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Desaster movies were always a genre that might lead to desastrous
results.
Mainly it's just a mix of has-beens and B-actors protraying cardboard
characters telling the audience how bad they are and having dialogues you
have heard a thousand times before better. But if the stars of the movie
are Arthur Kennedy, Carroll Baker, Lionel Stander, Hugo Stiglitz and Olga
Karlatos, but promises a bit of cannibalism, one might get the idea that
this film is really a mess ... and in this respect it does not disappoint.
The plot: Due to a cyclone, a tourist boat, gets lost on the high sea,
and soon they take on board the passengers of an airplane that had to make
an uncomfy waterlanding and the crew of a smuggler boat, which has also
sunk.
You soon have the typical cast of characters: the good-looking he-man
who tells everybody what to do, the pregnant woman who of course has her
baby while on sea, the priest, the woman with the annoying dog (the dog
gets eaten by the way), the doctor, the sometimes violent but essentially
good-natured sailor, ...
As it happens in these situations, soon enough, food and water get
scarce, and first they eat parts of the dog - and try fishing a shark with
the rest of it, a stupid idea that desservedly fails. Then people start
dying, and at first they try to take bodyparts as bait to catch amybe
another shark, but after a time, they start eating the corpses ... all
that though is done in relative good taste, good taste of course
considering that they are eating human (but dried) flesh.
In the end, a few of our castaways take off in a lifeboat to get help,
while the rest of the group manages to sink their ship and are one by one
eaten by sharks (the overbudgeted animal horror Jaws was still big
back then, remember). But some of them are saved nevertheless ...
Now even if my synopsis sounds somewhat interesting, the movie is
incredibly boring: Even though it lasts almost 2 hours, none of the
characters is in the least fleshed out, they only seem to be mumbling
phrases from a desaster movie dialogue construction set, and the actual
horrific scenes - the eating of a human and the shark attack - are filmed
rather uninterestingly and - since you just can't identify with any of the
cradboard-characters - fail to work on an emotional level.
Simply put, there is no point in watching this film.
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