1200 miles from land, on a sleek yacht, Nicole Kidman (Rae) battles a psycho-killer. Fifty miles away in fierce squall violent with lightning, Rae's husband, John fights to survive as the larger schooner on which he is trapped begins to sink. People get shot with spear-guns, mangled by boat propellers, threatened with a shotgun, and shot in the face by emergency flares. A cute little dog named Benjy who lives on the yacht, is murdered. Boats burn and rescue rafts are set afire and lightning snaps a mast dropping the massive wood pillar into the guts of the sinking schooner where John (Sam Elliot) is trapped. When John has to breathe through a metal pipe, the outlet of the tube swarms with cockroaches. George Miller, who made the Mad Max pictures, produced this movie and directed second-unit sequences. Dead Calm, is the name of this 1989 Australian picture and, as you can imagine, the movie is anything but calm.
In some ways, Dead Calm (directed by Phillip Noyce) resembles Scorsese's Cape Fear -- there's an isolated boat, a woman in peril, and a psychotic villain who can't be killed. No matter how badly mutilated, these sorts of psycho-killers keep reviving to continue their brutal crusade to rape and murder the heroine. Robert De Niro's scary monster in Cape Fear is, at least, motivated by revenge (he's trying to torture the wife of the prosecutor who put him in jail); by contrast, the psychopath in Dead Calm is just a ferocious madman, an example of more or less "motiveless malignity."
Based on a well-known 1963 novel by an American author Charles Williams, Dead Calm begins with a completely irrelevant prologue before getting to thriller business out on the high seas. Rae and John have embarked on a sailing trip to the Great Barrier Reef (the Whitsunday Passage) to salve the young woman's psychic injuries incurred when she was involved in a terrible car crash in which her toddler son was killed. Rae seems to be rallying when the couple, idling like a painted ship on a painted sea on a yacht called the Saracen sight a schooner adrift and obviously weather-battered. A young man appears in a dinghy seemingly fleeing the "black schooner" as it is called -- he claims to be the sole survivor of a botulism outbreak on the vessel; it has, he claims, killed the other five people on board. The young man seems weirdly manic and his story doesn't make sense. John locks him in a stateroom on the Saracen and, then, rows over to the black schooner where he will spend almost all of the rest of the movie. It turns out that the young man, Hughie (Billy Zane) has apparently butchered the other people on the vessel. From clues discovered on the eerie ghost ship -- it's got naked carytid figureheads below deck and other sinister furnishings, strange messages scribbled in blood, and pale mangled corpses floating in the bilgewater -- John figures out that Hughie and an older man, a war correspondent, have recruited four beautiful models ("broad-minded" according to am\n advert on the boat) for a sex-cruise around the South Pacific. But something has gone badly wrong and Hughie murders everyone on board, making a sort of "snuff film" that John views before things go badly wrong on the vessel. There's a squall and the boat begins to sink and a mast knocked down by lightning traps John below deck. Back on the Saracen, Hughie menaces Rae. She has sex with him to calm him down and, then, sets to work figuring out ways to disable him. She poisons him with soporifics in his lemonade and this knocks him out, after some scary scenes in which he chases her around with a shotgun. Having disabled Hughie, Rae doesn't kill him or throw him overboard -- this would be the logical way to deal with this mad dog. Instead, she ties him up and locks him in a room with the predictable outcome that he escapes and chases her around again, this time in the storm, for about a twenty minutes. She finally kills him, but this is the sort of insane bad guy who has to be killed, at least, three times before he stays in the grave and so more mayhem ensues, all while Rae is sailing the Saracen through heavy seas to reach and rescue John on the sinking schooner. (She has, as they say, her "hands full.")
The movie is pretty good and has some nice Hitchcock touches. Billy Zane is creepy as the ebullient sadist. It's not entirely clear that Rae doesn't enjoy her sexual interlude with him. The little dog is a good actor as is Sam Elliot as the stoic, unlucky husband, a naval officer which explains his seamanship with, nonetheless, goes awry. There's no deeper meaning to the movie. It's a simple straight-ahead suspense film with horror movie overtones. The opening sequence, presumably motivated by fidelity to the novel, features a horrific car crash and some nasty hospital scenes in which John has to tell Rae that their little son has been killed. This scenes have nothing to do with the rest of the movie and lead nowhere and I don't understand why they were shot, let alone retained in the movie, except as filler. The subject matter is rather thin and, therefore, it seems that the movie had to be padded. At one point, the psycho-killer says that Rae has beautiful bone structure "behind her face" and that when she's eighty she will still be unavoidably beautiful; Nicole Kidman was 22 when this movie was released. She's starring on Amazon's limited series Expats in January of 2024 as I write and the madman's observations about her in Dead Calm remain pertinent and true.
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