Once in a while you stumble on a movie that cries out for re-discovery. Recently I was flabbergasted by a 1933 Paramount B thriller called Terror Aboard. It’s also an early body count movie like Friday the 13th; really quite bizarre and also incredibly entertaining. It’s also an hour and 6 minutes of fast and furious weirdness.
The film was originally slated to be more of an A picture and star Cary Grant and Carole Lombard, but I’m glad that didn’t work out. Paramount turned out quite a few shockers at the time like Murders in the Zoo (1933) and The Story of Temple Drake (1933) before the Code came crashing down to censor and neuter the film industry.
The opening is incredibly atmospheric and creepily effective. A freighter makes its way through a thick fog bank. They are startled by what looks like a runaway yacht in the water. They try to contact the ship and honk the horn but get no reply. That’s when they set out in a small boat and a sailor climbs up into the ship. When they can’t even contact him they all climb aboard the vessel to find their crew man dead, his skull bashed in. “This is some kind of a devil ship,” an officer comments. They can’t seem to find anyone aboard the yacht until they come across a dead woman lying in a passageway, frozen solid. They find another man hanging in his cabin. They also notice a fire in the engine room and are about to flee when they discover part of a telegram and suddenly the movie flashes back to when that message was sent to the ship.
The telegram is for the Captain of the yacht Dulcina, Maximilian Kreig (John Halliday, who played Katharine Hepburn’s roguish father in The Philadelphia Story). It states that the Grand Jury has found him guilty of Grand Larceny and authorities will be waiting to arrest him when he arrives in port. The radio operator offers his sympathy to the Captain and then they get into a conversation of some small uninhabited islands nearby that a person could possibly survive on. That’s when a lightbulb goes off in the Captain’s head and he pulls out a gun and shoots the radioman dead. That scene is startling as the hole where the bullet enters suddenly blossoms with blood on his jacket. Maximilian then plots to murder everyone aboard the yacht except for his beautiful fiancé (Shirley Grey). He even makes a list and starts crossing off the names as they die.
Not all are murdered by Maximilian. He finds way to cause death and chaos. A musician shoots the husband of his lover and then hangs himself. The adulteress is locked in the deep freeze by the Captain. Maximilian even poisons the soup at dinner and asks the cook to come out and taste it, which he does and keels over dead. It just goes on and on with the fiendish Captain checking off the crew and guests.
They find a crashed plane in the water with the pilot alive on the wing. He turns out to be the former boyfriend of the fiancé (and played by Neil Hamilton– so memorable as Commissioner Gordon on the Batman TV show). His name is added to the Captain’s death list. Charlie Ruggles is the comic relief as the panicked crew member Blackie, who is scared of his own shadow (plus black cats and cross-eyed sailors). He repeatedly cries out that he wants to “go home.” He’s annoying as hell but it’s understandable the Studio needed some levity amidst the relentless series of killings. Hollywood Reporter dubbed the film “Grand Hotel of murder in every form on the high seas.”
As I light votive candles praying that Kino Lorber announces its release on Blu-ray someday, you can find this twisted treat on YouTube.
