Rating: C
Dir: Peter Keglevic
Star: Jürgen Prochnow, Patsy Kensit, Elizabeth Hurley
a.k.a. Der Skipper
For a lot of guys, four weeks alone with Kensit and Hurley would be paradise. Jurgen Prochnow finds out otherwise in this thriller, set mostly on a sailing boat in the Atlantic. The two girls play Newcastle lasses – should have been a huge clue there – Sue and Lou, working in Gibraltar as singers, though their performance receives a far more enthusiastic response when Hurley starts taking her clothes off. Or maybe it’s just because they’ve stopped singing. They get a lift on Prochnow’s boat, for what should be an idyllic month-long cruise to Barbados, but within days, tensions are boiling, and unfortunately, land is far away.
The setting makes the film, adding much claustrophobia – unlike, say, haunted house movies, the characters can’t leave. Most of their deeds, especially Prochnow’s, are thus not far removed from what we’d do in a similar situation. There is apparently a cut of the movie emphasising the lesbian relationship between Sue and Lou. This’d certainly explain the jealousy, and might also explain the apparent dubbing, if they needed to remove this angle – though why they’d want to, escapes me, and probably anyone else likely to buy the DVD… The subplot in which we wonder if Prochnow is a murderer is badly handled, since we’re already pretty sure of the answer. As for the ending, any film that relies on captions for its finale is in big trouble. However, the performances are fine, and there’s sufficient tension to make this not as bad as I feared. At least they don’t sing much.