Subject: Well, heck -
Here's the description from the video guide:
"Spur of the moment decision by an alcoholic yachtsman to sail to Barbados with two young British women leads to the predictable clash of passions. Listless voyage propelled only by capable performances and a twist ending."
And yes, Jürgen has the leading role. Damn, and I missed the chance to write that script myself... "Listless?" Are they kidding? What's listless about two cheap bimbos fighting over a drunken Jürgen Prochnow.... The hair-pulling, the bikinis falling off, the running into each other while trying to sneak into his bunk at night, both horribly frustrated because he's too snockered to satisfy them... I bet the script sets a world record for the most times the word "bitch" is used in a single movie.
If it doesn't, all I can say is that you and I get dibs on creative control of the remake.
Subject: Re: Well, heck -
I like the way you think.
Subject: A postcard
I've been watching this thing for 14 minutes and it's already exceeded my expectations. All I can say is: "Wish you were here."
I already know that if the distributor never drops the price for this one, some day I will pay the 80 bucks to own a copy. It'd be worth it.
Subject: KILL CRUISE
Gosh, where to start... I want my own copy of this SO bad...
Jürgen's wife has been having an affair with his best friend for years, and the, um, friend falls overboard while the two of them are on a boat in a storm, and Jürgen can't save him. The wife thinks Jürgen killed the guy (or deliberately let him drown), so she walks out and Jürgen becomes a drunk down at the local bar for 6 months. Every day he says he's going out to sea tomorrow.
Finally somebody insults him, so he goes to sea with two horrible bimbos who are looking to hitch a ride to Barbados, one of whom is a really bad actress. The bad actress, by the way, is not the one who gets naked in this movie so I don't know why she got the part. Just the magic of Hollywood, I guess. The one who does get naked is Elizabeth Hurley of Austin Powers fame, if anyone wants to know.
Now, before they get on the boat - before they even meet Jürgen, in fact - these girls, Su and Lou, have already demonstrated their charm (the line "you're beginning to get on my tits" lingers like the aroma of boiled cabbage). The start of the voyage, I can tell you right now, is beyond my ability to describe but I'll take a whack at it. Su and Lou insist on shaving the skipper even though he says that it's bad luck to shave at sea. They lather him up but don't get too far with the shaving because they suddenly decide it would be more fun to teach Jürgen to do the hula and jump on his back and lie down on the deck with him (he still has lather all over his face).
Folks, that's it right there. I don't care what I haven't seen yet; I don't care what he does in movies yet to be made. The hula in Kill Cruise reigns supreme as the lowest moment in Prochnow's film career. EVER. I have seen him kneeling sick over a toilet. I have seen him scrape up dog poop. That's Oscar- winning footage compared to the hula with the two sluts on the boat deck. It's just mind-bending.
ANYway... Jürgen does all the work while Su and Lou sunbathe and hang their panties out on the ropes. For some ungodly reason Su decides she wants Jürgen. I say for some ungodly reason because he was just nasty-looking throughout this film. But Su's got nothing better to do. She gets sunburned; he puts lotion on her legs; and she spreads them wide open. He tells her to grow up or something to that effect and walks off. So Su scrapes her cheek up a bit and then tells Lou that it happened when Jürgen kissed her (I told you he was scuzzy), and says she wishes he'd leave her alone.
Then Su starts snooping around the boat - she spends a lot of time doing this during the movie. She finds pictures of his (ex)wife along with the dear-john letter she wrote when she left him. Su was weird from the get-go, but now she's really rolling. She makes herself look as much like Jürgen's wife as possible and snipes at him until he's furious with her. After this, things start to heat up between Jürgen and Lou. Su is not pleased. So when they go swimming in the ocean, Su pulls up the ladder, starts the engine, and has the boat going around in circles. At the same time she does some more snooping and finds one of Jürgen's used syringes in the trash.
Jürgen and Lou finally make it back on board. Su later quotes the dear-john letter to him. He's starting to get a little nuts at this point. Then Su tells Lou that she's found evidence that Jürgen murdered his wife; then she finds his drugs and hides them; then he explains that he's a diabetic and if she doesn't give him the insulin he'll die; she doesn't care. (The problem here is that previously he was sucking down an awful lot of liquor for a diabetic so it's hard to believe he's still alive, but I guess that's none of my business.) Lou is the one who finally finds the insulin and gives it to him. That was fun too, as he was too shaky to handle the syringe and had her give him a shot in the stomach even though when he did it himself he put it in the calf of his leg. Made for fine, fine drama, though.
The best part of all this was when Jürgen tied a rope to Su and dragged her along behind the boat for a while to try to make her tell where the insulin was hidden.
Then Su catches Lou and Jürgen having sex, and they know she's standing there because they both looked straight at her, but they keep going anyway. For some time, apparently. Su watches the whole thing. Then they're all friends again until Lou kills Jürgen by shooting him in the neck with a harpoon and draws a heart in his blood and licks it off her fingers and smothers Su to death.
So I just have a couple of miscellaneous comments:
1. Jürgen Prochnow should be legally barred from doing sex
scenes when he needs to be cleaned up that badly.
2. He should also be legally barred from eating spaghetti on
camera, or at least heavily fined if he ever does it again.
So THAT was Elizabeth Hurley's old nose!
Yes, I've been out CRUISING this AM. This picture is the product of a dirty mind. But you know, not really dirty enough, in some ways. Like soft-porn wanna be without the courage of its own convictions.
I think Mr. P. wears the scum-encrusted wharf-rat look well. Poor thing, though. Up to his neck in shrieking British nitwits. Must have been hell. And more SONG! YIKES!
Really, the motivations were -- I was going to say puzzling, but let's go for non-existent. WHY is Patsy such a bitter twisted git? Why doesn't Our Hero simply lash that ho to the mast and leave her there when she starts acting up? Dragging her behind the boat is fine, but why not hack off a leg first to attract the sharks? After all, she's a real danger to the crew and of NO BENEFIT, as she cannot even be trusted to keep watch. Hell, I wouldn't trust either of these two bints to paint their nails without hurting themselves and others, never mind loading a harpoon gun correctly.
The ending was balderdash, what with Lou's psychosis leaping right out of the blue. HUH?? But why quibble.
I enjoyed it, guiltily. I can only imagine what was going through the man's mind as he stood goggle-eyed before their appalling musical number at the dive-bar. Was he imagining his hands wrapped around his agent's throat? Not for the first--or last--time, I'll wager.
I read some review that said the chief pleasure of this was just watching Jürgen handle the boat. And you know, I did like that. Anyway it had lots of laughs along the way, especially when the score suddenly and inexplicably swelled into a feeble sort of grandeur during the...yes: washing Willie's poop over the side of the deck scene. I mean, a solid three minutes of Jürgen cleaning dawg doo??? In what way does this bring us to a deeper understanding of the man's character?
Which brings me to my favorite line: "Next time you sh*t overboard, okay?"
And that goes double for you, girls.
As for the hula...words fail me. I watched it between the cracks of my fingers, grateful that he had not donned a grass skirt for the occasion.
Fave scene: Patsy Kensit beating herself wildly about the head and neck. Who could resist? Here, let me help.
[Later Linda noticed that the lips and voices didn't match up in the final scene. We tried to figure out what they were really saying, but didn't work on it too hard; the one thing which became clear is that Lou says "I love you!" to Su. Which was kind of a relief, actually, as I thought when I saw this that those girls were going to turn out to be lesbians - at first, anyway. By the end of it, I didn't know what to think of ANYBODY in this movie.
As it is, our best guess is that Su was not gay and had no idea that Lou was, nor did she know how Lou felt about her; and the reason Lou took up with the skipper was to make sure he had as little reason as possible to develop an interest in Su. This still doesn't infuse a whole lot of sense into the plot, however. The skipper detested Su, and it didn't look like "the fine line between love and hate" either; he outright loathed her. Where was the threat?
So theory #2 is that Lou killed the Skipper because he'd endangered Su by dragging her behind the boat...but then why would Lou have saved him by giving him the shot when he couldn't do it himself, and why did she have sex with him and THEN kill him?
And why did she kill Su? Because Su rejected her, or just because she was psycho? ("Psycho" would be the safe bet. Killing the skipper was the dumbest thing she could have done. They were in the middle of the Atlantic and those girls had no idea how to operate a sailboat - or a radio.)
Possibly the original dialog clears everything up, but we can't imagine how. KILL CRUISE is our second favorite unsolved mystery. -ed.]