sense, but to the movie's credit, it powers unashamedly on and on no matter how ridiculous things become, and you will keep watching if only to see how far it is willing to go with its Lost island premise.

★★☆☆☆

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The Mercy (2017)

In 1968, Douglas Crowhurst entered a competition to solo-race around the world by boat and what happened aboard the Teignmouth Electron, a trimaran of his own design, while on land energy was high for his Boy's-Own Adventure, makes for gripping viewing with a terrific performance from Colin Firth as Crowhurst and a career-best performance from Rachel Weisz as his poor wife - but don't be fooled by that hopeful, heroic stare on the poster: it's grim.

★★★★☆

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Murder Mystery (2019)

Adam Sandler not acting like a moron and Jennifer Aniston doing what she always does makes for a likeable pair of sleuths here but the writing is so lazy, the murder mystery plot aboard a luxury boat so run-of-the-mill, the assembled suspects (played by a surprising array of big name stars) so lacking in characterisation beyond exaggerated nationality, deformity, or idiosyncracy, and the denouement so underwhelming, so bemusing - in fact so boring - viewers will only continue watching to the end either because they're tied to their chair or because they vainly hope this Netflix offering will dish up a final twist or surprise or something, anything!, to unlock the great mystery: how Netflix sustains its subscription service when it serves up dross like this so lazily thrown together you almost suspect it has been released unfinished.

★☆☆☆☆

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Ghost Ship (1952)

Rumours of a ghost don't stop a couple from buying a ship but after their crew members flee their jobs, the couple hire a paranormal investigator whose arrival on board the ship marks the point this low-budget nautical thriller becomes really, really scar...ily bad - none of the actors has any choice but to bear with stoic faces the paranormal investigator's awful explanations and the acting from that point becomes more wooden and more hollow than the ship's hull. 

★★☆☆☆

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Adrift (2018)

We flash backwards and forwards between Tami Oldham's life before and after a significant life event, revealed eventually as a period of 42 days adrift at sea following a storm that destroys her boat and injures her crewmate, Richard Sharp, but on either side of that narrative pivot point the focus of this true account is Tami's relationship with Richard - not the disaster - so, with the exception of the big disaster "reveal", the movie amounts to scenes of cream being applied to sunburn, rations of peanut butter being relished, and poor Tami rolling her eyes deliriously about in her head.

★★☆☆☆

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Agatha Christie's Death On The Nile (1978)

Agatha Christie wrote Death On The Nile while staying in Aswan, Egypt at the Old Cataract Hotel overlooking the Nile, in the 30s, so watching this film version of her book with its rich period detail - cream linen suits, cloche hats, pearls, pith helmets, cravats, stockings, against the dust and dry of Egyptian ruins or in the colonial opulence of saloon bars and cigar lounges - it is easy to imagine Christie is in it or that the film depicts a moment in her life, and beneath the stiff social propriety of the British characters aboard The Karnak, a river paddle boat to Cairo, runs a terrific thread of suspense as someone kills off several of those aboard; it is up to Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot to determine who the murderer is among characters played by the likes of Mia Farrow, David Niven, Bette Davis, Maggie Smith and Angela Lansbury.

★★★★☆

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Dangerous Voyage (US: Terror Ship) (1954)

A yacht is abandoned with nothing but a man's shoe on board in this fairly wooden, fairly badly written mystery adventure that moves from England to France and back, and from courtrooms to the open seas and, to quote the movie itself, it "is [a story] alright for a train journey."

★★☆☆☆

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Titanic (1997)

The most irritating thing about this romance set aboard a painstakingly recreated-to-scale Titanic is that Leonardo's Jack and Kate's Rose are entirely fictitious, so at every minute of the three-plus hour epic, viewers are left discombobulated by what might be painstakingly recreated historical fact and what else is pure throwaway James Cameron fantasy.

★★☆☆☆

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All Is Lost (2013)

Robert Redford plays an aged, all-American version of Pi, again lost at sea, whose plastic surgery gives him a suitably awed expression throughout the dramas that unfold on his boat and dinghy, all beautifully filmed, often spectacular, and thoroughly engrossing.

★★★★★

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