Reel Advice: Haunted Boat

By Steve Anderson Nov 21, 2007, 11:36 GMT

Six teenagers board a small boat and head out for a weekend of fun and partying, oblivious to the vast sea and building swells. Suddenly, tragedy strikes, hurling the teens into blind panic. They try to head home but the engine won\'t start. Strange and inexplicable events follow, each increasingly more terrifying. Lost at sea with no way to communicate their plight, the teens struggle to survive an unseen enemy, ...more

Call this one the adventures of half a dozen self-centered asshole teenagers (look more like twentysomethings if you ask me) about to get horribly killed on a boat.  Or, if you're feeling a bit more existential, call it "Karma's A BITCH".

Whilst out on a wreck of a boat that one of them got for his birthday with enough booze to float the Bolivian Navy home, a sudden tragedy strikes.  Planning to turn around to fix their problems, they discover the engine won't start. 

Worse, strange events start happening all around them, none of their cell phones work, they have not a clue in their empty little heads what the fuck a radio is, they're on a boat in the middle of Nowhere Ocean heading for Catalina and they're all about to get killed by their own worst fears.

Yep, Class X Standard Horror Movie fare, all right.  Random Script 27-A. 

Worse yet, we're stuck on this boat with the biggest assholes on the face of the earth--spoiled rich California kids.  People so spectacularly ignorant and self-absorbed that they really truly honestly believe that, if they didn't see it or don't remember it, it doesn't exist.  I'm not kidding. That's a quote.

And the next stop on the "even worse" tour is just how these methods of death come about.  For example, the horrible CG-inserted shark that tears apart one of our vapid teenagers.  Wow, that's just sad. 

At least, it was sad until I saw their reactions to the loss of said torn-apart vapid teenager.  Screaming and crying and begging for help and blaming each other back and forth and not one person spending more than three minutes actually looking for their friend who got torn up by freaking sharks.  And then they don't even mention the sharks--they actually think he might be playing a joke on them and went underwater to the front of the boat.  He got attacked by sharks, dammit, he's not swimming fucking anywhere.

Then, as a plot device, they actually reduce the ambient light level of the film by like ninety percent, making a large portion of the film unviewable.  They take this opportunity to reduce the movie down even further, to the point where they're telling each other ghost stories.

And then, finally, we get to the ending of this little parade of misery to a thoroughly nonsensical end involving hallucinatory weirdness, ghosts aplenty, and corpses, corpses, corpses!  Oh, and don't forget extremely improbable last-second rescues out of absolutely nowhere.

The special features include audio options, English and Spanish subtitles, and trailers for "Open Water 2: Adrift", "Haunted Forest", "Beneath Still Waters", "The Nun", and "Sea of Fear".

All in all, this waterlogged little wreck is far more dinghy than racing yacht.  Holed below the waterline and sinking fast, stay away from this pleasure cruise to nowhere.

Haunted Boat is now available for order at Amazon. As of yet, there is not a release date for this version of the DVD in the UK. Visit the DVD database for more information.

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