Death Ship/Fun Facts

From The Grindhouse Cinema Database

< Death Ship
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  • The number of survivors from the luxury ocean cruise liner was nine. On the film's main movie poster though only six survivors are depicted on the lifeboat.
  • The footage showing the movement of the Death Ship was the result of filming from a small boat moving around the Death Ship. The crew shot for about an hour before the 'Death Ship' broke down. The rest of the required shots were achieved by faking movement, as the broken vessel was anchored and stationary.
  • The make and model of the derelict mysterious black 'Flying Dutchman like' "Death Ship" was a deserted German World War II freighter which had once been a Kriegsmarine prison ship used for torturing.
  • When the crew of the ocean liner picks up the echo of the approaching ghost ship on their radar, the close-up of the ship's radar imagery is actually a reverse-image video clip of the fog-covered "Skull Island", taken from the Dino De Laurentiis 1976 production of King Kong.
  • The film was "scripted by cult director Jack Hill and David P. Lewis, but attributed to John Robins for Canadian movie business reasons" according to 'The Spinning Image' website.
  • The name of the old black-and-white musical film shown on the "Death Ship" was the 1936 British musical picture Everything Is Rhythm (1936).
  • Producers Sandy Howard and Harold Greenberg's other 1980 picture was also a horror movie set on a vehicle but not on a boat but a locomotive it being Terror Train (1980).
  • Final theatrical feature film [to date April 2014] of actress Sally Ann Howes.
  • Second appearance in consecutive years portraying a captain for actor George Kennedy who plays ship Captain Ashland in this 1980 film and had portrayed Captain Joe Patroni for the fourth and final time the previous year in The Concorde... Airport '79 (1979).
  • This movie and Agency (1980), both first released in 1980, were the first major credited cinema movie appearances of actor Saul Rubinek.
  • As the ghost ship collided with the cruise liner, brief scenes of an explosion, a grand piano falling between decks, and the engine room flooding were cut in. These scenes were from the 1960 film, "The Last Voyage."
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