Cruise into Terror (1978) -***

     From the log of the Obeah, the preposterously named tramp steamer (or whatever you call the equivalent vessel when it runs on diesels) skippered by a certain Captain Andrews (Hugh O’Bryan, from Ten Little Indians and The Son of Ali Baba):

     Why yes, Cap’n Andy— as a matter of fact, it does! And it’s only going to sound more ridiculous the deeper we get into Cruise into Terror, encountering the curse of King Tutankhamen, garbled Thor Heyerdahl horseshit about the Maya being actually Egyptians, outrageous misuse of the Key of Solomon, waters adjacent to the Bermuda Triangle, and even the Antichrist! This impressively ludicrous made-for-TV movie was among the lesser works of producer Aaron Spelling, 1970’s television’s most towering colossus. On that level if no other, it makes sense that Cruise into Terror should play out as if the Love Boat ran off course en route to Fantasy Island, and had to detour through an entire season of “In Search Of.”

     But to return now to Andrews and the Obeah, the little ship is in a bad way as we join the action, at Andrews’s home port somewhere on the Florida coast. As first officer Simon McIane (Dirk Benedict, of Demon Keeper and Sssssss) reports, one of her two engines is totally screwed, and there’s nothing that either Simon or his fellow crewman, Nathan Delacroix (Roger E. Mosley, from Sweet Jesus, Preacherman and The Mack), can do about it without specialized parts that will have to be ordered from a supplier outside the shipping company for which they all work. Nevertheless, their boss, Mr. Bennett (Marshall Thompson, of Around the World Under the Sea and White Dog), is adamant that they must have the Obeah ready to sail for Cozumel, on the Mexican side of the Gulf, that very morning. Evidently one of the cruise ships operating out of the same port is seriously overbooked, and Bennett has accepted a contract to transport eight of the surplus passengers. Andrews objects, of course, on several seemingly unanswerable grounds: the Obeah’s maximum speed in her current condition is a pathetically poky eight knots; sustaining even that pace will overstress the remaining engine, inviting a total loss of power; and the last thing pleasure-cruise tourists are going to want is passage to Mexico aboard a tub fit only for hauling around sport fishermen and salvage divers, even if she weren’t limping along on just one motor. Nevertheless, Bennett makes it clear that the captain has no discretion to turn down this assignment, and Andrews skulks off to render his ship something like ready for sea. No sooner has he gone than Bennett places a phone call to persons unknown, announcing that the desired arrangements have been made— “And God save both our souls.” Then immediately after that, he’s crushed to death in a seemingly impossible forklift accident.

     As for those eight passengers, this is where Cruise into Terror really gets its Aaron Spelling on. Marilyn Magnusen (Stella Stevens, of Slaughter and Arnold) is a randy, middle-aged divorcee. Neal Barry (Christopher George, from Day of the Animals and Enter the Ninja) is a grasping, workaholic business prick, whose wife, Sandra (Linda Day George, of It Happened at Lakewood Manor and Fear No Evil), booked this trip in the hope of rekindling their marriage by getting him away from the office for a while. Reverend Charles Mather (John Forsythe, from Kitten with a Whip and Marooned) is a dry-drunk minister on an unspecified Mission from God which he believes will redeem his years of worshipping the bottle instead, dragging his sexually frustrated spouse, Lil (4D Man’s Lee Merriwether), along most unwillingly behind him. Judy (Jo Ann Harris, of Caged Fear and The Beguiled) and Debbie (Hilarie Thompson, from Hex and The Fury) are a pair of college girls who no doubt expected to spend the 800 miles to Cozumel flirting with affluent young single guys, but will now have to content themselves with Simon McIane. And Dr. Isaiah Bakkun (Ray Milland, whose other forays into the realm of small-screen junk include The Darker Side of Terror and Daughter of the Mind) is, of all things, an anthropologist hell-bent on proving his personal crank theory that the Mayan civilization was founded by colonists from Egypt. Then there’s a ninth, hitherto unregistered passenger, who scrambles aboard the Obeah at the last possible moment, in a tempest of disorganization. His name is Matt Lazarus (Frank Converse, of Solarbabies), and he’s some sort of physicist or engineer or mathematician. Maybe even all of the above.

     Now when I say that Bakkun is looking to prove his pet theory, I mean specifically that he seeks archeological corroboration of the text from a newly discovered papyrus written some 2000 years ago, recording that Cleopatra Selene (more on her later) decreed the construction of a tomb “where the sun meets the sea”— which is to say, someplace way off to the west. Why that ought to mean Cozumel (and not someplace more obviously reachable from Egypt, like, say, Gran Canaria) is apparently discussed in one of Bakkun’s books, in sufficient detail for Lazarus to critique his math later. And as for why “Cleopatra Selene built a tomb on Cozumel” should prove that she also founded the Mayan civilization, the most believable thing about Cruise into Terror is that Bakkun never treats those dots as requiring any connecting work on his part, any more than the era’s real “alternative archeologists” felt the need to justify similar logical leaps in their own theories. Nor, more oddly, does the professor concern himself with the questions of who might be buried in this supposed tomb, or why Cleopatra would have wanted them interred so far away. Furthermore, he takes active offense at the notion, put forward by Reverend Mather, that he wouldn’t be perfectly within his rights to dig the place up and ransack it. But while Bakkun and the others are arguing those points, Lil raises one that none of the debaters seem to have considered at all. If the archeologist is right, we may be certain that Cleopatra Selene knew whom she was burying, and given the hassle and expense of burying them on Cozumel, we can also be certain that it wasn’t done merely on some royal whim. If there really is an Egyptian tomb on the island, it can only have been put there for a damn good reason. That temporarily silences even Bakkun.

     That’s about when things start going weirdly wrong aboard the Obeah. And I don’t mean stuff like the overworked second engine breaking down, which is a completely normal and predictable mishap under the circumstances. For that matter, I’m not even sure we should include the almost uncanny manner in which a new piece of the power plant gives up the ghost each time McIane finishes fixing the last one. No, I mean weird stuff. Debbie getting scared half-overboard when she thinks she sees a pair of glowing red eyes watching her from the impenetrable nighttime darkness off the port bow. A man-eating shark of a species not normally found in the Gulf of Mexico sizing up the passengers while they take advantage of the Obeah’s infirmity to get in a little recreational diving. (This scene might have more impact were the undersea menace not portrayed by a totally unremarkable and relatively inoffensive blue shark.) The same killer fish suddenly breaking off the attack the moment it gets a good look at Lazarus. That kind of weird.

     Now do you remember what I said before about Lazarus taking issue with the math in Bakkun’s book pinpointing Cozumel as the site of the supposed tomb? He broaches the subject while the Obeah is laid up with engine trouble, because if his calculations are correct, the clues that led Bakkun to propose Cozumel more accurately point to a spot some miles out to sea— the very one, in point of fact, where the crippled ship now rides at anchor. Cap’n Andy does his best to dissuade his passengers from going on an aquatic treasure hunt, but excitement at the prospect is running too high for him to keep a lid on it. Besides, the search for submerged ancient burial sites will at least get the passengers out of the crew’s hair while they work on the engine.

     Incredibly, atop an uncharted seamount that must have been an island 2000 years ago (Oh, hey! We’ve got some old-school Catastrophism in here, too!), there is indeed an obviously man-made edifice, and inside that is a child-sized sarcophagus in the unmistakable Egyptian style. It’s just too bad that Delacroix, whom Andrews sent down with the passengers to make sure they didn’t do anything stupid, is crushed to death in an undersea rockslide while Bakkun directs efforts to hoist the miniature coffin up to the surface. And it’s really too bad that whatever is inside the sarcophagus begins bringing out the worst in all the passengers, exploiting their character flaws to turn them into a fractious but effective defense against anyone (Charles Mather, for example) who might want to toss the artifact back overboard. When I put it like that, a skeptic might be tempted to say that all these venal assholes are just going full Treasure of the Sierra Madre on each other— and Cruise into Terror sometimes explicitly encourages us to do exactly that. The thing is, though, the fucking coffin breathes. Also, it occasionally levitates, and even hurls itself through the air to crush those who slip past its assorted squabbling guardians. This thing is definitely cursed, no two ways about it!

     It’s the details of that curse, once they fully emerge, that establish Cruise into Terror’s worthiness to stand alongside such demented examples of 1970’s occult tele-horror as The Horror at 37,000 Feet and Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell. You see, the mummy inside that 2000-year-old kiddie-coffin is none other than the Antichrist! Charles Mather knows this because it says so in the Key of Solomon, a copy of which he happens to have brought along on this excursion. (Hey, it’s not any weirder than my idea of vacation reading…) Matt Lazarus knows it, too, because he’s been charged by Satan himself to facilitate the entombed child’s rise to mastery over the mortal world. What delights me about all this is that nobody involved in making Cruise into Terror seems to have appreciated what a gigantic theological innovation (or heresy, if you prefer) it really was. The Antichrist, after all, is a figure of the End Times— a retcon of John of Patmos’s Great Beast concocted in order to keep Revelation relevant after the demise of the real Great Beast, the Roman Empire. The entire point of him is that he rises up in the future. But here we have him being born in tandem with Jesus, dying in infancy, and making bids to live again at thousand-year intervals. (The fall of the Mayan civilization, we’re given to understand, was a side effect of his last attempt.) It’s honestly kind of brilliant, insofar as it strengthens the parallel between Christ and Antichrist by making their End Times showdown the Second Coming for both of them, and now I’m a little disappointed in Evangelicalism’s for-profit prophets for not picking up on it the way they did so much other pop-culture bric-a-brac in the 1970’s.

     There are two reasons why I’m fairly confident that screenwriter Michael Braverman didn’t deliberately set out to reinvent the Antichrist. On the one hand, the concept put forward here simply has too many holes to be the product of conscious revisionism. And on the other, there are too many areas where he ignored obvious opportunities to develop it further in interesting directions. For starters, isn’t it a bit of a shame that Braverman didn’t take the whole business still one step further by making the mummified devil-child also the product of a human woman’s impregnation by an ancient alien astronaut? We’ve got every other square marked on the bingo card of 70’s paranormal bullshit, so why not that, too? Not only would it create an excuse to open the coffin for a monster-puppet reveal, but it would also give meaning to Lazarus’s background in science and mathematics. If Satan was from outer space, it would stand to reason that he’d want a guy who knew his way around computers and rocketry looking after his kid.

     Then, tacking a wee bit closer to reality, there’s the issue of Cleopatra Selene. Everyone knows that Cleopatra was the last queen of Egypt, right? And most people know that she was the lover of Marcus Antonius, one of the major players in the Roman civil war that ended with Augustus Caesar established as the first emperor, too. Maybe they’ve even made the connection that Augustus, having reigned until AD 14, was emperor at the time of the Nativity, creating at least a tenuous personal link between him (and by extension Cleopatra) and the advent of Christianity. The trouble, so far as Cruise into Terror is concerned, is that the famous Cleopatra wasn’t Cleopatra Selene; she was Cleopatra Philopator. Also, she committed suicide in 30 BC, so she was in no position to order the burial of any kid belonging to the same generation as Jesus Christ. Her daughter, Cleopatra Selene II, has the right surname and just barely the right timeframe, but she was never queen of Egypt. Rather, she married her way onto the throne of Numidia and Mauretania as the consort of King Jubal II. And although there was a Queen Cleopatra Selene of Egypt, she was Cleopatra V, co-ruling from 115-102 BC as the wife of two successive Ptolemies and the instrument of her formidable mother, Cleopatra III. So whichever Cleo we choose, the supposedly clockwork timing of the Antichrist Cycle is fucked from the start. Nor does it get any better on the Mayan side of things, because the Mayan Classical Period starts 200 years late for Braverman’s purposes, and ends 100 years early. Then, of course, you have to wonder why the Egyptians would give a shit about the Antichrist, anyway— especially three whole decades before Jesus went into the preaching business!

     And finally, it nags at me in the most vexing way that Cruise into Terror never addresses the question of how the Antichrist died. Was it just some random accident, like he got dysentery from a bad batch of dates, or was savaged by a police baboon gone berserk? (No, really— the ancient Egyptian police had baboon units!) Or was there yet another parallel with the life of Christ, only Cleopatra Selene was altogether more successful than Herod the Great at hunting down prophesied supernatural troublemakers? Again, there’s potential here for all kinds of engaging religious revisionism, but it can’t take flight, because the filmmakers seem to have set it up completely by accident.

     What Braverman and director Bruce Kessler set up on purpose was, of course, an Aaron Spelling TV movie— and not in the How Awful About Allan-A Cold Night’s Death sense, either! Cruise into Terror finds Spelling in “Dynasty” mode, “Love Boat” mode, “Vega$” mode, so that the struggle over Kid Antichrist is constantly getting sidelined by the questions of whether Marilyn Magnusen will fall in love with Cap’n Andy, whether the Mathers or the Barries will be able to fix their tottering marriages, and whether McIane will be visiting Judy’s and/or Debbie’s bunks before the Obeah puts into port at Cozumel. Even Lazarus’s role as Satan’s babysitter takes a back seat for a while to his even more unlikely function as the dark man of mystery who can make Lil Mather a woman again. Strangely, though, on this one occasion, I didn’t find that misplaced focus an impediment to my enjoyment. I think it’s because it’s so misplaced that it becomes an absurdity complimenting and commensurate with those of the occult plot: “Oh good— at least poor Lil is going to get railed good and proper just once before the Devil’s Spawn unleashes Hell on Earth!”

     There is one thing, however, that Cruise into Terror does kinda-sorta right. Remember how I said the Antichrist’s coffin breathes? Well, it’s objectively a terrible special effect, and providing for it required the sarcophagus to be made out of rubber, since there was obviously no money in this budget for single-use hero props. At the same time, though, there’s something so patently unnatural about the sight of an inanimate object breathing that the shots of it doing so just barely work despite their technical shoddiness. Your conscious mind rejects what you’re seeing as a clumsy use of a bicycle pump, but something in the hindbrain responds even so. I guarantee you there’s someone out there who was scarred for life when they caught Cruise into Terror’s initial broadcast at about the age of six, and who’s spent way too much of their adult life trying to remember the name of that terrifying movie with the breathing mummy-case.

Home     Alphabetical Index     Chronological Index     Contact